Disney Mocked for Ludicrously Fake CGI "Actors" in Crowd Scene
Disney Mocked for Ludicrously Fake CGI "Actors" in Crowd Scene
Disney has come under fire after a video resurfaced showing horribly CGI-generated background actors in the movie "Prom Pact."
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
Saw the still and thought “ah it doesn’t look that bad”.
Saw it “animated”, and yikes.
Just pay your fucking actors.
56background is roughly $150/person/day. Surely that's still cheaper than whatever this is?
11Gotta put in an Asian but don't want to hire one
2
This shit makes the mummy 2 look like a masterpiece.
33I'm going to be honest, this is a huge nothingburger. How often do you pause and look at a crowd that's shown for a few seconds at most? Does this actually affect your viewing experience?
21It doesn't necessarily affect your viewing experience if you aren't paying attention to it, but I think the bigger problem is when these CGI characters become indistinguishable from humans so much that they start replacing humans in live action.
6I thought so, but then I checked out the clip. It's hilariously bad, the crowd looks like 1st gen Asimo robots just making a hand motion in a loop. It's a lot worse in motion than in a still pic
2Don't even have to pause it to see how bad it is. The reason this is newsworthy is because this is exactly the type of thing SAG AFTRA is striking against.
2
Everyone mentions LOTR, but they did those by duplicating the images of the real actors, and done at such distances no discernable detail is visible.
This shit just looks awful. Regardless of what opinions anyone has on AI vs real people, nobody wants it to look ugly. This is ugly AF.
15" "Prom Pact," a B-grade teen movie on the Disney Channel."
I don't think this is comparable to LotR, this isn't a blockbuster movie it's a trashy disposable low budget teen movie.
These CG extras are probably cheaper per unit than the old "stick two rows of humans in front of a dozen rows of cardboard cutouts" trick they've been using for decades.
2- -8
You are not understanding the difference between using AI to create the movement of the crowd, and using AI to digitize entirely new actors. They digitally duplicated the actors, and using a more video game like AI created the motion of those actors in the scene.
They talk in length about this in many commentary tracks of the actual releases of the movies.
18
Lol I didn't think it was gunna look that bad.
11What's the big deal? They uses to use cardboard cut outs , look at star wars a new hope during the award ceremony
9Definitely looks terrible but things like this aren't new. Whole crowds of orc and humans were CGI in at least one Lord of the Rings film. They used a lot of actors but still needed fill.
I don't really see an issue with extras being replaced.
9First of all, LOTR didn't replace all actors in any battle scene. They used their brand new 'MASSIVE' software for the tens of thousands of characters too distant to distinguish from the hundreds and thousands real actors used that were visible.
The other difference is that scale - it was literally not possible for LOTR to have enough extras due to complexity, local population, and budget. This is a scene with only a couple dozen people on screen at any moment.
4
Pure nightmare fuel.
7Surely people would line up to be extras in film... why would they resort to GTA NPCs?
6Clearly said by someone that hasn't worked in the industry.
Extra work is often miserable, has 0 job security, and is really only suitable for people with very little or no expenses.
Furthermore crowds are regularly filled with fake extras, even back to the 90s most times you worked as an extra in a crowd scene it was one or two rows of humans standing in front of a dozen rows of cardboard cutouts.
13Yep.
I've worked as an extra several times.
In large crowd scenes it's been pretty common to have fake people one way or another for a long time.
One of the movies I was an extra in was "We are Marshall", which is a football movie.
Most of the faces in the stands in the football game crowd scenes were attached to inflatable torsos.
4
This is the best summary I could come up with:
While the WGA has since come to an agreement with studios, SAG-AFTRA's strike is still ongoing — and the use of artificial intelligence in the industry has remained a huge point of contention, with actors calling for protections against studios using AI-generated versions of their voices or likenesses — and for good reason.
The clip, which first made its rounds on social media back in April, shows an audience seated on bleachers watching a high school basketball game.
The clip reignited a heated debate surrounding the use of computer-generated imagery in film, and how the tech could eventually replace human actors, a major talking point during SAG-AFTRA's ongoing negotiations.
In a press conference immediately following the union's call for a strike in July, executive director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland revealed that the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers proposed to have background performers scanned, "get paid for one day's pay, and their company should own that scan their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity."
"Disney is insane and just more reason why the AMPTP needs to ditch this plan to replace background actors with AI," freelance writer Christopher Marc, who recently shared the "Prom Pact" clip, tweeted.
This week, SAG-AFTRA proposed a bill to lawmakers called the NO FAKES Act, "creating new and urgently needed protections for voice and likeness in the age of generative artificial intelligence."
The original article contains 431 words, the summary contains 237 words. Saved 45%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
6[off topic] This is why I love the old movies. When you see something happen on screen you know that it's an actual person doing the stunt.
James Bond's 'Thunderball' has has a team of Navy SEALs parachuting into the middle of the ocean and then scuba diving to battle SPECTRE agents armed with sea sleds. 'Lawrence of Arabia' has an army on camels attackign a city. 'Waterloo' recreated the battle with 16,000 Red Army troops trained to fight a Napoleonic battle.
5Either that or legitimately a cardboard cutout
2Please, point out the cardboard cut outs for me.
1
That's look horrible.
But I personally don't care about it for background actors and crowds. I mean where do you draw the line. Look at Lord of the Rings Fellowship trilogy. They created tech to fake those huge wide angle battle scenes. Does that get covered by any rules/legislation that puts limits on AI actors? It's a fine line to walk that's for sure.
4Do tell me in what world would you actually expect any film production to cast and then costume those kind of numbers found in films like LOTR.
Let's take the Battle of the Pelennor Fields for example: 3,000 Gondorians 500 Guards of the Citadel 3,000ish South Gondorians and outlying provinces 6,000 Rohirrim cavalry soldiers 30 Northern Dunedain Tens of thousands of Orcs, Easterlings, Haradrim,Variags, oliphaunts and trolls.
I don't see any fine line here at all.
1Huh? I never said that I expect them to use only actors. I understand using technology to fill in large battle scenes. But it just has to be done right.
1
Anybody watch Some More News on this topic?
Why Are Modern Blockbusters So... Not Very Good
Hi. In today's episode, we look at modern blockbuster filmmaking, excessive CGI, the power producers have over the artistic process, and why studios need all their movies to make $1 billion.
3Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/OZ28knLt5Rs
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
1
It is pretty funny tho
1Oh hey, Colin got that job.
1