Apparently, Tom Hanks & Robert Zemeckis have reunited for this computer generated film based on a children’s book about a train that takes kids to the North Pole. The release is slated for 11/04.
As computers play a more important role in film (LOTR / ILM / Pixar), my assumption is the technology in the distant future will be improved to the point where the demand for extras, stuntmen and finally live action actors will fall dramatically.
The CGI phenom has even worked its way into the porn industry. I was over a friend’s house this weekend (without my kids) and we watched 2Funky4U - One of the most politically incorrect (and amusing) X-rated films I’ve ever seen. Granted, the animation was a little repetitive and clunky - and the size of certain body parts were very exaggerated; but for a first of its kind production, it wasn’t half bad. Once again, as the technology improves, is CGI animated bestiality and child porn all but guaranteed to be a part of our future?
I remember hearing an interview with Andy Serkis (voice/actions of Gollum in LOTR) talking about this. And he said it was ridiculous to think that jobs for actors are going to disappear. He said that making Gollum was much more labor-intensive than a normal acting job (and not just more work for the CGI people, but also for him). Between acting as a stand-in on-set, actually participating in scenes as they are shot, re-doing vocal tracks repeatedly, and spending tons of hours redoing all the scenes on the motion-capture stage, he figured that he put in three to four times the number of “in-character” hours that an actor would normally do for an equivalent live-action role.
Granted, this may be a special case, because they used Serkis’ body movements as the basis for creating Gollum to a degree that hasn’t been done before - but this will most likely become the “Gold Standard” for animation in the future. Key-frame animation alone takes too long to animate a major character in a feature-length movie.
“Normal” animated movies (either with traditional cell animation like Lion King, or with CGI like Finding Nemo) are different - the actor only needs to be around to supply the voice (a relatively short period - maybe a few weeks), and then the animators do the rest.
Having said all that, I think that new technology will allow more animated films to be made more easily and more often in the future, but I don’t think that this will pose a serious threat to live-action movies any time soon. More big-budget movies will be able to afford animated characters (just like they can afford more special effects in general), but it will probably be too expensive for smaller-budget productions.
Animated films can be very interesting and allow you to do things you wouldn’t normally be able to film, but in most cases it’s not necessary. Plain old live-action is just fine most of the time - there’s no need to animate it. Also, the stigma (at least in North America) that animation is “just for kids’ movies” will slowly fade away - but the only other place it’s been used so far is in fantasy movies (e.g. Pirates of the Caribbean, LOTR, Star Wars). I think some inroads are being made into having animation for adults in television - for example in King of the Hill. This is a sit-com that just happens to be animated. It doesn’t need to be, it’s not required in any way for the plots (like Futurama or even The Simpsons). Hopefully more shows like KotH will come into production.
The demand for stuntmen is already falling due to CGI doubles, and will continue to do so. And the market for mass numbers of extras crashed a loooooong time ago. Movies with “a cast of thousands” were rare during the 70s, 80s, and 90s because they had become too damn expensive to make. (Now of course they’re making a comeback using digital extras.)
But it’s pretty unlikely that lead actors are in any great danger of being replaced by CGI. The vast majority of shots involving lead actors involve them standing around talking. It’s immensely cheaper to shoot scenes like that using good ol’ fashioned meat actors than with CGI – and honestly, it’s hard to think of any reason why that would change. Putting a little makeup and a costume on Tom Hanks is always going to be easier than trying to generate and animate a digital double for Tom Hanks.
Plus, people will see a movie because it has Tom Hanks in it. Now, the first movie to feature an incredibly lifelike CGI Tom Hanksatron will undoubtedly draw crowds because of the novelty, I don’t see computer-generated characters engendering the kind of loyalty real-life stars (and their PR machines) do.
Bugs and Mickey are characters, not actors, and their greatest success has been in shorts, not feature films. You won’t see them deviating too widely from their established roles or starring in thrillers, epics, historical dramas, romantic dramas, etc.
Human actors, in contrast, can appear in a variety of roles and generate cross-over business. For instance, Sean Astin’s performance in the “Lord of the Rings” movies finally convinced me to rent “Rudy”, which I had avoided for years because I had no interest in watching “a football movie”.
Probably not, at least for featured and leading characters, due to something called the Uncanny Valley effect (named, according to this column by Roger Ebert, by Japanese cyberneticist Masahiro Mori in 1978). The idea is that, perceptively, we give a lot of latitude to something that only vaguely resembles the human form (consider the “smiley face” of Galle Crater on Mars), but that the closer the resemblance, the more obvious and disconcerting the remaining differences become. Look at that Final Fantasy movie; compared to Gertie the Dinosaur, the animation was hyper-realistic, but the flaws are magnified out of proportion and it starts to feel creepy and disturbing instead of natural and normal. It’s a strange, almost paradoxical, effect, but it’s very real, and until CGI has gotten to the point that you cannot tell the difference at all it’ll be a problem for anybody trying to achieve photorealistic effects. Note how the folks at Pixar have stylized their human characters, making them more “cartoony,” to avoid this.
It’s true, it’s way cheaper to hire one guy and sit him at a table and have him look out a window for ten minutes of filming than it is to hire twenty guys to create the wireframe and build and texture the environment and paint the character’s skin and animate his movement and render the final version to film over a period of several weeks. But the Uncanny Valley, and the rejection by viewers of subjectively flawed representations of human beings, is in my mind a no less important factor for the long-term job security of human actors.
(Real Player doesn’t do it much justice) and was amazed by their reaction to it. They couldn’t believe it was ‘animated’ ala Shrek, et al.