According to an article on the BBC website, there is technology in the process of being developed that can realistically replicate the human form so authentically that it will be possible that the CGI human could replace the “real” actor in the movie without being noticed.  They just make an actor sit in a box, which to me looks a lot like one of those globe cages motorcyclist ride around in, and get an insanely detailed photo taken of them.  This allows computers to generate an image that looks completely authentic.  Or even better, they can now just make a person up, from scratch.

Awesome!  We can cut back on paying all those divas and just let the computer can do the work!  I mean, people are lining up to see those Pixar movies, now imagine what the lines would look like if the people looked real!  Walt Disney himself proved that someone can relate to an onscreen character (of cute animal form) that was completely fabricated, so why would it be such a leap for an audience to buy a completely fabricated human being?  Just imagine, directors won’t have a limited pool of actors to choose from, their forty-seven-year-old, seven-foot-tall, half-Japanese, half-Native American, one-eyed ballet dancer can look exactly how they envisioned instead of having to settle for someone else that’s “close enough.”    Bald caps and greenscreen leg amputations are a way of the past.  With just a tweak here and a few clicks there, a director can get the exact performance that will be the key to making him/her (more) critically acclaimed.

And you know what?  I believe that they can do what they say they can.  I’ve seen some pretty awesome CGI before and it’s not a stretch to believe with a little time and money, computer geekage would triumph. But who’s going to voice these ingenious inventions? … Anyone?  That’s what I thought.  We are still going to have to pay (and direct) an actor of some form to deliver the lines.  Well, I guess that will be their next computer project then.

I guess the question that lends itself to be asked, is what will happen to the trash mags? And where will we be without Angelina or Paris’s latest gossip? And what will happen to the Oscars?¹   No one cares about a bunch of Directors and Writers standing around in rented tuxes — other than film geeks, anyway — we want to see pretty people in Gucci.

I have very little fear that actors will be replaced by computer look-alikes anytime in the near future, and if they did, what’s the worse that can happen?  The world continues to evolve.  It’s not like they’re the Artificial Intelligence Robots that will eventually turn on their masters and wipe out the human race.  And if it were to be a step in that direction, I think we could take them.  Celebrities are known to be pansies in person anyway.