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.

Also, another thing that the developers at Celtx have done is started releasing short films about filmmaking.  They have a channel over at Blip.tv  where they have started releasing quick little shorts titled “Motion Sketches” and I’ll give them credit, they relay a lot of easy to digest information in short amount of time.  I’ve only had time to look through a couple, but if you have any interest in filmmaking or how cinema is evolving, I would check them out.  The current one is about the role of the producer but their first episode is about how the definition of Cinema has changed over the last several years due to what is referred to as the “digital age.” 

I watched the first episode last night entitled “So this is Cinema?,” where the host, Mike Jones (who I will talk about later) starts off by telling us that Cinema is so much bigger than sitting in a big dark room. There is an old way of thinking that a writer writes and a director directs and a cinematographer… cinematograph-erises… but there is room for us writers to be better if we are educated about post production and if editors were educated about pre-production, and so on.  According to this sketch, 21st Century Cinema is about empowerment and being self-sufficient.  Software has started to be bundled together so that any filmmaker, at any level in their career, can start thinking about all the processes instead of just the one stage they’re on now and worry about the next step when they come to it… only Mike says it much better.  If you have five minutes check out the first Celtx episode here.  And if you have more time, visit the channel.

MIke Jones, who is heavily involved with Celtx development down here in Australia, also happens to be a friend and mentor of mine.  I am going to let you in on a little secret about Mike; he knows everything.  I am not lying here or exaggerating, ask him how to do anything and he can tell you.  It’s really shocking.  That aside, he is also a fellow geek, and has some great insights on cinema that you might not get from the more wanky variety of filmmakers  – what it is, where it came from, where it’s going, etc.  On his website he has written articles about Cinema as a Spatial artform, an audio AND visual artform and how the old way of “film” is dead.  Though he’s a little bit more in love with the digital age than I and I have some differing opinions on the validity of gaming and cell phones as legitimate forms of cinema delivery, his opinions are worth reading and I promise you you’ll learn something new with every article read. 

I will be adding Mike’s blog to my links as well, something I should have done sooner.

As for Wii Fit, it’s a disaster. I didn’t make my goal, so I have started a new one and of course have not exercised since. Sigh.