Well what we in Los Angeles call kudos season has just gotten into top gear
with the announcement of the Academy Award nominees and I think it's probably
in the interest of all of us to take a look at one of these categories and see
what the world's political situation looks like. Hi everybody I'm Bill Whittle
here with Steve Green and Scott Ott and this is about your post-Oscars Oscars. So
here's what I think are the five best performances of 2017 and the nominees
for best male actor are:
"Alright, team Osiris the light is green."
"Brooks isn't a corporal anymore. Your sergeant now.
You're the commander of the Marines on this ship.
My honor, sir.
"We should contact Admiral Raines now, commander."
"No. Staff Sergeant Omar said to pick your mission,
don't let it pick you. That's exactly what we're gonna do."
Ho ho, ha ha, did you see what I did there? There's a reason for this. Certainly
those of us who are conservatives, the half of the country that's routinely
insulted by all of the glitterati and all of the rest of the highfalutin
limousine liberals who talk about open borders from behind their private
security fenced in compounds and all the rest of this hypocrisy - all of this is on
its way out. The Oscars used to be something that was just a cultural event,
now it's just kind of like a, you know Thursday night football game,
essentially it's going to essentially disappear. One of the reasons is that
entertainment is moving away from feature films and TV into things like
content produced by users on YouTube, some of these getting billions of views.
There's not a TV show in the world that ever got billions of views and also
so much of the focus of the creative arts today is going into computer games.
So as you can see from the examples I picked, we're not there yet but we are
getting perilously close to this idea of digital actors and so on and this is
what I'd like to discuss today: the digital future of entertainment. Steve,
let's start with you. I suspect that it will be available - it's already available
to Hollywood - to produce characters that are essentially indistinguishable from
digital characters, essentially indistinguishable from real people.
Certainly within the next two or three years on the high level it'll be routine.
This technology moves downhill very very quickly. What do you think that says when
a screenwriter is not only able to write a character but perhaps in
conjunction with the director is able to design the character - is to create
the actor that they think is perfect for this. Does that worry you at all or do
you think there's some interesting ground to be made there? No it doesn't
worry me in the slightest and let me tell you why. How many stories have been
written, by writers of course, about how Hollywood screwed up their book? )r about
how the singer screwed up their song? I've got Ray Charles in The Count Basie
Orchestra doing an old number called "Mom, Look What They Did to My Song." So
this is the age-old lament. That somewhere between the writer and the
audience, you've got a money-grubbing producer, you've got an egotistical
director, you have idiot actors who all kind of conspire to ruin the writer's
vision and I remember during the the big writers strike of maybe this is 20 years
ago now, one of the guys at one of these awards show reminding the
audience that every great movie begins with a great script but we also have a
lot of lousy movies that probably started with a pretty great script but
all of these things are in the way between the writer and delivering the
writer's vision to the audience. And if we can give writers these tools to
create these things directly and send them to their audience
directly, I think this would be the the biggest boon to to film and TV
maybe since since the invention of the projector. I can hardly wait to see
it and you know I'd worried before that instead of having the broad
popular culture that we had at the dawn of mass media and then for about 30 to
50 years after that, that we you know, now we're in these silos and the silos keep
getting skinnier and skinnier and taller and taller. Well this
disintermediation between the writer and the audience may be able to bring back
the popular culture, the actual broad base culture that we started losing
in the 60s and 70s. Well as we saw from some of the examples
I listed earlier, some of these characters are photorealistic but others
are extremely realistic looking and yet very stylized, they're clearly
not somebody who could ever have been cast.
Hang on Bill, let me throw something in really quick.
My favorite comedic performance of 2017:
Baby Groot!
Yeah, there you go. There you go. Exactly.
Scott, here's what I think is interesting about this, mostly
politically, is that we're not there yet but we're getting there very very
quickly. All of these performances that we saw
earlier are not animators moving lips, frame-by-frame adjusting expressions,
this is facial motion capture, body motion capture, so these are real actors
performing and the computers recording their motions and then translating those
motions on to a digital character and really this essentially got started with
Andy Serkis's amazing work with Gollum back in Lord of the Rings, early 2000s.
But what it means is this, Scott. We're very close to seeing I think the same
kind of revolution in in big ticket entertainment that we saw with that
whole idea of news and opinion when we got started, when the internet finally
had the bandwidth to do video. In other words, for the cost of about five
thousand dollars you can get a pretty good mocap system. Digital animators,
digital sets, digital people. They're not quite there yet but when these things
become photorealistic and a person can produce essentially an epic feature film
in a room the size of this studio and this is not hyperbole by any means, this
is certainly coming. What do you think that does to level the playing field in
terms of getting this kind of content away from these billionaire leftists and
their big studios and out into the people who have differing opinions about
things? I think we live in heady times. I mean it-it's this kind of exciting time
to be alive. I mean the first thing that occurs to me is: Finally! Hurray! There'll
be great opportunities for ugly people who have technical skills. You know you
don't have to - you don't have to have a jaunty jaw or handsome eyebrows to be to
be really at the heart of a star performance in a movie anymore. It's guys
who know how to code. You know, it's people who have actual skills who are
becoming the real stars in Hollywood and I guess we'll have to banish the others
to the stage, where they'll have to perform live in front of people and
learn their craft. The other thing that strikes me is that a computer-generated
character is unlikely to sexually harass his co-stars or the interns on the set.
But not impossible. Yeah not impossible but unlikely. That's why I said just unlikely.
The other thing which is a fascinating notion is, the prominence in recent years of vocal acting
that has, you know you have to actually be a significantly better
actor to pull off some of this stuff-
For all these voices in animated movies. Using a microphone, yeah.
Yeah I mean think of Robin Williams in Aladdin years ago, who really created
that character through the power of his voice and the artists just sort of built
it around Robin William's voice and so you know I think that there are lots of
positive things that come out about. Earlier today I was messing around with
GarageBand on my computer here and it does things that I'm not even, I don't
even have a an inkling of how to do but I have an entire band in my iMac. Yes.
This is my point. I can write a song with a drum line and bass and guitars and put it all
together and if I want to sing on it, I can do that but if I don't I can
completely fabricate all that. So you know I think it is really amazing . We've
said this before on this show but they used to you know, say that we have
freedom of the press in this country for the man who owns one and now in a sense
everybody owns one. wWe have you know freedom to shape the culture for the
person who owns a movie studio and I have one and so will you. Yeah that's
exactly my point. Everyone will be able to own a feature film studio for $10,000
or less. And I think this is what's exciting about it to me. Certainly young
people are trending more and more towards video games, are spending less
and less time and money going to films and more and more time living in the
world of these video games and one of the reasons they become so attractive
is because of what we call these cutscenes which we showed some segments
of earlier where these highly rendered scenes of characters interacting either
with you or with each other followed by some gameplay and then another another
cutscene and so on. So just in a nutshell what I would say is this: if I was a
Hollywood actor I wouldn't be too worried because motion capture requires
acting. As Scott pointed out, it requires exceptional acting and it's a very
difficult kind of acting where you've got a camera directly in front of your
face here and this net and so on. So there's going to be room for a lot
more technicians but these are things that are affordable. Motion
capture systems now $2,000. Facial recognition capture software,
maybe four or five hundred dollars. These are all available. So we'll
still need actors. If I was a movie star on the other hand I'd be a little
concerned about this because a good actor who may just be a real ordinary
looking guy essentially will have the ability to have the features of
whichever particular actor we find most interesting. I will say two things in
terms of a caveat. One of them is that if you get to design your own faces they
tend to all look similar. It's hard to commit to somebody with the
idiosyncrasies that come in from people off of the street. That concerns me
a little bit, sort of the homogeneity of these computerized characters. I suspect
that'll change too. But the final thing I'll say about this is, I think the
people that who have to worry the least are writers. Back in 1980-81, I was and
and I mean we were just getting started with computer games the simplest kind of
you know like branching out, do you want to do this or do you want to do that? And
a theater director teacher who I respected very much named David Shelton
said he was worried that since audiences will be able to make a decision that
basically they won't need writers anymore, that during the course of the
movie at several different key points the audience will vote on what they want
the character to do and therefore you won't need writers anymore and even at
that early time I said Dr. Shelton, I think you're wrong about that one. And
the reason I think you're wrong about that one is because if the audience gets
to decide what the characters are gonna do then they'll always do the right
thing. They'll always do the right thing and they'll always do the thing that we
want them to do, the villains will always be punished, the heroes will
always triumph and it's gonna be as boring as it can be because great story
is when the heroes do something wrong and evil and and the villains have some
humanizing element about them. So those elements will still be here. But to me
it's the democratization of it. It's the idea that already within our fingertips
is the means to produce films that look very much of the quality of Lord of the
Rings or so on and that within the next three or four years certainly we will
all as we now have our own TV studios in our homes and we have our own means
of communication, pretty soon we will all have our own you know enormous Hollywood
movie lots and a hundred and fifty, two hundred, three hundred million dollar
budgets to make these kind of movies and we'll be able to do it if you can talk
your friends into helping you out. It's an interesting world and
we're gonna live to see it. Thanks for joining us, I'm Bill Whittle, we'll see
you next time here with Steve Green and Scott Ott and on Right Angle, made
possible by the paying members at BillWhittle.com.
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