Monday, April 11, 2016
With Hollywood's Advanced Digital Face-Lifting, Do We Even Need Actors?
NPR: You can now digitally replace just about anything on an actor's body — including the actor himself. Journalist Logan Hill explains this practice of often invisible digital retouching in media.
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2 comments:
This article is both scary and fascinating. That we could move into a world where the physical actor is not necessary is bad news for actors. But the thing this article doesn’t really think about is how you would still need actors to voice the characters. In a way we have been doing this for years already with video games. The characters are all digital in games. Though I must say, there are some games where I would swear that they had real people dong the cut scenes and not digital characters. With this new process they still need to base the digital actor on a real face, though the fact that they can mix and match whatever features they want is weird. Also the last line of the interview- where once you have been scanned they can use your image however they want and you might not even know what they put you in a porno. It’s a scary thought. And in just a few years it will become all the more possible especially as digital voices get better and better.
The idea of having this technology replace actors sounds a bit unrealistic to me. I think this article, or the person being interviewed here, is pretty subjective and it's completely his opinion that CGI makes actors look more "normal" since no pictures or examples are included here for the readers to see. Also, in implementing this technology, it seems like whoever is programming the digital face lifting thing will be in complete control of how the "actor" is going to act, which I don't think is their job. Actors are not robots, they are all different and unique and as much as I appreciate technology, there are some things that technology should leave alone and I personally think this is one of them. This also reminded me of the virtual singer from Japan - although she is widely popular across the world, digital singers did not take over and replace actual singers. I can see this technology developing into its own genre, but I don't think it will replace actors.
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