George Rebane
In the early 1980s my firm in Los Angeles had just bought and installed the most advanced computer graphics system available. It was the second one on the west coast (the other one belonged to a big aerospace company) and we used it to create multi-media images and videos for the then new PC controlled laser discs. Word got out (well, we helped a little) and soon we were doing post-production work for Hollywood production companies fixing stuff that went wrong in producing movies and commercials. Working with that system, it immediately became clear to us that this was the future of movies. But more importantly, movie stars could live forever on the screen.
I called in our intellectual property lawyers, described what we thought was possible, and asked if dead actors’ estates had ever granted rights for ‘them’ to appear in new digitized productions. The answer was no, because such screen incarnations had never been possible or occurred to anyone.
The scheme to do it was complicated but straightforward since the actors’ faces and bodies existed on film from all angles, and we had lots of audio from them. This would allow surrogate actors to act out the parts in a new movie, perhaps wearing special suits with lights and gridlines on them. In post production we would then render the surrogate actors with the appropriate stars’ faces and even costumes. The speech would be modified using the dead actors’ speech formants (analyzed speech components) to ‘superimpose and blend’ it on the surrogates’ voices. The final product would be the real thing – Lauren and Bogie, or Lucy and Desi, or … .
All we needed then was some faster and more commodious hardware - that would eventually come along given Moore’s Law - and to write some nifty interactive computer graphics (CG) and speech processing software. Anyway, I later checked that part out with John Hughes, founder of Rhythm and Hues which along with George Lucas were then the world’s leading CG houses. John agreed that all of it would be possible with the new hardware and a pile of cash. Having neither, we both went on with our lives doing other things.
Today the movie Avatar has brought together the CG technology developments of the last thirty years and demonstrated that it is indeed possible to make a new road movie starring Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, or anyone else you care to pick. I haven’t yet heard of the voice overlays I described above, but I bet someone is working hard on it.
And not only will dead stars live again, but still kicking actors will be able to play themselves in a much younger year. In short, an actor need no longer progress through the aging roles of yesteryear. Tom Cruise can play a twenty something when he’s sixty something, and Sean Connery will forever return to his 007 role. People covering the industry have already started talking about it (here) since Avatar continues to rack up piles of cash.
An aging population would flock to movies and programs that revived memories of their younger years with new material that comes to life with the same actors that inspired their youth. There’s gold in them thar hills!
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