Imagine for a moment you’re a movie maker.\u00a0 You have been handed an amazing guaranteed-blockbuster script.\u00a0 You assemble an incredible cast and start production.\u00a0 But there’s a problem:\u00a0 One of the actresses, a star of significant reputation, doesn’t want to do one of the scenes as scripted because (gasp!) it would require she get nude or at least topless, something she refuses to do.\u00a0 The scene is significant, though, and the nudity is not gratuitous; there’s a good reason for it in the context of the movie.\u00a0 Your starlet agrees the scene should be in the movie exactly as scripted, but that doesn’t change the fact that she won’t do it.\u00a0 What to do?<\/p>\n
Ten years ago, there wouldn’t be much choice.\u00a0 You either re-wrote the script or convinced the actress to get undressed.\u00a0 Now, however, there may be a third choice, and I personally expect to see somebody use it someday soon, and that is to use CG.\u00a0 The “uncanny valley” of computer-generated people is being crossed finally.\u00a0 Look at the first Spider-man<\/em> movie from a few years ago.\u00a0 There’s several places where Spidey is not Tobey or a stuntman, but a computer-generated image climbing walls.\u00a0 Everything is so perfectly done that it’s nigh-impossible to notice the difference.<\/p>\n The second and third Matrix<\/em> movies made heavy use of this, replacing Neo with a CG Keanu Reeves a few times and later Agent Smith was duplicated a millions times over.\u00a0 The conditions they were in made this a little easier to believe; heavy rain or fast action makes it tougher recognize something isn’t quite human anymore.\u00a0 But the day is coming when a more casual scene makes use of such technology.<\/p>\n Take the above example.\u00a0 Perhaps the script calls for the heroine to walk into a room topless.\u00a0 As a writer, I could come up with a thousand reasons why this would be important to the scene, so the motivation is irrelevant.\u00a0 The sun is shining in the window, so it’s a bright scene, not some dim bedroom scene where something like this could be more easily fakes.\u00a0 Our starlet walks on clothed, but in post-production her top is removed and she appears to be otherwise.\u00a0 Some actresses might still object to this as it would give the appearance<\/em> they went topless, but some who would otherwise balk at doing such a scene might accept having computer-generated boobs.\u00a0 Depending on the actress, some might want<\/em> computer generated boobs, even if they’re willing to go topless.<\/p>\n I think this is a good thing.\u00a0 The technical restrictions on making our imaginations come to life are slowly being removed.\u00a0 Look at the recent Avatar<\/em>, much of which was computer-generated.\u00a0 The natives were larger than humans, but did not look superimposed like giants in movies of the past did.\u00a0 Everything looked very real, and I enjoyed that aspect of the movie a lot.<\/p>\n Even better, some older actors are getting to relive their youth, after a fashion.\u00a0 Anthony Hopkins got to play Hannibal the Cannibal in the Silence of the Lambs<\/em> prequel Red Dragon<\/em> and computer-generated graphics allowed him to look believably younger.\u00a0 Sure, the producers could have caked on make-up to achieve this effect, but aging an actor in either direction with make-up alone is, by all accounts, a real challenge.\u00a0 Look at almost any film where they’ve made a young actor look old with make-up, and most of the time it just doesn’t seem natural\u00a0 Sure, sometimes it’s done well, but often it looks like what I have described:\u00a0 Caked-on make-up.<\/p>\n It’s easy to see computer-generated graphics allow the imagination to really run wild.\u00a0 Avatar<\/em> is one fine example; the Lord of the Rings<\/em> trilogy is another.\u00a0 The Star Wars<\/em> prequel trilogy’s graphics are fantastic.\u00a0 The list goes on and on, and it’s just getting started.\u00a0 Stunts are becoming less risky because they’re done on a computer instead of by daredevils.\u00a0 And scenes an actor might otherwise avoid–steamy sexy stuff–can be done because the actors are only lending their voices, not their bodies.<\/p>\n Welcome to the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Imagine for a moment you’re a movie maker.\u00a0 You have been handed an amazing guaranteed-blockbuster script.\u00a0 You assemble an incredible cast and start production.\u00a0 But there’s a problem:\u00a0 One of the actresses, a star of significant reputation, doesn’t want to do one of the scenes as scripted because (gasp!) it would require she get nude […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=153"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":154,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153\/revisions\/154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}