Will we have entirely computer generated actors soon?

[Exapno_Mapcase]

That’s what she said.

[mlees]

@Voyager

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.

I have no idea what methods they used.

[Sam_Lowry]

@Chronos

Why is everyone talking in the future tense? Hatsune Miku has been around for eight years.

Like Exapno Mapcase said, the parameters need to be defined. Hatsune Miku is a computer generated musician, but she purposely looks like a cartoon. She is different in that her voice is from Yamaha’s Vocaloid 2 and Vocaloid 3 singing synthesizing technologies, not from a musician or actress recording the parts, although her voice is sampled from Japanese voice actress Saki Fujita. I haven’t heard Hatsune Miku sing, so I don’t know what she sounds like, but I can imagine she probably sounds good. Regular pop musicians definitely have distortion on their voices, so Miku probably don’t sound out of place.

I don’t know how soon that could be transferred to a computer generated voice for a character in a TV show or movie. It’s easy enough to make a voice that can say all the words that need to be said, but it seems like it would be much more difficult to get it to say in a natural way that sounded like a person talking. Technology will probably get there, and it will be a big gimmick for the first movie that does it, but I don’t know how soon that will be.

[Kamino_Neko]

@Sam_Lowry

I haven’t heard Hatsune Miku sing, so I don’t know what she sounds like

Rather autotuned, unsurprisingly. But more or less like a real singer using autotune rather than synthesized, so there’s that.

[Mijin]

@Trinopus

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 think this is a more plausible way for this technology to make inroads rather than resusurrecting the dead. That is, a super handsome or hawt actor appears in a film. Because they’re so attractive they get some fan following. And the fact that they’re not real is either kept a secret (initially), or at least press releases only hint at the truth and never outright say it. Then later you get to make headlines when you do the reveal.

Could conceivably happen within next 5 years. I don’t think it’s the technology that’s holding it back (though the first attempt will be crazy expensive / time-consuming to produce), but for a studio to take the gamble.

[cormac262]

There’s an old 70’s movie called “Looker” that is based on this premise of “capturing” actors digitally, and then using “them” for media (I think they only got as far as making commercials). It was based on a Crichton story.

Not the greatest movie, but it was the first I’d seen of this concept of “capturing” an actor and then “animating” them for use in media. Pretty interesting.

[Mahaloth]

The first really good attempt was the movie Final Fantasy: Spirits Within. By good attempt, I mean that the people looked pretty real. The movie was very bad.

Here is the trailer from 15 years ago.

It definitely looks artificial, but it was a solid attempt. The main girl and guy looked worse than some side characters that were rendered later in the production.

Here is how Donald Sutherland’s character looked in the movie. He was the last to be completed.

If the movie had done well, sequels would have been made and the technology would have greatly improved.

Here is the Final Flight of the Osiris, made for the Matrix series. It’s from the same company as Final Fantasy and shows some, but not enough, improvement.

@astorian

I’m not qualified to judge, but Steven Spielberg predicted about a decade ago that real actors would be obsolete within ten years.

Where did he say this?

[Snowboarder_Bo]

@cormac262

There’s an old 70’s movie called “Looker” that is based on this premise of “capturing” actors digitally, and then using “them” for media (I think they only got as far as making commercials). It was based on a Crichton story.

Not the greatest movie, but it was the first I’d seen of this concept of “capturing” an actor and then “animating” them for use in media. Pretty interesting.

Looker is from 1981; I know because I own it and I came in here to post about it.

[dasmoocher]

@Bryan_Ekers

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.

Didn’t they do something like this with Brando in Superman Returns?

Brando (who died in 2004) reprises his role from the 1978 film through the use of previous footage combined with computer-generated imagery. This required negotiations with Brando’s estate for permission to have his footage used. Singer explained, “We had access to all of the Brando footage that was shot. There was unused footage that had Brando reciting poems, trailing off subject and swearing like a sailor.”

…

Using footage from the original Superman (1978) film as a reference point, Marlon Brando was re-created by Rhythm & Hues using CGI.

[The_Hamster_King]

@Kamino_Neko

Rather autotuned, unsurprisingly. But more or less like a real singer using autotune rather than synthesized, so there’s that.

Vocaloid performances sound significantly more synthetic if you hear them in a language you speak. The Japanese recordings sound pretty good to me, but then, I don’t speak Japanese. Listen to this English recording and the deficiencies are pretty glaring.

As I said above, voice synthesis is decades away from being able to deliver a convincing dramatic performance. We can render characters that *look *like human beings right now. But we can’t make them move like human beings (unless we do motion capture) and we can’t make them sound like human beings (unless we do voice recording).

I expect to see robots walking around and interacting with people in the real world years before a virtual actor is able to deliver a convincing dramatic performance with no human input.

[Habeed]

I think the OPs asking when we’ll have animation software that can take instructions like “deliver these words and be angry when doing it” that doesn’t look fake or stilted.

Good luck, buddy. I don’t even know how you could begin such a task. My thought is you’d have to emulate the portion of a human brain that controls the face before you had something convincing enough to use in a movie.

[bump]

@Sam_Lowry

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.

Actually what would be even more interesting/weird is if they took a mediocre, but popular actor and via the magic of CGI, etc… his digital revenant ended up being a good actor. I suspect the reverse would be the case at first though.

Still, I think the initial uses for that sort of thing will be in prequels and things like the new Star Wars movies- they might want a scene showing Luke and Leia post Endor, but not this much later. So they’d gin up CGI versions and have Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher do the voices with a little bit of tweaking. Or, if for some freakish reason, they’re still making Star Wars films 50 years from now, they’d just generate their voices for those scenes.

[Sam_Lowry]

@Mijin

I think this is a more plausible way for this technology to make inroads rather than resusurrecting the dead. That is, a super handsome or hawt actor appears in a film. Because they’re so attractive they get some fan following. And the fact that they’re not real is either kept a secret (initially), or at least press releases only hint at the truth and never outright say it. Then later you get to make headlines when you do the reveal.

Could conceivably happen within next 5 years. I don’t think it’s the technology that’s holding it back (though the first attempt will be crazy expensive / time-consuming to produce), but for a studio to take the gamble.

As far as I know, very few actors become big solely because of movie or TV appearances. The movies and TV shows are the big things obviously, but there’s always the promotional tour and interviews. And now there is also the interaction with fans on Twitter and Facebook and at conventions. It would be possible to do that stuff and not have the secret get out that it was a computer generated person until later, but it would be difficult.

I don’t think that you would have a case of John Hunk becoming a big star and then it being revealed that he was computer generated. I think much more likely that John Hunk does a few movies or whatever, maybe gets some notice and some Twitter followers, and then later he’s revealed to be computer generated then he gets a lot more attention.

But I don’t see this happening anytime soon. Studios take gambles on things that could conceivably make them money, and it would be a big gamble that this would make them money.

@bump

Still, I think the initial uses for that sort of thing will be in prequels and things like the new Star Wars movies- they might want a scene showing Luke and Leia post Endor, but not this much later. So they’d gin up CGI versions and have Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher do the voices with a little bit of tweaking. Or, if for some freakish reason, they’re still making Star Wars films 50 years from now, they’d just generate their voices for those scenes.

This would be a logical use for it. With more studios making mega-franchise movies with things all connecting, I could see that seeming as worthwhile for them.

[gaffa]

A computer generated actress was the plot of the 2002 Andrew Nichol movie S1m0ne. I only saw it the once and it didn’t really succeed in it’s aims, but I should really give it another chance, as I love most of the writer/director’s other work.

They apparently originally intended to have a fully CG character, but the Screen Actor’s Guild objected, so she was played by Rachel Roberts and processed to be less than real.

[Mijin]

@Sam_Lowry

I don’t think that you would have a case of John Hunk becoming a big star and then it being revealed that he was computer generated. I think much more likely that John Hunk does a few movies or whatever, maybe gets some notice and some Twitter followers, and then later he’s revealed to be computer generated then he gets a lot more attention.

Agreed. This is the kind of scenario I was trying to describe.

I agree that it would be nigh on impossible to have a big star that isn’t real for the reasons you’ve given plus it’s too difficult to keep a secret like that for a long time.