Movies’ future: No sets, actors?

What if they put central casting on a hard drive and put it online, so that a movie studio could enter a password and download Lauren Bacall? Now there’s a concept.

Serious watchers of video technology think it might happen. The reason is that everything in the movie-video business is going digital, which has all sorts of effects.

Movies once had to be made on film, which was expensive and could be used only once. Now you can use digital cameras on magnetic tape. The tape can be reused, and the footage edited on inexpensive Apple computers. This lets talented people with little money make films. Films in digital form can be distributed by satellite. Anything digital is almost infinitely manipulatable.

A curious idea suggested by some in the industry is “regionalization.” People (or so goes the reasoning) like to see movies about where they live. In one version of a film, you would have Washington as a backdrop; in another, Los Angeles. Not a good idea, I say, but an idea, and sometimes possible.

Next, there is computer simulation. Crude at first, it was completely believable by the time of “Jurassic Park.” I concede that I haven’t seen real dinosaurs, but if I did, I’m prepared to believe that they would look like those in “Jurassic Park.” Simulation gets better quickly and is now mainstream. For example, scenes in “The Matrix” and “Spider-Man” that look real aren’t.

Simulation has moved well beyond what one thinks of as special effects and can produce much of a movie’s “world.” Barbara Robertson, writing in Computer Graphics World (cgw.pennnet.com) points out that, without computer graphics, in “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” we would not watch “250,000 Orcs, thousands of horsemen, and mammoth Mumakils trumpet their way into battle, Gandalf fly on the wings of an eagle, and Frodo, Sam, and Gollum wrestle near the lava of Mount Doom.”

Next, the resurrection of the dead. Years back, I remember watching Humphrey Bogart do something that he didn’t really do, because he was dead at the time.

His face had been electronically put on another actor.

I couldn’t tell the result from Bogart. That’s easy now.

Movie industry analyst Rob Enderle asks, “It won’t be long until we have our first fully animated movie that doesn’t look animated at all. We’ve certainly seen dead actors digitally transferred into current commercials, and I’ve begun to wonder what this virtualization means, long term, to the movie industry. For instance, do we really need actors anymore?”

He is far from the first to ask the question. As so often happens with technology, the bits and pieces are being developed here and there, some being more advanced than others, but all moving along.

It is easy now to use a voice synthesizer to make a character say anything you like, unconvincingly. It is much harder to mimic a known voice (e.g., Bogart’s) and have it say whatever you want, with proper inflection. It’s getting closer.

What happens when both the “world” of a movie and the actors can be created digitally?

How difficult will it soon be to invent an actor starting with nothing but software?

We aren’t there yet. Things are moving rapidly, however. We may see whole films made in supercomputers with neither sets nor actors.

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