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There's more to entertainment than just what's projected on the screen. When talking about movie and TV entertainment, it's also worth thinking about what gets people excited. A lot of us are interested in movies because of the celebrities involved, and our interest is in part due to the fact that we can relate to them as people more or less like us. It's been like that since there has been such a thing as mass media. Even before that, stars of the theatre captured our imaginations when we read about them, or the lies told about them in newspapers and magazines. Football players are atheletes first and foremost, but people will refuse to deal with them if they're seen to fail in their other job as role models. It doesn't seem to matter so much how fine an actor Kevin Spacey is anymore, does it? 3D artists have more in common with the Wizard of Oz than with Tom Cruise, and no matter how wonderful a wiz he is, he's not going to capture anyone's imagination.
..I'm with you on news today. It is no longer about reporting facts, it is all about ratings. Back in the day, Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley/David Brinkley, and Edward Morrow could give you more information on what was happening in the world in 15 - 30 minutes than you could get watching several hours of CNN or a full day of Fox these days. I'll never forget when NBC changed its format for the Nightly News, basically taking a page from the film "Network" where Tom Brokaw would stand in front of a large Chromakey backdrop on which video graphics were projected on, with the theme music for the newscast written by John Williams. I knew it was all over then, as newscasting went from simply reporting the facts to little more than infotainment and opinionating.
My telly blew up in 2002, I never replaced it., and I don't really miss it.
Yes, this is what I was saying above...
...but here is where you and I differ. People in Hollywood are not more or less like me. They're not like me at all. And in recent years, I feel that they have purposely moved away from me.
The theatre and the cinema; yes they sure did. But that was a different time; a different era.
Sports players, along with actors and musicians, KNOW they are role models. They know it and they expect it, and that's evidenced by how often they tell us how we should be conducting ourselves, even down to what they think we should be eating. This, along with advertisements and "news" shows that regularly insulted my intelligence as a viewer, are the main reasons I broke the TV cycle those years ago.
Before that, I would watch college ball on Saturdays and NFL on Sundays. A team of horses couldn't pull me away from the Summer Olympics, especially when swimming, track & field, and biking were on. When I was a kid, I would watch every home game on TV and listen to my major league baseball team's late-night west coast games under the covers after 11 pm so my parents wouldn't know. Extra innings were rough on me as a pre-teen, but haha, they prepared me for a life in IT, and at least it was summer vacation then! I hoarded 9-volt batteries like crazy, to keep my Panasonic AM radio going. We didn't have earbuds or headphones back then. I had a single earphone on that radio. One ear only. At least it got easier to find those 9-volt batteries and pay for baseball cards once I got a paper route.
It's too bad things are as they are now. But at least there're so many more constructive things I can be doing with my time and money these days!
I doubt if most people will care if a story is CGI or live action, if the story and graphics are good enough. Even if everything is subtly obvious, I doubt if there are enough visual purists to counter the savings to the bottom line.
I watch many independently created CGI shorts (15-30 min) online, and many of them are excellent, to the point that the process used to create them doesn't matter.
Right!
Just look at the collaborative shorts done with the last several generations of Blender, OMG! Far far far outmatches the storytelling capability of Hollywood. And a quick tour of Soundcloud and other music promotion services will disabuse anybody of the notion that only "professional" musicians are worth listening to. There are a bunch of fan-made Star Trek shorts available on You Tube, and although they mostly use live actors, varying degrees of well or ill-fitting uniforms, and a lot of green screen, the representations of ships and planets is fine enough to support the underlying characters and their stories.
They tell good stories and THAT is what matters most.
Indeed. Real actors will never be fully replaced by 3D characters for the same reason all the stars in Hollywood aren't getting replaced by cheaper no-name actors: nobody wants to see them. Consumers are not going to accept a random CG model just so Hollywood could hypothetically save some money.
And, conversely, CG actors will also never replace real people because real people usually cost less to use... especially in the case of things like reality shows, where the cast usually gets paid almost nothing and sign most of their rights away in exchange for the chance to even compete on one of those shows.
Of course they will eventually. Any prediction to the contrary isn't looking very closely at how technology of 3D graphics has changed radically. When I started in 3D graphics (35 years ago in 1984) we had to program all of our own tools. The idea of a "hobbiest" rendering tool like Poser or Daz Studio was almost laughable given how long even the simplest renders would take on our "blazing" 8Mhz Intel 286 CPUs with a whopping 4 MB of memory!
13 years ago, in 2006 when I started with Daz Studio, we were still mostly limited to biased rendering engines that required a great deal of dedication to get realistic approximations of real world lighting. Physically Based Rendering engines were mostly limited to some academics and industry leaders with access to high-end computing power. Nobody was ever going to be fooled by a 3Delight render of Victoria 3!
We're still on a pace where computing power is doubling every 2.5 - 3 years. To predict that technology will "never" be powerful enough to replace humans with virtual actors is likely to be proven false. There will certainly be a time when it is cheaper and faster to render an animation than to take an entire human film crew on location.
As for people not accepting CG replacements for "real" actors, I think that's innaccurate as well. Do you think kids (or adults for that matter) today care that Woody isn't "real"? Didn't we still tear up when Andy said goodbye to him? Did we really care that Gollum was a 3D generated character? If we can get past the "uncanny valley" stage of 3D animation and expression, I can easily see people becoming fans of specific CGI characters. I can forsee a time when the box office draw of "Victoria the 9th" is just as big as any human actress. Or, perhaps even more likely, when people don't care who the actor is anymore, they're going to movies to see the characters and the story, not the headliner.
I have re-watched "Alita Battle Angel" several times, mostly because the blending of CGI and live action is so good (to my eyes) that I'm amazed at the technology and skill of the movie making. I don't even know how many of the characters in that movie didn't have a real actor, just someone doing the voice. And, tbh, I don't really care. The characters and story are compelling enough for me to watch (and re-watch) the movie.
The time will come, if not completely within my lifetime, certainly within my daughters. And I can see on the horizon a time when my grandkids don't even pay attention to "who" is playing the character anymore. The focus will shift completely to directors, writers, animation houses, and voice actors (until we can generate realistic, nuanced human speech then they'll be out of a job too).
Every time I rewatch "Alita battleAngel" I get a little frustrated that this technology and style was not used for the "Ghost in the shell" remake.
I certainly would have preferred a stylized, CG Motoko Kusinaki over a real Scarlet Johansen any day.
There still are real actors behind all these characters. If there was a regular human looking CG character with a real actor behind it doing the voice acting and motion capture, why not just use the real actor? CG is great whenever there's a fantastical component or the actions of the character are impossible to do for a real actor (switching Keanu Reeves to CG when he's fighting 100 agents simultaneously), but using a CG character for your average character drama makes no sense and certainly won't save much money either. Unless that CG character is a completely autonomous AI that is essentially an actor in its own right. I could see that maybe be a novelty at some point in the future where such an AI could advance to stardom on its own. Even then I doubt this will lead to a complete replacement of real actors. Acting is an art and like other art forms I think these will be the last strongholds of humans even when most other jobs have been replaced by machines.
SIGGRAPH was in Los Angeles this year, so I went. I was quite surprised to note that what was cutting edge Virtual Reality type stuff is already considered soooo last year... "You say your company has a VR product? So what, buddy, who doesn't?"
The absolutely most mind-blownig thing I saw at SIGGRAPH was a presentation I attended on FACS. I thought it was going to be about how to construct better facial expressions using the Action Units defined by FACS. I was totally wrong.
Google "Mark Sagar Baby X", and I think you'll find a cut down version of the video he presented. Basically, researchers have modeled the physiological/chemical changes in the brain in certain scenarios, and discovered that they correspond to facial expressions. So they have a neural network that simulates this so when you talk to the baby, and say, it recognizes its own name, it makes a natural expression. If you say "spider" the baby acknowledges what you said but perhaps doesn't understand and the facial expression is what you would expect, a kind of "watchu talkin bout Willis?" but I you say "scary spider" the baby kind of freaks out, with appropriate expressions. It was not explicitly "programmed" to do any of that. Technological advances are not linear, they're exponential, and as such we can never act fast enough to predict the truly revolutionary ones.
I say it again, if you think this is not coming, and sooner rather than later, you are not paying attention.
May be for still images but not for videos (near future). Videos require too much movement details. That is why anyone can easily distinguish an animated actor/actress vs real actor/actress within few minutes. By the way my friends who are still not familier with DAZ or realistic 3d models think those characters are real (they told me so, by the way I already explained them those characters are 3d characters).
Considering "Alita" was a 16 year old "passion project" for Cameron who has enough clout to "call the shots" as he wished resulted in the film we got (Which I ADORE!!! I've craved this movie since Cameron first announced it in 2003.) I suspect there was not the same kind of "drive" behind "Ghost in the Shell".
Sincerely,
Bill
While I agree that 3D characters will never "fully replace" real actors, as we will always have a desire to watch real people, I do think there will also be characters that will rise to a level of celebrity. I think what will emerge will be celebrity characters with established personalities and identities. There are already Instagram 3D models with large followings and fans. They post renders that look like photos with the captions written in the first person - like "I had a good time a the opening tonight!" - things of that nature. Of course, it's 100% fabricated by their creators, but people don't care. They gain a following and fans, just as we have fans of real-life celebrities. This is becoming more and more common, and these are just individuals who have created these characters/models in their homes. Imagine how much more of a celebrity status characters can achieve when 1) they look almost exactly like a real human (right now 3D characters still aren't quite "there" yet, but we are getting closer every year), 2) they have the backing of a corporation that's promoting the character's image and personality in ads, movies, social media, etc.
Think of how many people already become huge fans of their favourite video game characters, anime characters, etc. Once 3D characters become nearly indistinguishable from humans, I think we'll see more 3D characters/CGI people gaining fans and celebrity status.
I can see 3d characters take over the real people actor, 3d animation is so much more versatile that real people specially for fantasy type movies, where you could not have a live actor do the scene because of dangerous or technical difficulties & PLUS!! I would imagine 3d characters would be a heck of a lot easier to work with than some prema-donna actor that never shows up on time.
But unfortunately until Ai or some other type of computer generational voice is invented that is believable , you can forget about computer total take over of the actors union..lol , you're going to need actors to do voices, for a while anyway
Ever is a long, long time...
When my film "Galactus Rising" is released this fall.
My entire marketing Campaign will be in the form of the CG actors in "behind the scenes interveiws" by Fake CG entertainment reporters etc .
It wont be"Photorealistic" but in the rendering style of the film itself.
Should be alot of fun.
Characters and story. #1 and #1. And I liked Alita very much too.
But we're in an amazing time to be alive. Just like how you can write, play, produce, publish, and distribute your own music album with just a laptop and a good audio/MIDI interface, we have the technology to make our own stories come to life.
There once was a day when EVERYBODY could tell stories around the campfire, or in the kitchen while peeling potatoes. I for one am very happy to have the media industry cracked wide open for all. Fresh minds, new ideas!
For somebody like me who has zero knowledge of Motoko in the comics/anime/wherever, the Scarlet movie was fabulous. It had interesting characters, a plot with twists, and overall told a GREAT story. Putting Johansen in it was a stroke of genius. And I say that not being a huge fan of her.
And although it's a bit of a trope, we all still cheered when Helen found a job and left Bob at home to take care of the kids and help with homework. It was great moviemaking. Bob, Helen, and the kids are ALL 3D based!
Because they introduce a huge amount of risk to an expensive project. They get injured, they get sick. They can die during production. They can also quit on a whim which may require the reshooting of miles and miles of film (see what I did there?), they have schedule conflicts, they retire at 9 or at 39, suddenly and without warning.
Also, human actors can and do let you down. They get arrested for drug, sex, or violent crimes, they become alcoholic, get hooked on drugs. Or they can make careless comments in social media, annoy a foreign government while on vacation, or just say something totally boneheaded, scaring off half of your audience even before opening day. And then everybody has to apologize.
Voice actors can be replaced, as evidenced by the voice of Po. Jack Black in the movies, somebody else on TV. In the original Avatar: The Last Airbender TV series, Mako, the voice of "Uncle Iroh" died. Well damn. But were they going to stop production because of the death of one of the central characters? No, of course not. They found a substitute that was more than passable.
Risk management. That's why you might not want to hire "the real actors".
It's not always about "saving money". As I said above, managing risk may be even more important than being economical.
It is an art, yes indeed. But actors are not God's gift to humanity and they certainly are not the only posessors of these art skills.
Thank you for the reference. I'll watch.
Cameron also waited decades to do the first Avatar film. He waited for the technology to get to a point where it would meet with his expectations for telling the story without pulling the viewer out of the story.
I'm another one of those weirdos who really liked the Ghost in the Shell remake just as it was, and find most of the complaints people had about it lacking in merit (including those about whitewashing). I don't think the movie would have been improved at all by replacing Scarlett with CG.
...the day when automation replaces the painter, the sculptor, the craftsperson, the author, the poet, the actor, the playwright, the singer, the soloist, the orchestra, the composer, and even the common worker, because it can do so faster and cheaper than a living person, that will be the day humanity has lost its sense of purpose, being, and soul.
Bleak. But there are always humans behind it. A CGI character is still someone's art. It's a product of both sculpting and painting. And it's movements are a product of an artist as well. It's actions and dialogue created by a writer. We just have to expand our way of thinking. CGI is most definitely an art form, and usually the product of many people's artistry. There will always be humans behind it.
...as just an art medium, such as what we work with, that is one thing. I only came into this because I no longer could hold a pencil or brush steady in my hand for long or very steadily without downing Advil like M&Ms, and my sense of touch is all but gone (one of the reasons why I don't use a graphics tablet and don't do digital painting as well as no longer play the piano).
It's when you start using the technology to replace the body behind the art or task (like the actor on the screen, backup musicians in a recording studio, or worker in a factory) with an automated system driven by algorithms, that is what I am concerned about. There is this utopian ideal that the more "leisure time" we will have due to automation taking care of the "drudgery" of work, the more time there will be to take on more creative and "meaningful" pursuits. I see more of the opposite occurring, idle time being wasted and misused, like posting selfies and goofy cat pictures on social media, playing online multiplayer games, or watching endless streams of video programming which turns people into spectators instead of participants.
Yes there will always be some humans behind the scenes writing the code for new, and maintaining the systems, but it will not require nearly the same workforce to perform as technology and deep learning systems become more sophisticated. We already have software that can create and modify programmes. We have programmes that Wall Street uses which can monitor and predict market trends more quickly and accurately than living analysts and brokers can. We have planes that can navigate and even land themselves (as well as self driving vehicles on the horizon). No common job or profession will be immune from automation's impact.
My concern is what is to become of everyone who is phased out in the process?
Seen as a stand alone Sci fi movie the Live "Ghost in the shell" was a visual treat overall.
However from the perspective of a fan of the anime very familiar with the source material, Johansen's casting acting and performance was epic fail IMHO.
And they went super cheap on Bato's prosthetic eyes.
but I digress .
Animation has also become a terrain where the producers took over.
Handdrawn animation was fairly mysterious to most producers. Plus, even slight changes often meant throwing away anything you had, and starting over from scratch. Not cheap. The animators still had pivotal roles and were actors, artists, rather than technicians.
No more. Changes are done at the touch of a button. Producers with zero artistic talent and just marketing in their heads will ask for corrections upon corrections upon corrections, until the last bit of spontenaity and soul have been lost from the scenes. Animators have more and more become conveyor belt work slaves, with minimal creative input. And it shows in a lot of the productions. Especially in the hyperrealistic ones.
I had a masterclass some months ago, in motion capturing, from Craig Caton-Largent. He used to do practical effects, has worked wiht legends like Stan Winston and Phil Tippett, has worked with velociraptor-puppets on the first Jurassic Park. He lamented the drop in creativity over the past decades, and the increase of producer involvement. And also believes that computers/CGI are very much overused, nowadays.
In regard to Kyoto Kid: I have worked in the field. And I just think they want the artists out of the equation. We're difficult, we're rebels, we're expensive, we're a pain in the arse. They want to automatise as many things as possible, and cut on our costs. And noname MoCap actors are sooo much easier to direct than those headstrong difficult animators....
I would imagine Many of the "Master craftsmen"
who mixed the delicate balance of chemicals at Eastman kodak, were likely ' difficult, ,rebels, expensive, & a pain in the arse.
Alas the unceasing forward motion of progress, technology and time itself sundered their special little snowflake status moot& obselete.
Welcome to the Universe.
And for every "Souless" CGI laden, mass produced, hollywood procedural one can name,
I can name a well crafted & thoughtful treament of high concepts like relativity in CGI laden movies like "Interstellar"
Ironicly the internet, and forums like this one itself, are great examples of how technology has enabled embittered veterans to lament their tragic loss of relevency to a much wider audience than they ever could in the Good old pre- internet days when human interaction was more personal and presumably more "valid"
Early in my career as a Graphic Designer ,I had an art director tell me ,in a job interview, that:
"These fancy desktop publishing programs ,like Quark Xpress, have only enabled bad Designers to produce their bad designs more quickly"
Yet his reason for not hiring me was ,my then, lack of experience in.......
Quark Xpress .
Such Irony.
+1
They can sit by their computers clicking the "Make Art" or "Make Music" button all day.
It will happen and in the same way that other technologies have been incorporated into society, there will be cases where it’s use will be appropriate and other cases where live actors will be a better choices. Like in all aspects of art, more options are better and usually offer a richer experience. The idea that cgi will completely replace humans onscreen is preposterous. Could never happen, will never happen. Nice gimmick though.
Once more, there will always be a need for a human actor behind the cgi character. And animators. Currently cgi is more labor intensive than live filmmaking. There is no incentive for replacing actors at this time, only incentives for more creative choices in expression. There is room enough for everyone, virtual or real, in this bandwagon.
Ignoring casting choices and character design, a core discontinuity with the live action "Ghost in the Shell" (GitS for bevity from this point) is the "world" depicted and the Major's situation. the live action movie presents her as the first of her kind and she's turned into a cybernetic soldier against her will, wiping her memory and telling her lies to make her more compliant. That's almost Murphy's situation in "RoboCop". But, Shirow in his manga and later the anime adaptations (both the theatrical movies and the TV series) depict a society where cyber upgrading is the norm. It's known by the masses and widely accepted. In fact, it's commone enough that one "danger" involves the loss of individuality. There's a scene in the 1995 theatrical anime when Motoko sees another person wearing the same "shell" as she. (Yes, hers is "tricked out" like a police car or a military humvee, but externally, it's a popular, widely available "model".) A more humorous spin of this idea unfolds in the original manga when the Major is mistaken for a "pleasure droid" that vanished from a factory. This is about as polar opposite from the society depicted in the live action movie.
I mentioned a "RoboCop" parallel in the live action movie, being converted into a cyborg without her consentand her memories wiped and tricked into believing she was someone VERY different from her pre surgery personality. In all earlier material, various animes and mangas, she knew darn well who she was, her convertion was not the result of duplicity and she joined Section 9 of her own volition. Again, almost the direct opposite of all earlier versions. Plus, after learning the truth in the live action flick, being turned into a killing machine against her will, at the end she decides, "Meh, I guess I'll just stick with it." Giving in like that? Had that happened to the Major of Shirow's manga or the various animes, she would have said, "F**k that!"
And while admittedly a "petty" complaint, shoot, they couldn't even get her distinctive hairstyle right!! Just a few spitz of hairspray and a brush the fluff out the nape and her bangs was all that was needed! Instead, it looked like a bucket of water was dumped upon her head, her hair hanging limp!
And need we even discuss the studio opting for a bog standard "corporate duplicity" story instead of the theme of spontaneously evolving artificial intelligence that was the central theme of both Shirow's manga and the 1995 theatrical anime? Don't tell me audiences wouldn't 'get it". the concept has been presented in various ways, sometimes even competently, for decades in the movies!
Yes, the movie did recreate some iconic sequences we associate with the property. The choir from the '95 anime returned (not the same singers, probably, but that selection of music). They even had a truly bada$$ Aramaki speaking Japanese, but without a narrative that reflects the original material, its just a disjointed sequence of homages.
Sincerely,
Bill