The future of movies?

#1

Had an interesting thought after a visit to the movie theatres tonight…

The way the polarized lenses work to show you a 3D movie is essentially them projecting images for the left and right eye, and the glasses blocking the opposite displayed image for each eye.

SO… imagine this: say for example you decide to go see Captain Marvel, even though you don’t really like the lead actor. You wonder, while buying your ticket, what it would have been like with another actor in the lead role. Say, you want to see the movie, but don’t like Brie Larson… and you wish Natalie Portman had taken the role.

What if you could have a choice between those TWO lead actors for the film and you could watch each in the role, at the same screening, by using one of 2 different colour coded 3D glasses - the film would be a NON-3D film, but the glasses could have two left polarization lenses in blue frames for Brie and two right polarizations in the red frames for Natalie. Say both actors came in to do the dialogue on a weekend between their other projects, and for your theatre experience, you could be provided with headphones that play both actor’s vocal performances, but the built-in noise cancelation makes it so that you hear only one of those performances at once.

NOW… imagine that you use the Deep Fake (or similar) facial animation software.

The end result is the ability to go to a theatre, watch the one lead actor that you choose out of two options, and by using Deep Fake, the actual A-list actors can license their likeness and their voice to the project while a professional stunt person (or team of them) does the physical performance for the entire film.

Actors make royalties on their likeness and minimal voice work. You get to choose the lead actor that you want to see in the film you’re watching.

(Obviously, acting is more than just reading lines and being in the environment helps drive vocal performance, but it wouldn’t be any different than the voice cast performing for animated films.)

Imagine the implications for foreign versions of blockbuster films… eventually, we’ll be able to do caucasian star in English in one pair of glasses/headphones and a Chinese star speaking Mandarin in another pair of glasses and the remapped noise-cancelation in your same headphones.

The only downside that I can see is that Deep Fake isn’t good enough yet, though it is improving really fast, and that this approach would mean that films made this way could never be shown in (polarized) 3D.

Am I missing some reason why this wouldn’t work?
PM for address where to send my Technical Oscar. :rofl::joy::joy:

#2

  1. It would make every shot in a film a ‘VFX shot’ so therefore way more expensive per second.
    Anybody who thinks this will be ‘automated’ as never done a 100 retakes while the director changes his mind about any old thing the camera sees. You want plug and play?! Make the director plug and play. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

  2. The more thespian an actor the less happy they would be with this approach…

  3. How and why would the A list actor of tomorrow ever get famous and in demand in the first place?

#3

Assuming the uncanny valley problem is solved…
What you are proposing is not possible for cinema because of course the polarised light needs to be as far as possible from one lens to the other. And then you have 200 people all demanding diferent actors.
Let’s say you can do this for streaming movie and then you go one step further, instead of actors you use footage of your grandma and grandpa to train AI to place them in the movie.
Quite a gimmick, but it takes away control from the directors. They will be the second to oppose this. First will be the producers. This kind of thing would bring enormous and unnecessary costs.

#4

  1. The process woudn’t be done on set. It’d be done in post so it is less about the director doing retakes and more about vfx artists translation the performance to the stunt people… which they do all the time anyway. lol
    But it will be automated, some day. Count on it.

  2. Agreed… and having two actors in the same role in the exact same film would lead to an interesting dynamic on the promo tour - and it would lead to inevitable competition in the numbers between who in the audience wore the red glasses vs the blue glasses. As in maybe Brie’s performance is watched by 35% of the audience and Natalie’s version is the choice by the remaining 65%. Actors might not like it… HOWEVER… it’s still technically possible (ultimately, I don’t know if anyone will ever make a film like this outside of a gimmick).

  3. They would get famous the same way they do now - acting. Or, and I think this is more likely, we’ll see aging stars doing work as their younger selves because the production has licensed their likeness and it means they can make a few million for minimal work, rather than being passed over for the role due to age and or scheduling conflicts. Maybe Schwarzenegger’s estate will eventually license his younger likeness to new productions so that you can include him in your film. By then Adobe’s voice mapping software should be able to handle the voice end as well. Hire a stunt double to physically be him on set and say the lines in his cadence, then augment the film for his likeness and voice. Stars with big enough egos might allow for that level of immortality.

Oh, it’s possible. You’re just limited to 2 choices.

For streaming, you are correct. I thought about that too… imagine being able to take high res photos of your head and watching an ‘augmented reality’ version of that film where YOU are the star. Or be the character in a video game.

Directors can still craft their projects, and the performance isn’t driven by anyone other than the people they hire, like it is now.

Yes cost is still a significant factor, but it won’t be forever, and that’s aside from the technical, which is possible.

Anyway… it was just something that interested me from a filmmaker/digital artist standpoint.

#5
  1. Um no I do mean retakes. At the VFX level! As in post. Not the live stuff. The approval chain goes as follows.
    -Lead OKs Initially so show in Dalies
    -Supervisor OKs in Dalies to show to director
    -Director OKs to show to the Producer
    -The Producer usually represents the Film studio. aka the one’s who actually pay the $$$. So if the Producer is happy usually the Studio is too. It might take months for the Studio to decide they want a retake on something that everyone else thought they were done with. But the studio wants a retake-you do it.
    Basically 100 or so retakes-per shot- is not that rare at all by the time everybody is happy.

Your Idea adds all of the above to every shot now. Its not just edits anymore. Every shot is a VFX shot too.
Already many studios work together on a single VFX heavy film. Now there will needs to be VFX studios for everyshot and everyfilm.

  1. So only use famous actors from the past you say? So basically their families estates make money-but no other actors will?
    Thirty years from now and everything is digital. How does a new actor -not been born yet. Get famous? Get in demand? Get A listed? If they can’t why are they motivated at all to support such an industry anymore?
    Believe it or not I read a Science Fiction novel with this scenario. And basically ‘acting’ as a job went away-and the general public basically only watched re-runs for entertainment and did freaky drugs for fun instead. :upside_down_face:
#6

Horrible Idea IMHO Mate,
Consider the obvious unworkable &toxic politics of

hiring multiple actors to play alternate versions of the

same roles in the same production.

Imagine the Ethnicity/Race &other issues laid bare when

people learn they are only given the choice between two

Ideal BMI white women/men as alternative actors for a

certain film.

What about the black chicks… and not just the Paula

Pattens, but the really Dark skinned ones?
why no “non-binaries” or the slightly over weight etc

etc.

What a bloody marketing nightmare.

Hollywood has zero business incentive to
even consider such an undertaking with live action

movies.

Their Current movie theater distribution model is

already imperiled by the advent of Digital Video,
Affordable 50+inch flat screen TV’s and the proliferation

of broadband internet for torrenting of every netflix

deliverable and official BluRay release.

And I do not see this as a viable service for a third
party , paying for all of the legal permissions to use

“Deep fake” or some future algorithum
to post edit a movie in its final distribution format
outside of a Live streaming/game engine type of

environment and we sort of already have that now
with instant switching of Avatars in game engines.

BTW as an aside,
I too had low expectations for Brie Larson in
" Captain Marvel"
However I was pleasently surprised as her performance

was a measured balance of witty sarcasm without

Snarkiness and toughness without masculinization,
and left much room for the other actors performances to

shine as well.

Natalie Portman would have been the utter ruin of this

movie IMHO.

#7

DeepFakes is pretty neat. The Steve Buscemi-Jennifer Lawrence video was weird but impressive. It seems that with a good voice manipulation software you could create new movie scenes featuring Bogart or whoever and get a convincing fake performance if carefully done.
Consider how much work went into Jeff Bridges in Tron 2 and how many short cuts exist now.
There’s also a mind blowing video of computer-created faces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hOhzr0gCMQ

#8

The 3D glasses don’t work well enough for that, there’s a certain amount of ghosting where you can still see a bit of the other image which would be more visible when it’s actual different images.

#9

Just no, no reason to write any more of a reply to the idea.

#10

Somebody in here know these guys? lol

#11
#12

Jim Carrey in the Shining

#13

That is rad! hahaha
It turned out pretty great! I didn’t go over it with a fine-toothed inspection, but I think it looks pretty dang solid.

It’s funny, because I know both of these actors, and this scene, I see a lot of Jim’s Lemony Snicket facial expressions and some of Jack’s rant on the stand in A Few Good Men in this combined performance.