YWD67
July 23rd, 2006, 06:55 AM
Can actors be replaced with digital actors? With the every increasing computer-generated images (CGI) in today's movies, one wonder's if the human actor may be a dinosaur slowly walking into extinction.
Today to produce a traditional film, it cost around $200 million do produce what companies hope will be a hit. This includes actors, set people, labor, material, transportation, etc.....
To produce a CGI movie with the same hit potential the cost is around $60 million dollars.
With a CGI produced movie you have practical no transportation cost to speak of, or materials and other such on scene production requirements.
The human actor still has a role in a CGI film, but that is relegated to a voice for the CGI image. With those kind of numbers in cost it is hard to ignore producing a CGI film over what I will call a skin film from here on.
Lucas is one of the few filmmakers rich enough to ignore economic concerns. And although he's known as an action director with little knack for working with actors, Lucas says it's the acting that will keep CGI actors limited to action sequences and other stunt work.
"We've never been able to teach a computer to act," he says. "It's a talent, it's a skill, it's something you learn, it's something you're born with, and I don't see in the foreseeable future that computers can become human enough in their artificial intelligence to have the same crazed psychology you need in order to relate to other people, so you can emotionally express ideas.
"The art of acting is to transfer emotions from one human to another by imitating various fabricated characters. A computer can make a perfect visual representation, but the computer cannot act."
True a CGI may not be able to act (yet) but the human voice conveys's most of the human emotions. It is a heck of a lot cheaper to pay a person for just their voice then it is for the hole physical pack.
WIth voice acting you have none of the physical requirements that a skin film may have. You could have a 5 ft. 275 pound woman voicing the part of a 6 ft. blonde with the supposed perfect female dimensions of 36-24-36. I personally like the first number in the high 40's, but that is just me.
With that anyone of us poor shmucks here at ZP could be the next star of Hollywood, as long as we are heard and not seen.
Creating the physical CGI actor would not be hard. What few realize is that many of the past and current actors images are property of the movie industry. What that means is that the movie company has rights to their physical image.
One would only need to use the image of a skin actor in a CGI not the actual person.
This was done with the CGI film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. It was released on July 11, 2001 in the United States and it was the first animated feature to seriously attempt photorealistic CGI humans.(Alec Baldwin and James Wood to name a few.) The movie was a bomb at the box office. One of the reasons given for not liking the film was that it was unnerving to watch real actors that were not real. ( not sure of what they mean)
With the ever increasing power of computers and their speed and the increasing realistic images of CGI, it may one day be hard to tell a CGI actor from a real one.
Who knows one day the images of long dead actors may once again see the movie screen again in new films.
In the future to use the image of an actor one might just need to pay a small licensing fee to use an actor in a film.
I have said this to many people, several years from now CGI images of dead actors may be common place.
Who knows, one day a porn company may CGI a movie with John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart doing it doggy style, and it would look like a real skin movie.
"Do you want to pitch or catch pilgrim?"
Today to produce a traditional film, it cost around $200 million do produce what companies hope will be a hit. This includes actors, set people, labor, material, transportation, etc.....
To produce a CGI movie with the same hit potential the cost is around $60 million dollars.
With a CGI produced movie you have practical no transportation cost to speak of, or materials and other such on scene production requirements.
The human actor still has a role in a CGI film, but that is relegated to a voice for the CGI image. With those kind of numbers in cost it is hard to ignore producing a CGI film over what I will call a skin film from here on.
Lucas is one of the few filmmakers rich enough to ignore economic concerns. And although he's known as an action director with little knack for working with actors, Lucas says it's the acting that will keep CGI actors limited to action sequences and other stunt work.
"We've never been able to teach a computer to act," he says. "It's a talent, it's a skill, it's something you learn, it's something you're born with, and I don't see in the foreseeable future that computers can become human enough in their artificial intelligence to have the same crazed psychology you need in order to relate to other people, so you can emotionally express ideas.
"The art of acting is to transfer emotions from one human to another by imitating various fabricated characters. A computer can make a perfect visual representation, but the computer cannot act."
True a CGI may not be able to act (yet) but the human voice conveys's most of the human emotions. It is a heck of a lot cheaper to pay a person for just their voice then it is for the hole physical pack.
WIth voice acting you have none of the physical requirements that a skin film may have. You could have a 5 ft. 275 pound woman voicing the part of a 6 ft. blonde with the supposed perfect female dimensions of 36-24-36. I personally like the first number in the high 40's, but that is just me.
With that anyone of us poor shmucks here at ZP could be the next star of Hollywood, as long as we are heard and not seen.
Creating the physical CGI actor would not be hard. What few realize is that many of the past and current actors images are property of the movie industry. What that means is that the movie company has rights to their physical image.
One would only need to use the image of a skin actor in a CGI not the actual person.
This was done with the CGI film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. It was released on July 11, 2001 in the United States and it was the first animated feature to seriously attempt photorealistic CGI humans.(Alec Baldwin and James Wood to name a few.) The movie was a bomb at the box office. One of the reasons given for not liking the film was that it was unnerving to watch real actors that were not real. ( not sure of what they mean)
With the ever increasing power of computers and their speed and the increasing realistic images of CGI, it may one day be hard to tell a CGI actor from a real one.
Who knows one day the images of long dead actors may once again see the movie screen again in new films.
In the future to use the image of an actor one might just need to pay a small licensing fee to use an actor in a film.
I have said this to many people, several years from now CGI images of dead actors may be common place.
Who knows, one day a porn company may CGI a movie with John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart doing it doggy style, and it would look like a real skin movie.
"Do you want to pitch or catch pilgrim?"