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.
Not a troll but a real question... Does the porn industry already have established digital characters like this? They always seem to lead the way in these areas... no CG person would balk at anything asked of them.
And if they do make real digital celebrities, how long until grey/black market pornographic representations get loose?
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
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.
-----
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.
When you look at how disconnected celebrities are from the reality that their fans' live ... CG characters may be the ultimate in understanding. It's quite possible that CG characters may more down to earth than their hollywood counterparts, as the people creating them and animating them will live lives substantially closer to our own than Julia Roberts ever has.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Are you kidding? You think the artists, let alone the software and hardware manufacturers are going to just stand aside when it starts raining money?
324006
So what you're saying is that a fake virtual celebrity doesn't count, while a real virtual celebrity does? I think I've hurt my brain.
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