Comment by montagg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by montagg | Hacker News Reader

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The future is probably not 100% generated, but probably a mix of generation + animation + motion capture. AI is not going to be able to replicate the deep and affecting performances you get from humans—I fully believe it can recreate some aspects of the visual arts, but no way is it going to get to the point where it will be the best of the best. It may become good enough, which is a thing and will make an impact, but I think creatives will still want that kind of control.

And when we see the edges of that control, people will be interested in seeing things that make it "the old way," part of the reason you see a lot more practical effects these days, and I would include the background-in-unreal backdrops there, because they read as more real than actors in front of a green screen—for reasons that are totally unconscious unless you are highly trained in the differences.

While I do think gen AI is going to change how movies and TV shows get made, anyone telling you it will be a whole hog replacement has not studied the history of multimedia and probably hasn't made anything that required a high-level of vision themselves.

With a few notable exceptions (James Cameron) the film industry is largely unconcerned with "possibility." I think this is often why there is such a big misunderstanding from tech folks about how movies are made, since tech is very feature and tool driven whereas filmmaking is very much process-driven.

The Odyssey was shot on IMAX cameras half the size of a car that weighed 400lbs. It's easy to call that out as being ridiculous, surely a much smaller camera system could have achieved 99% the same results, etc. but that totally misses the point. Nolan could have shot it on anything he wanted, and he chose the less convenient way, because that is his process. If he was forced to use a more reasonable camera, it would not have been a Christopher Nolan film.

Sure, I'm down with that mix of generation + animation + mocap workflow. But at some point, people will going to look around at all the equipment, the people in mocap suits, the thousands of hours of generation and the millions of dollars of compute, and just wonder...wouldn't it be easier to just film someone with a real camera?

> half the size of a car that weighed 400lbs

Link please - saw nothing like that from a quick search

https://www.reddit.com/r/cinematography/comments/1p2exyx/che...

Nolan is irrelevant. He is the last of a dying breed. Once him and his ilk are gone, studios will go 100% into AI slop, Oscars be damned. No company is funneling 200 million into risky Oscar bait when they can make one hour Tiktok equivalents and get higher ROI. Movie theaters as a whole might go the Blockbuster route in a decade or two. The younger generations are not supporting the film industry with their eyeballs or dollars.

Someone else already replied to you politely explaining this from another angle, but for some reason you not to engage with him.

> Nolan is irrelevant

Irrelevant to whom? He's not irrelevant to me and many movie fans.

Also, you are lecturing someone who seems to actually work or has worked on the movie industry.

He is irrelevant to future trends, as should be clear from basic reading comprehension. And so what...? Tens of thousands of people, probably more, have worked in film. Each one of these is immune to criticism and an accurate futurist? My point remains, he engaged with every early comment except the polite one from xp84, which lays out the same general issue already.

How do you know Nolan is irrelevant to future trends? What's your expertise?

Your point most definitely does not remain. You're arguing with someone who knows his/her stuff. Your claim, which comes from no experience, directly contradicts what someone who works in the industry is telling you how it actually works!

> Nolan could have shot it on anything he wanted, and he chose the less convenient way, because that is his process.

Kinda. There are also interesting technical reasons. From my lay person understanding:

  1. IMAX film is physically larger and creates a higher quality image
  2. Because of the size and machine noise close up dialog is normally redubbed.
  3. Nolan (and team?) came up with a method of sealing off the cameras' noise that made them even larger, so they had a system of mirrors that allowed the actors to interact in a more natural way and allowed close in capture by IMAX with integrated sound.

The system of mirrors reminds me of Errol Morris' Interrotron which allowed him to film an interviewee's face directly from the perspective of the interviewer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrotron

I swear I watched a 1930s hollywood film where a guy died inside the box they built to soundproof the camera.

It was Babylon (2022), which takes place in 1930s Hollywood

Thats it yep.

The problem isnt that the future is going to be 100% AI driven, its that the cheap shit is going to be 100% AI driven and that's where new talent has to go to learn the ropes.

Like you mention James Cameron, and he is just one of hundreds of filmmakers who got their start with Roger Corman.

If the Roger Corman of tomorrow is budgeting 50 bucks + 1000000 AI tokens, you aren't going to get another James Cameron. The guy wont get a chance to make practical effects for a bunch of low budget practical films. We are already seeing this with CGI being so common.

>And when we see the edges of that control, people will be interested in seeing things that make it "the old way," part of the reason you see a lot more practical effects these days, and I would include the background-in-unreal backdrops there, because they read as more real than actors in front of a green screen—for reasons that are totally unconscious unless you are highly trained in the differences.

Yep, and we are already at the low end of people who can implement these techniques.

>has not studied the history of multimedia

Look at the animation quality of childrens media over the last 20 years. They have grabbed low quality CGI with both hands.

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