Not sure what forum this should reside in, but will we have an entirely computer generated actor soon? That is, not only the image, but the voice as well?
Thanks,
Rob
Define soon. Seriously. And also define all the other parameters. One actor digitally inserted? All of them? In an experimental film? In a short? In a full-length film? What counts as *entirely *computer generated?
Some of those probably are pretty soon. Some are much farther off.
Moderator Action
Moving thread from General Questions to Cafe Society.
The point of CGI is to have characters do amazing and visually fancy things that are hard/impossible and/or expensive to do with live actors. Voice is a different issue - it’s not hard to get somebody to read a voiceover script, so why would you even want to have CG voices? If there’s no reason for it to happen, then it won’t.
Does CGI as applied for Paul Walker (face replacement on body doubles) in F&F7 count? Or is the OP more ambitious with something like a Pixar movie with more dedication to realism?
The 2010 version of Tron had a fully CGI young version of Jeff Bridges, but since he is specifying CG-voice as well, which is silly and pointless, then that severely limits the scope of the answer to the stated question.
Not necessarily - when I first heard about this concept, its proposed use was to resurrect dead actors, i.e. shoot a wholly original Humphrey Bogart performance.
That such hasn’t come to pass (though actual footage of dead actors has been repurposed using digital effects) suggests to me that there isn’t much demand for it.
That and it’s also crazy difficult.
Computer-generated voice acting would be hugely useful in videogames where the dialog has to adapt to the player’s actions.
Right now the best voice synthesizers can produce simple declarative statements that sound somewhat natural. They’re good enough for a voicemail system, but they don’t have the emotional nuance that a human actor provides. Computer-generated voice with believable emotion is such a hard problem that as far as I know, no one is even working on it yet. We’re decades away from being able to do away with voice actors.
Even on the animation front, procedural generation of believable human motion has hit a wall. If a character really needs to look real, you hire an actor and have them perform on a motion capture stage, then use that performance to drive the animation rig. The game engine might perturb the captured motion in response to player input, but the nuances of the movement come from the human performer.
I raised this issue years ago-I would like to know if there is anything to stop a studio from resurrecting some long dead actors and putting them back on the Silver Screen. take Humphrey Bogart-dead for 50+ years, would love to see him in a modern film noir movie. His voice could be digitized, his face also, and pasted onto a living actor-would this be feasible to do?
Just think-a remake of “Casablanca”!
They used CGI to make a duplicate Arnold/T800 in the latest Terminator movie.
I have watched a couple different Youtube movie critic reviews that include some of these scenes, and the CGI is fine when CGI-Arnie is just glaring at folks, but when it is speaking (“Your clothes… give them to me.”), it looks a tad off. There must be some subtle facial and body language cues that are missing.
I don’t think current CGI actors have the same impact as living actors, especially in a dramatic scene. I can’t imagine a CGI Captain Quint (Robert Shaw) doing his U.S.S. Indianapolis monologue, and having the same impact.
For another pseudo instance of this happening, Laurence Olivier appeared in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, where they used digitally manipulated archival BBC footage of him to make his villainous character.
There are a few things preventing this:
[ul]
[li]The expense to do it[/li][li]The family might have the legal ability to stop the company, or even if they don’t they would raise a stink[/li][li]The lack of need for it. If Casablanca was remade, it would be infinitely easier to just cast some unknown actor[/li][/ul]
Or a known actor. Face it, a Casablanca sequel/remake with Ryan Reynolds would probably be more commercially successful than one with CGI Humphrey Bogart (cue people under 30… “who?”)
Well, considering how his last several movies haven’t done well, I don’t know if Ryan Reynolds is a selling point for any movie. But I get your point.
But also it’s not just that young people don’t know who Humphrey Bogart was. It’s that I don’t know how many people who do know who he was would be interested in seeing a CGI version of him in a new movie. I’m a big fan of Paul Newman, and if some lost movie or archival footage was found I’d be interested in seeing that. But if they made a new updated CGI version of The Sting with a CGI Paul Newman, I wouldn’t be seeing Paul Newman perform, I’d be seeing a computer animated character wearing a Paul Newman suit. I don’t have much interest in that.
My grandparents watch old movies on TCM a fair amount, and if those old actors were made into CGI creations in new movies I just think they would be weirded out, not interested in seeing the new movie.
I’m not qualified to judge, but Steven Spielberg predicted about a decade ago that real actors would be obsolete within ten years.
So, he was off by a few years. But I expect he’s right, and that it WILL happen eventually.
Did they do it from scratch, or did they motion capture him, which would seem a lot easier. That’s been done for years. My favorite is Beowulf, where the actor who portrays the hero is actually pretty dumpy.
Why is everyone talking in the future tense? Hatsune Miku has been around for eight years.
There’s already a LOT of computer generated porn, including some very elegant “fantasy” porn – centaurs and the like. You can still generally tell the difference: the skin still tends to look a bit waxy. But it’s getting a hell of a lot better, day by day. Animating the still figures will be the next challenge…and they will solve it.
(I loved – and laughed out loud! – at the animated Schwarzanegger terminator, completely computer generated, in Terminator Salvation. It was still obviously a caricature, but a good one! And that was six years ago – entire generations in computing terms!)
Jessica Rabbit came first.
…Because Roger was a really sensitive lover?