Comments on: Digital actors don’t need personal assistants, salaries

By: chase

chase — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 22:28:23 +0000

This could explain Pauly Shore.

By: opus

opus — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 20:31:14 +0000

Technically they already are replacing actors in live action movies they’re just not the lead characters They’re replacing extras that would normally be hired to make large groups of people.
Perhaps as the tech improves the one’s being replaced will be, if not the leads at least characters who get closer to the camera.

By: cftoto

cftoto — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:20:36 +0000

I sure hope not, Opus, but I think the digital effects coming down the pike will give film studios some interesting leverage when it comes to working with actors.

By: opus

opus — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 03:45:38 +0000

They’ll always need a human controlling the performance even if they do manage to bring the graphics up to snuff. It will likely be a mixture of motion capture,(Final Fantasy,Gollum,KingKong ,Beowolf), and hand animated cgi.
Unless they can perfect AI enough to create a performance I don’t see actors ever being completely replaced.

By: cftoto

cftoto — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 23:59:35 +0000

I agree, K … even when they get very close to looking human it just doesn’t look quite right. And the result is downright creepy. But technology marches on pretty fast …

By: K

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 23:27:04 +0000

There was a “Final Fantasy” movie where the characters were very photorealistic human like. Personally, I found it creepy and very distracting as the character presentation tended to pop between realistic and almost but not quite realistic. The human eye can detect extremely small variations in facial qualities, which is why most people can recognize hundreds of different faces by small variations, so I’ll withhold judgement on how good this new technique is until I’ve samplied it personally.