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Comment by mdale | Hacker News Reader

The moment the actor asks and "you only need to do this once for each actor?" seems to have a subtext of questions of actors future job security and odd combination of marketing latest tech and wtf am I going to do realization packed into a single presentation.

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I have no dog in this fight, but perhaps I can offer a contrarian position. I hope people are able to look past how this technology will disrupt the status quo into the future of how such technology will enable much better cinematic story-telling by those without large studio budgets. Artists of the future will have opportunities to use lower-cost talent to enable their visions that will open up the floodgates of creativity, no different than what was seen when YouTube took off.

Both actors and producers can benefit when access to talent is not held behind the gates of a few powerful entities. We've seen the damage such gatekeepers can wield with the Weinstein case and numerous subsequent claims, where vulnerable actors have their careers held hostage to avoid upsetting predators who wield all the power. If an actor can pay the bills by doing many short-term mocap jobs for independent producers armed with sophisticated software, everyone can benefit.

In addition, motion capture opens up opportunities for very talented but otherwise less conventionally attractive actors who traditionally are relegated to type-cast bit roles.

I consider the advent of this technology as whole, with the current state of Hollywood, to be concerning. It will ultimately lead to a world where actors will have their autonomy stripped away from them, even more so than they do now. Consider the status quo, whereby an actor's autonomy is somewhat determined by their start power. If you're trying to break into the industry then you have to put up and shut up with what you're given.

With the advent of motion-capture like this, actors will be reduced to a marionette of flesh to be puppeted around as the producers see fit. Perhaps Hollywood will be going towards a future where actors no longer act in movies, instead their likeness is simply licensed to a studio for a certain number of movies. Anyway, I'm a cynic when it comes to this, the industry itself is already plenty abusive and exploitive, and this could further that.

Is that what happened to musicians after music production gear became cheaper and democratized?

Arguably this is the golden age for musicians. Lowest barriers to entry ever, if you have talent. You don't need anyone's permission to be a star ... just talent.

Why would it be different for actors?

I feel like you are not thinking about the full implications of this kind of democratizing tech.

As a self-admitted lousy musician and marginal-at-best amateur filmmaker, the last two decades of technological progress have unleashed a veritable Disneyland of capability I can access anytime 24/7. As amazing as the tools are, the ability to collaborate with other amateurs around the world and to instantly publish content to a global audience with no gatekeepers is equally transformative.

Perhaps I appreciate just how much we live in "the golden age" of personal creativity because I'm >50 yrs old and lived through saving from each paycheck to afford renting a high-quality camera for a day or an edit suite for a few hours (only between 12a-6a for the reduced rate). I'll just come out and say it, "Kids these days have no idea how amazing their world is." Now, excuse me while I go outside to yell at some clouds...

Perhaps like music there will be a split between money from 'recorded' performances and money from 'live'.

Theatre wasn't killed by films and TV, live music is still going despite recording.

Artists... don't you mean AI?

The next 10 years are going to be interesting. I wouldn't want to be a 16 year old trying to decide upon a career path.

Me eldest is 10. In the past few weeks I've gone from "I'm pretty sure all my kids are gonna be OK" to "... well, better count on about two of three living with us until they're in their 30s".

I was down on the future in general, but fairly optimistic about my kids' mid-term prospects. Not so much, now. Feels like being on the Titanic just as the deck's starting to noticeably tilt.

I'm telling my kids to get their tractor-trailer license. It'll be 30 years before trucks will be allowed to travel completely autonomously along the road, and in the meantime they'll have autopilot that removes most of the manual burden and allows them to get paid while they sit in the cab to write books, compose music or program applications.

I say it half in jest, but it'll be a long time before politicians allow 80,000lb trucks to wander our highways without a human responsible for it.

Yes I think there is definitely a positive angle. Hollywood's influence has been protected in large part by union influences controlling access to bankable actors, among other reasons. The possibilities for a surge of truly independent decentralized productions is promising.

Hopefully breaking away from the continuously lazy loop of people in capes that now dominate Hollywood productions.

That's not how the Hollywood talent unions work...

They don't control access; any production can hire any actor they want. The unions just negotiate a minimum wage for actors working on productions at major studios.

Your suggestion is horrific: you're suggesting that indie films should be allowed to profit off of someone's image without paying for them.

I don't read it that way at all. You would no more be able to steal someone's image and pretend it was them than you could use a famous bands music in your soundtrack without paying for it.

As I see it, a budding filmmaker could use two or three actors to fill 20 different roles in a film without needing expensive prop and makeup artists to place them in detailed fantasy/sci-fi scenes.

I heard it more as, can I as an actress just get to the part where I act, and skip the just-stand-there-for-an-hour part getting my face captured.

Taking parallels - I don't know if many developers complain when compilation times go down, although technically they're being paid to wait. The thing that's scary to developers is GitHub copilot. But this actress here, she's still doing all the acting.

Many companies don't pay ML engineers/researchers for the time spent training an ML model anymore.

I don’t understand this comment. If my model is training for 2 days I expect to be doing other work while I wait for the results. Are/were there engineers/researchers that expect to get paid to do nothing while they wait for paint to dry?

Yes, many of them used the training time for quiet deep thinking without worrying about getting paid.

If they’re doing “deep thinking” about work then it’s literally work. The clock doesn’t stop just because you’re not typing.

Also, many of these positions are salaried so they aren’t actively tracking hours.

Imagine you are an ML consultant with an activity tracker installed. The company is only going to pay you for the short fragments of time you are typing the source code and launching subtasks, but not for the duration of those tasks if your activity tracker shows no activity on your side. I had a client who wanted to negotiate two rates - one for the active part and another one for the training time part (barely covering AWS costs). If you think this is rare then you might be well-insulated from the market.

> I had a client who wanted to negotiate two rates - one for the active part and another one for the training time part (barely covering AWS costs).

This doesn’t make any sense. Training time is billed according as a passed through cost plus, not an hourly rate for the person who started the task.

I don’t know anyone who would have gotten away with billing AWS training time at their own hourly rate as if they were working. That’s ridiculous. Would be hilarious to see someone submit 24-hour days for long training runs though.

I can understand that for outside-working hours tasks. But not for working hours where many companies really try to do the activity tracking-based payments like as if the consultant didn't have time allocated on working on their tasks already.

The goal for the game industry is to not need actresses or actors.

It's been increasingly common in indie game circles to buy libraries of mocap animations and lately facial expressions. Then things like Blender and Unity have been working on amazing solutions to merge various mocaps together.

Several multi-million dollar Unity games have used that process successfully 5 years ago, and can fill in the gaps with tech like unity asset "puppet face". Which works surprisingly well with just webcam. Unity face capture on IOS is also fantastic.

I think stuff like this further reinforces the value of actors over the animators. Sure they only have to scan an actor once to get a metahuman model, but they need the actor to give the actual performance.

Instead of one over the other, what might happen is the role of mo-cap actor and animator become a single role. Animators and actors both create expressions and poses of the character. Animators already film themselves in poses for inspiration.

In the future, a single person might end up taking their own mo-cap video as well as polishing up the animations for several characters.

Reminds me of how people just shoot their own podcasts now. It's just become that easy. At some point you might add to the team, but if you want to just try it, you can.

Animators are still needed, because not all motions can be captured.

It was probably a similar feeling to how stage actors felt when they heard that someone created a new-fangled invention called the 'video camera'

"You mean I only have to perform the play one time, and people can watch me perform it over and over....for free?"

Actors already can license their digital likeness for royalties. They would have to set this up in the same way. https://www.indiewire.com/2022/10/bruce-willis-sells-likenes...

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