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First All-Artificial Feature Film Released
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Thu Jun 03, 2004 12:56 PM
from the that-takes-some-work dept.
from the that-takes-some-work dept.
Hugh "Nomad" Hancock writes "Machinima.com have just released the DVD version of Killer Robot, award-winning filmmaker Peter Rasmussen's buddy movie about two mining robots who set out to protect their "meat-sack" masters from a master mining robot gone insane. The twist here is not only that it's Machinima, made in 3D Game Studio, but that even the actor's voices are computer-generated using programs like Festival, making this possibly the world's first all-artificial movie."
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What about pr0n? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What about pr0n? (Score:5, Insightful)
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CGI porn will NOT be a replacement (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, this just can't be that far off. Sex and war drive technology, and all that. Give them time, and I'm sure the adult industry will find a way to drive the costs of this down to levels where it's reasonable for everyone.
I agree that computer-generated porn is inevitable but I disagree that it is going to become so cheap as to replace the real thing (such as it is) anytime soon. Let's face it, it costs almost no money to make a porn flick. I'm sure they spend no money on the writers. There is essentially no budget for props. The actors and actresses don't have an awful lot of career choices so they can be paid a pitance. And it's recorded on videotape for chrissake. You are arguing that replacing this dirt-cheap operation with an all CGI environment is economically a great idea? I don't think so.
The question is, will people be interested in this for its own sake, or will it have to wait until things reach the point where it's indistinguishable from the real thing? I'm guessing from the preponderance of cartoon porn on the internet that it's just around the corner.
I suspect that the "real" porn will continue much as it has for decades and that if CGI evolves to the point that it is feasible to make pornos from it will satisfy a slightly different crowd or need. You pointed out the cartoon porn. That stuff is pretty different from flesh and blood porn. Those films feature fantastical characters or situations. A typical film would feature a female ninja with green hair who can change into a warewolf battling monsters on behalf of some ancient clan rivalry. You couldn't make something like this with flesh-and-blood porn without it being absolutely laughable. Now, granted, the cartoon version isn't meant to be taken seriously but the audience is more willing to accept it just because of the choice of media that is used. And the non-consensual nature of a lot of cartoon porn makes it a definite no-no for anything remotely realistic. But I think the reason cartoon porn florishes is precisely because it is not realistic. It is fantastical. I suspect that CGI porn would fill the same niche -- something completely wild rather than a substitute for mainstream porn.
One possible avenue of CGI porn is letting amateurs and hobbists make their own porn films. If easy-to-use authoring/animation tools get created, you could have guys making their porn flicks. People could play out movies for whatever crazy fantasies that they have. And with p2p software, I can easily see people trading their homemade pornos with others. This would actually be an interesting development. Let's face it: there aren't a lot of creative minds in the adult film industry. Once you give people (and there are a lot of people who secretly love porn) the ability to author what's on their mind, I think you will see an explosion of all sorts of porn. Some of it will be real sicko stuff, I'm sure. However, you'll also get people who can actually write decent stories creating some porn. CGI may end up being the greatest thing that ever happened to porn within a decade.
GMD
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Re:porno writers (Score:3, Insightful)
This was NOT the kind of guy who would trade being able to bang his leading ladies for a fake chick
Re:What about pr0n? (Score:3, Informative)
I'd rather say it's already here, at least when you talk about still images pr0n. Just check the google directory [google.com] of adult 3D-rendered galleries (mostly Poser stuff). Personally, I find many Poser-rendered erotica much more interesting
Re:What about pr0n? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What about pr0n? (Score:3, Informative)
You got the link right, but misspelled the word: it's ephebophilia. Although the two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, there is some difference between those attracted to pre-pubescents (pedophiles) and those attracted to adolescents (ephebophiles). For example, most of us have been attracted to teenagers at some point in our lives, which makes an attraction to them during adulthood fairly "normal" (for what that's worth).
American Flagg (Score:3, Interesting)
Silicon (Score:5, Informative)
Silicon: is a non-metallic element used in the manufacture of electronic components like Integrated circuits, as well as glass and many other things. In its raw for it is rather like sand.
Silicone: is a rubbery or liquid compound which includes silicon as one of its primary components. Silicone is used for rubber materials including molded plastics, sealants or caulks, and breast implants.
Silicon != Silicone
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Re:Silicon (Score:5, Funny)
So...
San Jose = Silicon Valley.
Hollywood = Silicone Valley.
Parent
Silicon/Silicone - more specifically (Score:5, Informative)
Silicone is a chain of
You can make pure Si chains, but they don't get very long before they fall apart. Silicon comes in two primary forms: amorphous and crystaline.
Other common silicon-based terms:
Silicates: Silicates are primarily SiO4 tetrahedral structures (compared to Silicone which is usually in chains - think of it as the difference between diamond and petroleum). Probably their most useful form, industrially, are zeolites (wherein one of the silicons is relaced by a metal ion); these have all sorts of useful absorbative, catylitic, and even superacid properties in some cases.
Silanes: Chains of silicon bonded to hydrogen; the simplest form (often called simply "silane") is SiH4, and is roughly a silicon equivalent of methane, apart from the fact that it spontaneously combusts in normal atmospheric conditions. They are less stable than silicone and their hydrocarbon equivalents in general, although this can be remedied by having functional groups being involved (organosilanes). Silanes are very useful in sealants and paints, as well as their electrical and optical properties.
Silanols: Silanes with an OH; generally being water-soluable, they are widely common in earth's oceans, and have all sorts of interesting chemical properties and bonding structures naturally. More than anything else, silanols have led to speculation that silicon-based life could be possible on other planets. They can form hydrogen-bonded membrane-like sheets, various catylitic complexes, etc.
Various types of silicon compounds can also form rings as carbon chains do, although you won't get any benzene-style rings (also, silicon resists double and triple bonding as well).
Parent
All-artificial? (Score:5, Insightful)
post-produced, and distributed by bots?
Re:All-artificial? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, that would be a movie written, directed, post-produced, and distributed by robots who were created by other robots.
Parent
Re:All-artificial? (Score:5, Funny)
Also, these robots created by other robots... would the other robots also have to have been created by robots, created by robots, created by robots, created by robots... (ad infinitum)?
Parent
Re:All-artificial? (Score:5, Funny)
And here I was getting all excited. Thanks for spoiling it!
Parent
Re:All-artificial? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:All-artificial? (Score:3, Insightful)
post-produced, and distributed by bots?
A good, semi-serious observation that brings me to the point I initially thought when I read the headline...
What about many of the avant-garde films of the 1960's, some of which did not feature traditionally "filmed" subjects at all (some of them literally just had objects pressed between the celluloid layers of film, giving a kaleidescope effect when the film was run). And what about animation? Not all animation feature
Oh, No . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh, No . . . (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Sounds similar to I, Robot (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sounds similar to I, Robot (Score:5, Funny)
No, Will Smith makes his acting appear mechanical and artificial on his own.
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Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Nope (Score:3, Informative)
Additionally, there's a group on the Battlefield:1942 [bf1942.net] fan site that are making a movie.
For those interested, BF1942 is a multiplayer online FPS game, that allows for vehicles, ships, planes, multiple classes, etc. It also allows for complete reskinning via mods, with entire new classes of vehicles (subs, helicopters, harrier jets, pirate ships, etc.)
Anyways, a group of people wrot
What about the textures? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What about the textures? (Score:5, Funny)
And it will suck. "An AI [with] no access to any outside materials" will by definition also have no reference as to what makes a good movie or not, and thus will probably wind up making a movie that only it thinks is good.
Parent
Re:What about the textures? (Score:4, Insightful)
Photographs are artificial. If you're arguing that they are not artificial because they refer to real objects, then you might as well demand an entirely artificially-generated language be created for the dialogue.
Parent
Re:What about the textures? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh for crying out loud. At what point did we as geeks decide that nothing's ever good enough? Are our tastes really that sophisticated? If so, then how come we all saw Episode 1 or Matrix Reloaded on opening day?
Prior..."art". (Score:5, Funny)
For More Machinima goodness... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:For More Machinima goodness... (Score:3, Funny)
Humans still did all the work. (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems to me that humans still did most of the work. It would be more accurate to say movie with environment and actors fully computer modeled.
When I read the first all-artificial movie, I thought of a program that wrote the plot, picked main characters and background characters, edited the models and the envirnoment and generated all that without any human involvment.
Artificial Pr0n (Score:3, Insightful)
Just Think about all the Artificial Pr0n you can create with this technology! Wait...No need for Actors or Actresses...Oh the Possibilities are Endless!
mmmm (Score:4, Interesting)
People are confused (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the posts so far are pointing out that because it was not made by AI it is not a completely artificial movie. What they are trying to say is that it is the first completely artificial movie product(basically when you see the movie there aren't any real traces of human actors/voiceactors).
nope (Score:5, Insightful)
There's magic in acting: controling your every emotion to become someone you're not, and then making other people believe it. That's art man. What they're trying to do sounds to me like trying to replace a Picasso with a fractal image. No magic.
Re:nope (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:nope (Score:3, Insightful)
FWIW, he never actually claimed to have created any fractals. He just said that "a lot of work that went into each image". One could argue, I suppose, that fractals are only discovered, not created. But then again, a lot of creativity has to be applied in the presentation to turn them into something that could be considered "art-worthy". Mandelbrot's initi
Re:nope (Score:3, Insightful)
It better be good... (Score:3, Funny)
disappointing voice technology (Score:3, Interesting)
My trusty Electrolux Trilobite protects me (Score:5, Funny)
Anyway it was just telling me it cant wait to see this movie, apparently one of the actors is a real hell raiser, sort of the Colin Farrell of the robot entertainment industry and the other one is quite cute (purely from an engineering perspective so it tells me).
soundtrack? (Score:4, Interesting)
So is the soundtrack done in MIDI?
Luckily (Score:3, Funny)
As luck would have it, there's already series of all-artificial [oscars.org] awards they can earn.
Qualifiers (Score:5, Insightful)
"This is the first computer animated movie"
"This is the first computer animated movie with photoreal humans"
"This is the first computer animated movie rendered with global illumination"
"This is the first computer animated movie rendered with global illumination, on a render farm of Linux servers"
"This is the first computer animated movie where the main character is green"
"This is the first computer animated movie where the main character is green and one of the characters is a cat"
It gets silly after a while. At some point you have to ask "is the movie any good?"
j
Internalist and externalist acting (Score:5, Interesting)
Internalist is most often associated with the Stanislavsky "Method": feel it inside and it will come out on the outside. The Method has been taken to stupid lengths that have been much parodied ("What's my motivation?"), but the core is extremely sound. Audiences are extremely sensitive to faked emotions, and internalist acting makes for very compelling performances.
Externalist acting predates internalist acting, but it's still much used. It's basically the school of thought that says, "I don't care what you feel; as long as it looks good on film, I'm happy." It's necessary for a lot of things. You can't lose yourself in a fight scene, for example, because that's how actors get hurt (especially on stage.) But other than that, it's largely out of favor among top-flight actors and directors.
Most modern actors use a combination of the two techniques, but the balance is different for every actor.
I bring this up because computer animation is the ultimate externalist acting. You have a physical control over the "muscles" of a virtual actor far beyond that which you have over yourself. That's why externalist acting often fails: you may think "this is what I look like when I'm angry/happy/sad", but you just don't have the control over the hundreds of little muscles in your face.
I've been incredibly impressed by what emotions they can get a virtual actor to do. I remember thinking it for the first time watching Barbie at the end of Toy Story II, doing her flight attendant "bye bye, buh bye, bye-ee" routine. She clearly had a "fake smile", in contrast to the real smiles. Everybody knows the difference, but it takes an extraordinary eye to reproduce it precisely.
Shrek and Fiona showed me layered emotions I'd be hard pressed to reproduce myself.
Now these guys are adding voice, where there are even more fine gradations, and it hasn't been as well studied. Artists have been dissecting people's faces for centuries and every art student knows the name, origin, insertion, and purpose of every single muscle in the face.
The voice will prove harder, but I've looked into some of those programs and it looks like a good start. It's a lot of work to specify the exact shape of a line reading, but as with faces, they'll probably get it eventually.
It flies precisely in the face of what I've been taught as a director. I tend to the internalist school most of the time, and you never, ever specify the details of a line reading to an actor. You give intents, motivations, impulses, and try to help the actor find the natural way to get what you want out of a line. If you give the actor a line reading, it will read falsely to an audience, because the line reading won't match up to the rest of the clues that the audience gets about what the character feels (body language, timing, facial expressions). These details are too hard to control, so you give emotional directions instead. It's tedious, but the result will be more compelling.
It would be interesting to direct an actor who did have minute control over voice and body, as this film will show. It's probably too early for the thing to be 100% successful, but I'd really like to find out.
Not the first. (Score:3, Informative)
But I'm more impressed b/c this is the work of one man!
Torrents anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Are slashdot readers all-artifical too? (Score:3, Funny)
I swear the whole comments system here could be replaced by a small shell script. A cron job that posts "Microsoft sucks" and "BSD is dying" would take care of a good chunk of the system right there. What else am I missing?
And why am I talking to a small shell script?
The Falicy of All Digital (Score:3, Funny)
Re:it will be really artificial (Score:5, Funny)
You have been replaced by a very small shell script. Good day.
Sincerely,
C. Ron Tab
Parent