“always”?
I’d question whether it is inconveniencing anyone at all. Few people outside of the industry seem to give two hoots about it.
Those who are closer to the industry are understandably more vocal but seeing as no-one is seeing a drop off in quantity or quality as yet it is a bit of a hard sell to get them to care.
But that’s how everything works. I have to admit that whenever I see any item of news, the first thing I think is whether I’ll be affected.
I haven’t seen a new Jimmy Kimmel show in weeks. I miss the show and I feel bad for all of the people being financially harmed.
I think that most of the late-night shows went on hiatus when the Writer’s Guild went on strike (at the beginning of May), as they depend on WGA members for creating their content.
I watch Stephen Colbert fairly regularly, and just prior to the WGA strike, he noted that all of his show’s writers, including himself, were members of the guild, and that they wouldn’t be producing new shows until that strike ended.
But, that said, the late night shows also depend on actors as a significant part of their guest list, and those actors are usually there to promote a new movie or show (and it sometimes seems that Kimmel’s show exists primarily to provide promotional support to Disney/Marvel/Star Wars/ABC projects). Even if the WGA weren’t on strike, I suspect that any SAG members who appeared on a late-night show would be instructed to not actually do any promotional work for, or even discuss, their movies/shows – IIRC, they received similar guidance about appearing at Comic-Con a few weeks ago.
Jimmy does a very funny monologue and there’s so much happening. That’s what I’m craving.
An NPR article about studios using digital body scans of background actors:
In case you had any lingering doubts about whether or not WB leadership knows what they’re doing…
What a profoundly stupid man.
Edit: For some reason the article embed isn’t working, so here’s the headline:
Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav Claims Strike Has Saved Studio Millions
He could have the best quarter in Hollywood history if he just fired all the employees and put every one of WB’s assets up for auction.
The Eddie Lampert School of Business Success.
This is one aspect I don’t much get. We can pretty much generate full digital humans and the tech is getting better all the time. Why even bother scanning real people?
Considering execs are almost always heavily compensated for short term gains over long term damage, why wouldn’t they?
Scans are a whole lot cheaper than making a photorealistic CGI human that moves like a real human being. It’s the same level of difference between filming a real actor and making a CGI character.
The difference between the scans and just filming the extras is that they are essentially filmed in 3D doing various actions. Then AI can be used to (more or less) seamlessly blend between different actions.
Scans are cheaper now, but in 5 to 10 years? No one is going to bother scanning no names for a crowd scene. Generate 5, 500, or 50,000 randos no problem. It’s not like these CGI peeps are expected to be front and center, they just have to be good enough to exist in the background without being a distraction. The studios might as well say for now, sure we won’t scan actors without adequate compensation (because soon we won’t need to scan anyone period).
Don’t know anything about the tech but I image in 5 to 10 years there will be big enough libraries of scanned extras that you’ll go a while before you see the same one twice.
Why would they need to scan SAG members anyway? For AI generated background characters, it doesn’t seem like it really matters if the AI is rendering an image of official SAG member “Joe Smith” versus random person “John Smith”.
It seems like managing scans for background characters could be done in a similar way to how photos are handled in the stock photo industry. For stock photos, people get paid to have their pictures taken, the pictures are added to a stock photo database, and then companies can license those photos for various purposes. There are no residuals or payments to the model other than whatever they are paid for the original photo shoot. If all the studio wants are scans of people to put in background scenes, it doesn’t seem like it matters whether or not they are SAG members, or even that they are actors. Just get a few hundred random people, pay them a fixed amount, scan them, and that’s it. Computers could even tweak and merge scans to create variations in the images to create a larger set of images.
Is there anything preventing the studio from doing this today? For instance, could they setup a scan booth, offer $200 to anyone who agrees to have themselves scanned, and then use those scans for AI generated people in films?
My thought exactly. Maybe one of them can be a future equivalent of the Wilhelm scream guy.
I was wondering the same as the last few posts. The studios will do this once it is cost-effective, but what they have now is much cheaper:
They can pay a professional background actor $187 to drive to their studio, use the equipment that is on-site and set-up, get actors that are vetted, afraid to be difficult, and pre-cataloged with their demographics, etc. It’s cheaper and easier than driving a trailer to the mall and asking randos to emote. They basically have the ‘stock photo’ system in place.
Maybe this is a condition that the studios are willing to give up since they know they have a back-up, but it depends on the exact text. The studios won’t want to pay for the material they have already collected and they won’t want to compromise using AI in the future.
I haven’t been following this story closely, but it seems that the big studios are somewhat insulated by their international studios. Do the actors have any leverage?
I doubt it but like has already been mentioned, it won’t be long before no initial real-life human will be needed.
If anyone offered me a couple of hundred quid to be scanned and used as a virtual extra I’d be happy to do it, as would many others.
The ship has already sailed anyway. I recall that Gladiator famously pasted in a digitised version of Oliver Reed and duplicated multiple versions of digitised extras for the stadium scenes.
And that was nearly 25 years ago, technology moves on. Matte painters are replaced by digital green screens, physical props by digital 3D representations, stunts are wholly generated in the digital world. Scanned, manipulated and polished.
In time, extras and actors will also be part of that same digital world. Nothing is going to stop that and it may mean less work for some people in certain sectors and a shift of jobs to the technical realm. T’was ever thus.
The strike will likely achieve very little in the long term and I don’t get a sense that the general public, content-saturated that they are, care very much or are strongly supportive.
Remember when one of the studio execs said they’ll starve the bastards out until they have to sell their apartments?