And of you are just going to digitally do the fight scenes then why not just use moves already recorded without any IP?
Seems to me like he was smart to Nope TF out.
That said, they will find some other young but starving martial artist and record all his moves. He may not be as famous as Li, but he will be cheaper and easier to manipulate.
I wonder how far are we from making movies completely with software, with no human actors at all
It’ll be more like K-pop, with mall appearances.
Then, take it a step further by trying to produce the voiced line from a sufficiently detailed narration and transcript. Obviously GPT-3 is close to being able to produce narrated stories, so that would give you a pipeline that turns a vague story idea into animated speaking faces.
Generating the movements of bodies and props might be harder, but I'm guessing that in some CGI movies for kids they don't have any human characters so they don't need to capture any actor's body movements or have any physical props or a stage at all.
The difference is they wanted to motion capture his moves in addition to the regular filing process.
That's completely different from capturing the image of an actor on a 2d video frame.
Again, motion capture wasn't mentioned in the article, nor was it clear to me that even if that assumption is made that it isn't something commonly done in martial arts movies or limited to the Matrix movies.
It wasn’t unheard of, but wasn’t yet common in the early 2000s when the Marrix sequels were made.
Also, Matrix has lots of Bullet Time rigs, which aren’t motion capture rigs, but we’re clearly usable even back then for some “transplanting” of recordings to another scene, much more so than regular shots.
Jet Li was extrapolating into the future, but not far into the future. It was already common and happening 10 years later.
I don't think Jet Li needed to extrapolate into the future at all.
>He added, “By the end of the recording, the right to these moves would go to them.”
Li said back then, he was already worried that future technology would allow US filmmakers to digitally reproduce his moving body and superimpose the face of any actor onto it.
“I was thinking: I’ve been training my entire life. And we martial artists could only grow older. Yet they could own [my moves] as an intellectual property forever. So I said I couldn’t do that,” Li said.