Slashdot Mirror
CG Idols - Human Not Required
greymond sent in a blurb about computer-generated celebrities in Japan. I'm sure a fair number of you have read Idoru... The Final Fantasy movie didn't do well, but I think it's safe to predict that eventually, computer-generated celebrities will be as numerous as live ones. There are so many advantages for the purveyors of pop culture, ranging from "never gets arrested for drunk driving" to "never demands salary increases", that I think it's inevitable.
This isn't really that huge of a deal--idolizing a person because they aren't actually real. I guess it seems like a bigger deal than it is because they are computer generated images. But think of all the famous "people" we have now that aren't real: Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny...even CG like Woody and Buzz. No need to look at Japan for that type of thing.
:)
Maybe because the line between what is real and what is not becomes blurred by CG makes this more of a story. Some could mistake Aki for a real person (in a still picture at least), but I don't think anyone would assume Buzz is real. As we head forward into more and more realistic CG, I think an effort should be made to distinguish what characters are real and what are not when blending them with live action--just for society's sanity
PS - on an unrelated note, I read that George Harrison passed away...RIP to an incredibly talented man.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
Here's Yuki Terai's offical site. Not quite photo-realistic, but pretty good CG. Guys with a thing for little Japanese girls should love it.
www.lucernesys.comHorizon: Calendar-based personal finance
(highly UK specific post....)
There have since been many virtual stars already. Ventriloquist dummies are often stars in their own right, but Basil brush, Emu, and Roland Rat are all virtual characters that have not only had their own shows, but been interviewed as stars and so on.
The move from puppets and models to CGI is not that important.
Roland Rat was especially interesting because he didn't have a clearly identifiable human partner, but was very much a creation of the TV company.
At the end of the day, these things are all fiction. I can't really see people getting more excited about a CGI model than a furry puppet. It's also _much_ harder to use the CGI model. An interview with the virtual star would require weeks of computer work and post processing just to fit the CGI model into the normal studio shot of the interview. Not exactly spontaneous and realistic.
At least with Roland rat the guy operating him could ad-lib.
-----
I agree... I have nothing against computer animated movies. As a matter of fact I really enjoyed Shrek. But as for action movies, I'd much rather see real stuff being blown up. Now I realise a lot of the "real" stuff may be CG anyway, but I just think it makes it more enjoyable all the way around. Plus I can't see myself getting all worked up about animated characters anyway. I feel much more connected in movies where I can relate to the characters, and that requires them to be human IMHO.
Just my $.02
This space available at a low monthly rate...
Computer generated celebrities are fine, I guess,
but are we really that inventive?
Starmakers give us Britney Spears. Worse, they give us Britney clone after clone after clone, at least when they're not cooking up another boy band or Country-Western Hat Act or heavy metal lizard band.
Britney Spears, yes. No Doubt, no.
Do you believe that a million CG monkeys at a million CG terminals would ever come up with a Humphrey Bogart, a Jimmy Stewart? Heck, how about an Arnold Schwartzenegger (Give it up man, with that accent, you'll never make it in movies).
Life is more creative than we are.
Thank God for that. It keeps things interesting.
The first thing this called to mind was David Mack's Kabuki. A great graphic novel about a near-future Japan. Hard to describe to anyone who hasn't read it, which I strongly suggest - but the main character(s) are enigamtic pop-stars presented as super-heroes, CG representations often popping up on the occasional screen with a quick propogandic blurb. No one being certain whether they're real or fake. Really interesting reading.
I love the song 'Love Communication' by Kyoko Date. I had no idea she was a CG idol. I just figured it was some nifty bubblegum J-pop. Damn, now I feel wierd. I always thought the name of the MP3 I found had some funky Japanese to English translation errors.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
There is some CGI animated porn show on Playboy...or, um...so I heard. My friend, um, watched a little bit of it...it was funny in parts and was well done considering the production value of the rest of the stuff on the slap-n-tickle channels.
It's unlikely that CG idols will not be tainted by scandals: I bet lots of popular CG idols will appear in prOn, have afairs with other CG idols, or even real people - they're computer generated, and so they are far more easy to reproducible, duplicate and copy than their flesh-and-bone counterparts.
Scandal and sex sure could sell well, and someone out there is going to try to make money on it, even if it's some CG Idol pirate ripping the Idol copyright owner off.
Okay, so you didn't cry at the end of Bambi? Are you some sort of monster? *wink*
Seriously, though... I don't think it's any harder to get worked up about animated characters (human or not) than it is live actors. Many people are quite moved by books, and those characters only exist in your imagination (which arguably is a lot richer than much of the animated work being done).
One of the strengths of, for example, a Pixar movie is that the animation does just enough work to get you to suspend disbelief by providing visual hooks to real life, but the strength of the films is in the writing and in the voice acting. A good example would be a film like 'Toy Story'. Without Tom Hanks and Tim Allen doing voices, and without the realistic drama that comprised the story (remember we're suspending our disbelief that toys secretly come alive when we're not looking), the movie would just be a bunch of pretty pictures.
And that's the problem. No virtual celebrity is really anything right now without a well-acted voice. And yes, voice acting could change from real human to another real human, but would still require real humans-- a major drawback. Even so, animators will often take visual clues from the people doing the voice acting. We've got some way to go yet, but Disney has been getting us excited about (often non-human) animated characters for years and some of them are quite celebrities.
I do not have a signature
Sorry, don't have any "real" data, but I tend to catch Howard Stern on the radio quite often. He had Jenna Jamison on (is there a bigger star?). She had mentioned that stars sign package deals, maybe 100K or 150K for 2-3 movies. Figure each star is doing 10-20 movies with maybe a a couple hours of footage for each movie. Not a bad deal....
there are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots
Sure, human celebrities are real people, but you'll never actually see the real person unless you happen to be a close family member or friend. What's the point of elevating fake personas to such status?
The two word answer: social control.
If people are engaged with how to look like an icon, or how to live like one, they are less inclined to notice what's really going on in the world.
For example, there are now kangaroo military courts alive and well in America, because it is "at war". It might give one pause to think about the deeper, underlying issues of what is being done here in the name of "freedom" and "security" if we didn't have the Britney Spears of the world tarting around to remind us what's *really* important: just-legal lust (though Bob Dole's dirty-old-man routine in the Burpsi commercials failed in this regard: too openly creepy for me.)
In _The Republic_, Plato wanted to ban artists--actors, singers, etc.--as being dangerous distractions for the people of the polis; he saw entertainers as a bad thing. However, in the inverted polis that is America, the distraction of the manufactured personality is not only a good thing, it is absolutely required to maintain the power structure.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
This is exactly the scenario that played out in the music business back in the 80s when many artists (particulary Hip Hop artists) started incorporating copyrighted samples from earlier releases into their songs. Stands to reason this will be raise all the same difficult questions:
:)
Was the character's nose stolen or is it a derivative work?
Stands to reason that the result will be the same too.
There already is legislation making kiddie porn illegal even if it is just given the appearance of kiddie porn. That is, a young looking 18 year old wearing a junior high school shirt and pigtails in a pornographic act could be considered kiddie porn. I'd imagine that CG kiddie porn would fall under that.
;)
However, not to be grotesque, but as of now, there isn't any legislation banning other kinds of CG porn. There's no reason why CG characters couldn't participate in a sexual snuff film, extreme mutilation, etc.
I've always considered myself to be a fairly open-minded person... but that crosses a line, I think. One part of me would vote to make CG kiddie porn as illegal as real kiddie porn... but the other (in a smaller voice) says "Why not? They're not hurting anyone by looking at CG?" Same thing goes for snuff/mutilation/other illegal nasty stuff.
I haven't been this disturbed by a comment on a slashdot story since.. er.. since ever. Thanks a lot, guys!
- dev0n