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◡◶▿ SOFT11 | Synthetic actors
🎭 Who needs the Stanislavski Method when you can imprison your actor in an infinite prequel? | Imaginary Software of the Filmmaking Future Week 11
Hello. Welcome! It’s week 11 of our sideways look at future filmmaking software. Make yourselves comfortable. Let’s learn!
But first - “the weekly recap.” Last week, we looked at the concept of the cyborg Mandy.com applicant. We covered how:
Roboticising the body may help film techs develop a ‘sixth sense’ for the decisive moment/ camera tilt/ costume stain.
The effect might even persist when you remove your implants!
The boom operator’s head is a moveable recording studio stacked with unexplored rooms.
Video editing in VR has endless potential - so endless that your editor may never return.
Okay. Good! “Cutting edge.”
Missed a week? Joined late? Don’t worry about reading these lessons out of order. Each functions independently. They are sent in a sensible sequence but hardly reliant on it.
Today’s lesson is about AI-generated and/or -controlled actors. There’s so much more to say about characters, too. But no room! For now. Instead, this week:
👩❤️👩 How the (human) actor-director relationship is the incompatible rom-com coupledom that keeps our love for the movies alive.
🎭 So we need a rethink if actors are to be replaced with digital sprites.
🤖 Somebody’s gotta direct that handsome bag o’pixels.
🤩 The awkward moment when the flesh sags and the joystick becomes the star.
It’s the penultimate email of the program. The filmmaking singularity is just a week away.
Unbalanced performances
You can hear me deliver this lesson by scrolling up to the header and clicking Listen and/or the play ▸ button.
The majority of filmmakers are not knowledgeable about human actors and acting. The majority of trained human actors know altogether too much about their bodies and their art form.
Thankfully, the filmmaker’s lack and the actor’s excess of knowledge usually balance each other out. The filmmaker wears down the actor’s acting, and the human actor bristles, swells, and roughens in resistance.
The potential for fully synthesised, software-based ‘actors’ threatens this balance.
The filmmaker who prefers to work with hyperrealistic AI replicas loses:
the actor’s innate and embarrassing body awareness, and
the filmmaker’s own, valuable social ineptitude.
This filmmaker will need to make up for:
the balanced acting decisions that are lost.
The precious, weird decisions that she and her weary actor might have reached together.
but also the infinite unconscious micro-decisions a live body1 makes across 80 minutes of screen time.
Decisions whose untraceable roots may be emotional, digestive, hormonal, or whatever else goes on in there.
Worse: the filmmaker is unlikely to have the time to micro-manage an AI cast’s entire performance. And it is established that the majority of filmmakers do not have the knowledge to do this well. Which means she’ll probably need the sprites’ digital acting coaches - perhaps the human actors on whom the AI actors are based - right there on set with her.
Behind the camera with their joysticks and their art.
Cybernetic actors
Before too long, it will be possible to replace real, live actors with photorealistic, software-based ‘sprites.’
These sprites may be based on existing actors or models. Or composited with ideal features from a range of consenting or oblivious bodies. Either way, it is likely that any successful sprite will be updated and re-used in movie after movie. This is due to the economic and emotional power of brand recognition. As well as the durable and adaptable nature of code-based talent.
It is to be assumed that a synthetic actor of this type would be under the full control of just one ‘agent’ while performing in a particular role.
That controlling agent might be:
The movie’s director.
A human actor/puppeteer.
Perhaps the actor on whom the sprite was based would be hired to lend their craft to the synthetic actor,
Because both their appearance and skill were desirable for the project, or
Because the only way to secure the rights to their appearance was to hire the underlying human.2
Or perhaps an entirely unrelated actor-puppeteer would be hired as a consultant to control a synthetic actor to which they have little or no physical resemblance.
(Although experience of a body with similarly-weighted limbs would be an advantage).
A producer or shadowy cabal of producers.
A literal agent - a talent manager with direct agency over the sprite’s synthetic performances (or who delegates control to an underpaid assistant).
A popular sprite would probably need a talent agent of some kind to ‘prompt’ it through its career choices, promotional appearances, and ‘off-screen antics.’ It is unlikely such an agent would be willing to ‘hand over the keys’ at the start of a shoot.
The talent agent of synthetic actors may be the true intertextual auteur of their epoch, coordinating yells, twitches, and gestures across multiple actors performing in multiple titles and across multiple media.
An artificial intelligence.
Cloned from the source actor, or
Written and programmed for a particular role,
With higher or lower ‘temperature’ (free randomness) depending on the time spent on character and software development. (An AI ‘sprite soul’ programmed with less detail may require higher degrees of randomness to avoid blocky characterisation.)
Or with higher or lower ‘temperature’ (free randomness), depending on the filmmaker’s desire for randomness.
And potentially ‘grown’ from scratch or given hundreds of hours of experience in an end-to-end sim universe of unpublished prequels dating back to the character’s birth.
Cloned from the source actor but re-generated ‘in character’ for each role, with lesser or greater memory of his past lives, or
Modelled on something other than human intelligence; an animal, plant, hive, bacterial, or completely new type of intelligence better suited to shaping and guiding a compelling dramatic performance with the synthesised human form.
A parent (of the source actor or, for low-budget indies, of the director; or perhaps just an unrelated adult renowned for their parenting skills).
The “natural world” would no longer continue to directly influence an actor’s performance. The “natural world” had better join a union!
Machinima Babylon
It seems only reasonable, if filmmakers are to use synthetic actors based on the appearance of real actors, that they should hire the real underlying human to control their synthetic replacement. It seems only reasonable, and it might also be a contractual obligation.
Perhaps, to get around this clause, the software companies could make the interface too complicated for actors to use. Force them to cede control to the director, or to hire an expensive personal technician. A puppeteer for their digital sprite.
Perhaps the same technician would follow an actor from job to job and get to know his tics intimately, like foreign-language voice actors who dub the same Hollywood stars their whole lives. Perhaps technicians like these would even become as famous and celebrated as the actors whose synthetic bodies, faces, voices, and sweat they maintain intimate control over in the movies.
And perhaps, under such guidance, the synthetic actor might “outperform” its underlying human, leaving the flesh and blood legacy in the dust. Perhaps the half-forgotten actor and his celebrated puppeteer would fall out. Brawl on the red carpet. The puppeteer knows the moves. But the actor’s blood is boiling.
What a rivalry! Golden Age stuff!
Please share your thoughts, queries, and exercises from this week’s lesson in the comments.
The imaginary next week
No gossip this week. No time!
Next week, we’ll bring the semester to a belated3 close by examining the impact of imaginary software on the imaginary culture, imaginary careers, and imaginary lives of the filmmakers of the future.
Class dismissed!
~Graeme Cole.
(Principal)
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(including voice and other emissions)
Of course, in this case, the production would incur the same economic and emotional costs as simply working with the real actor to begin with, as well as additional processing costs. However, there are many advantages, such as being able to destroy the same actor again and again or to create convincing background photographs of the character when younger with their pretend family or a sinister figure from their past.
Spring term ends two weeks into the spring break. You’ll recall we had to push things back by one week when I fell ill; I’ve no idea where the other week went. Let me know in the comments!
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Roaming absurdist film school. Micro-essays on the esoterics of filmmaking. Trudging through wastelands of ignorance towards a Cinema of Doubt via Béla Tarr, the Kuchars, Maddin and Deren.