Digital Actors

RE:  Blog Entry #5 - Digital Actors  (Mary Ward Communications)

With all the new the new technologies and advances being discovered today, not only do scientists benefit from this, animators and others in the movie industry may benefit from this too! A great example of these technologies' abilities is seen in the movie "Avatar", which has been getting a lot of debate over whether the animated characters should get recognition when it comes to acting awards.

This is a picture of Kevin Flynn from the
latest installment of Tron, Tron:  Legacy.
If you couldn't tell, this is not even a real
man!  This character is a CGI (Computer
Generated Image) of Jeff Bridges.  With
this type of accuracy and technology,
could it actually be possible for actors to

become  obsolete?  I would hope not!

Is this acting or animation?

I feel that the movie "Avatar" is a great example of incorporating traditional acting with the new advances in special effects and animation.  I find that calling it one or the other wouldn't be quite fair to neither the actors or the animators because all participants worked very hard to achieve the amazing quality that is in the movie.  Everyone should be recognized for their participation and effort.


Do you think that animated characters should be eligible for acting awards?
Acting awards should be eligible for characters who have actors portraying and acting them out. That being said, I feel that animated characters could be eligible for acting awards.  This all depends on how the animated character was portrayed.  If, unlike "Avatar", the animated character was completely based on computer animations and the actor's voice, without the actor's physical acting, I don't think these characters could be eligible for acting awards.  This is because I feel it takes a lot more than voice acting for one's character to be eligible for an acting award.  For animated characters that are the result of both an actor's physical acting and computer animations, I feel that these characters could be eligible for an acting award.  This is because, not only does this character have the voice acting of an actor, it also has the physical acting of an actor, which (in my opinion) makes the character worthy of an award.


Do you think that human actors will ever become obsolete?  Why or why not?
With all the innovations and technology that we have today, I think there is a possibility that human actors will become obsolete.  Even though all these advances are very high end, cutting edge and therefore expensive, it would probably be much easier to spend the money and development on this technology over the actors and actresses with very similar salaries.  Also, since this technology is now able to mirror human actions and generate familiar or similar faces, it's completely possible for animators to generate a new but virtual celebrity that would appeal to many fans.
Even though I predict this could happen though, I still prefer my human actors and actresses.  This is because some people, like me, prefer to physically see familiar faces, and always generating new ones with computer animations could cause consumers and fans to lose that familiarity - even if the generated face resembles a favourite actor or actress.  And personally, I prefer to see real actors acting in my movies.

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NOTE TO MY TEACHERS:

This entry is based upon on the information taken from the article "Do the 'Avatar' Actor's Deserve Recognition?"

-Jercy

Winter Break

... I did not update my blog this entire winter break.


Oh dear.