Hacker News Reader

Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

Apparently Peter Jackson did not hire over 10,000 orc extras for the battle of Helm's Deep.

And matte paintings have been taking away jobs from set-builders for some time....

Actually I am in favor of real human actors, practical effects — just pointing out that things are going the way they've always gone.

View on HN

The difference is that those orcs were always CGI, not scans of real humans, the exceptions being the orcs in the foreground with speaking or stunt roles.

And matte paintings were always parts of the sets, not in lieu of them.

Also note how much better the orcs looked in LotR compared to the Hobbit CGI wrecks.

You can kinda see how the actors fight versus their shadows with CGI while in LotR each blow looked heavy.

> The difference is that those orcs were always CGI, not scans of real humans, the exceptions being the orcs in the foreground with speaking or stunt roles.

Not just that, but people are missing the point. It's not about CGIing an extra so they can use them as background characters. What the studios are fighting for is the right to hire a person for a single day's labor, scan them, and use those scans in perpetuity for any purpose.

What that means is, if you suddenly become a big-name movie star, that studio no longer has to pay you to act in their movies, because they have the rights to scans of you from 10 years ago, and they can just use those instead.

> What the studios are fighting for is the right to hire a person for a single day's labor, scan them, and use those scans in perpetuity for any purpose.

The studios have said multiple times that this is not true. Rather this is a fear that the union brought up, not an actual request from the studios.

> The studios have said multiple times that this is not true. Rather this is a fear that the union brought up, not an actual request from the studios.

Incorrect. The current contracts (and relevant laws) arguably[0] allow this already. Actors want to explicitly prohibit it, and the studios have said they want to preserve that option.

Whether or not the studios are claiming they want to exercise that option is irrelevant; their insistence on maintaining that option is one of the core sticking points of the entire strike.

https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/PROPOSALS.pd...

[0] Actors claim it is already prohibited by the existing contracts, and AMPTP claims it is not.

I read your link, and it does not support what you said.

> I read your link, and it does not support what you said.

I posted a primary source which corroborates everything I explained above. If you'd like to provide a primary source that says differently, go ahead.

>The studios have said multiple times that this is not true.

What is said publicly, or even to internal employees, ir even in the course of negotiations is not what is actually said in the boardroom. If you think any executive is straightforward on intent, the only person you're fooling is yourself.

The matte paintings are taking the jobs away from camel drivers who would otherwise have transported vast amounts of film equipment across the desert for on-site shoots.

Kubrick was going to actually get 10k+ soldiers for his Napoleon though.

Christopher Nolan refused to use CGI to add soldiers to the beach for Dunkirk. The end result looks like more of a beach outing than 100k+ soldiers desperate to evacuate.

Christopher Nolan is a notable hold out who never uses CGI though, so this is a pretty extreme & rare example.

Wait, not even Inception? This is crazy

Months of set work to fold that road. I heard they are still rebuilding parts of Paris to this day.

Famously, Waterloo (1970) used 17,000 Soviet Union soldiers and (Cold War-era) cavalry brigade as extras.

They also drilled, slept, and fought like real 1815 infantrymen and cavalrymen, as it was.

"Camelot!"

"It's only a model."

The orc union must've been furious!!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com