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Animal Cloning Comes to Hollywood
Kate Thompson writes "A week after San Francisco's Genetic Savings and Clone revealed the sale of their first cat to a customer, the Boston Phoenix reports that GS & C acknowledges it has been hired by anonymous buyers in Hollywood to bank genes of show business animals."
Just because the cloned animal has exactly the same genes, doesn't mean that it will exhibit the same behaviour.
The dog that played Benji might have had an ideal temperament for filming, but it's clone, brought up slightly differently might be a right little ankle biter.
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By the time this cloning technology gets off the ground, it will be easier/cheaper to replicate the animal with CGI.
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While selling back a physical looking animal will bring in a fair chunk of change, and really how big can that market be. How much work would they have to do to make a benji next year, the main thing would be the breed and same hair color and pattern ; thoses can be changed by dye and makeup.
Where the big money will be is selling clones to the public. When a popular show/movie has a animal the sales of that animal almost aways increases. For example when the comedy Fraiser was on the air the Jack Russell terrier rose in popularity in the each year(in 2000 along by 21%). Now instead of purchasing any Jack Russell terrier you can purchase a clone of the actual one on the show. How much do you think people would pay for that?
Granted costs will have to come down ALOT, but if you are thinking for the future this is the way to go.
Genetic Savings & Clone are currently cloning cats for $50 000 - that's pretty cheap already compared to getting an effects house to create a photorealistic character. Sure, I havn't factored in the cost up bringing up the animal, but CGI is still comparatively expensive, and the results aren't always that believable - the best CGI effects work is typically on fictional characters (Gollum), where movements are a combination of motion capture and keyframing. You'd still need an animal to base movements on - I can't recall a recent film which had a believable CGI animal (that's a "realistic" animal, rather than a talking / exagerrated character). On a more practical front, I'm sure actors would actually prefer working with an animal (trouble that they may be), so they can realistically react to them - you just don't really get that with a CGI character (unless you get an actor to perform with the cast, and composite over. This may work for human like characters, but completely defeat the point for animals, because you'd still need one in the scene).