Disney Mocked for Ludicrously Fake CGI "Actors" in Crowd Scene

https://futurism.com/the-byte/disney-mocked-fake-cgi-actors-crowd-scene

by my12parsecs • 3 years ago

53 56 3 years ago

rdtsc• 3 years ago

Perhaps they embedded a deep commentary into the piece on how the crowd members operate on a level of simple automatons.

The meta-commentary is they consider the movie audience as part of the crowd.

matchbok• 3 years ago

Seems like an improvement - nobody argues that a career as "bleacher actor #847" is something to aspire to. It's something we should AI away.

Teever• 3 years ago

But you know that the bleacher actor #847 of today is the single line actor of tomorrow and potentially one day a leading role.

How do you expect actors to get a start if there's no where to start?

variants• 3 years ago

They will start where the next starting line is

zdragnar• 3 years ago

Does "bleacher actor 847" actually lend credible experience to getting bigger roles? If I'm putting someone in front of a scene, I don't really think I'm going to care that they've had more or less experience in the background amongst a sea of a thousand other people.

FireBeyond2• 3 years ago

So union protectionism. What next, "Studios forbidden from using CGI extras if a SAG member is available and willing"?

LapsangGuzzler3• 3 years ago

Nobody aspires to peak as a junior software engineer even though they mostly just do small, easily automated tasks. Is that a valid reason to completely gut a set opportunities that provide a foot in the door to something bigger?

zamadatix3• 3 years ago

Sure, if it's so valuable to have a training type role we'll keep it on those grounds (or find some alternative) instead of roundabout reasoning which requires us to be inefficient to hide the real reason it's valuable.

Anyone not expecting job roles, opportunities, or pathways to change in their career is going to have a very rough time, even more so than the hard time people from the last 50 years had.

joneholland• 3 years ago

This isn’t even AI. This is just low budget VFX. Something that has been done since the 90s.

gonehome• 3 years ago

The tech for this will obviously get better (is the example shown even recent?). The complaints in the Twitter thread are ridiculous imo. Disney is right to be experimenting with this stuff, it’s clearly going to be super relevant in the future.

LapsangGuzzler3• 3 years ago

There’s nothing wrong with calling out a company for putting out shoddy work during a contentious labor strike.

Disney can play with this stuff all they want, but society is going to start asking these big questions in louder and more forceful ways, and there’s nothing wrong with that either. You can’t take away an entire industry’s livelihood and expect them to accept it lying down.

zamadatix3• 3 years ago

I think the comment is in reference to the comments focusing on quality instead of the jobs impact. The whole debate around quality seems like a red herring in the first place, who is surprised or did not expect a direct to streaming high school romcom to have have the highest quality everything - even for the second row bleachers in a 1 second cut shot? Who is actually bothered by that problem vs the jobs debate you've highlighted?

jsnell• 3 years ago

The movie was released in March, well before the strikes.

jeffbee• 3 years ago

The tech for this is already better. "Massive" software has been doing CGI characters with AI behaviors for 20 years, including in famous films like Lord of the Rings. The clip in the tweet looks like some NPCs from a PS2 game.

civilitty• 3 years ago

The clip in the tweet looks like some NPCs from a PS2 game.

NHL 2000. Those animations look exactly like the awkward crowds from NHL 2000.

PeterStuer• 3 years ago

With all that is terrible with Disney entertainment (and the rest of the last 2 decades of studio output), I do not think 'background crowd did not look real enough' would make my top 100 of things wrong with film/tv.

wahnfrieden3• 3 years ago

That’s not what’s criticized despite the headline

metadat• 3 years ago

Think of the untold money that will be saved as the need for human involvement is increasingly liberated from the film production process. (Or should it now be called "generation process"?)

All that money can now go directly to the studios, thank God.

unsupp0rted2• 3 years ago

Even better, the studios won't have a monopoly anymore on creating blockbuster movies. Some kids in a garage with a cloud service subscription can do the same with their lawn-moving earnings.

Lacerda69• 3 years ago

Exactly, contrary to doom sayers beliefs, ML models will enable a huge new segment of creators. It is already happening with people creating games/movies/books/music etc. that are of much better quality than those churned out by AAA.

SoftTalker2• 3 years ago

What lawn mowing earnings? Robots will be doing that soon enough

concordDance• 3 years ago

One would hope that more studios and more independent film makers with more interesting plots will emerge.

In fact, I think we're probably already seeing this... YouTube gets more viewing hours and more revenue than Hollywood.

ShamelessC• 3 years ago

The discussion focuses on AI generation, but shitty CG humans have been possible for a very long time. This seems to just be a lousy and maybe less expensive effort for CGI actors, but not AI generated actors?

It does indeed seem like a bad idea overall, especially given the current climate. I just don't have any reason to assume generative AI was involved.

insickness• 3 years ago

Using likenesses of a person is different than creating CGI extras in the background. They're not using anyone's likeness with background actors.

And where would the NO FAKES Act draw the line? Would the studio be unable to create hundreds of thousands of soldiers in a battle? What if the soldiers were humanoid aliens or robots?

besus• 3 years ago

Yeah, just think of how the battle scene at Helm's Deep would look if they weren't able to use CGI. AI generated CGI is just the next step forward.

Write and produce good content and we'll watch, subscribe, and buy.

XorNot• 3 years ago

Yes but if we all approached this sensibly, then someone on Twitter couldn't get offended on behalf of a hypothetical person, in an industry they don't work in our understand, about a topic that's become the flavour of the month for virtue signalling and thus get their own big break as the internet's main character for the week.

And then what would happen to the Twitter outrage industry? No one thinks of the real victims here /s.

dylan6043• 3 years ago

They don't want you to buy though. They want you to subscribe/rent. So I'm guessing that before too long, the "buy" button will go the way of the dodo.

Phase I has already been initiated with Best Buy discontinuing sales of shiny round discs: https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/best-buy-ending-dvd-bl...

nsxwolf• 3 years ago

The Disney clip may not have any relevance to the AI content issues of the day, but it’s bad. Incredibly bad.

Of course you would use CGI to create thousands of soldiers. But 5 extras in a gymnasium? That saved them what, $500?

The more unnecessary the use of CGI, the more distracting and offensive it is.

NBJack• 3 years ago

I suspect it was trying to avoid a re-shoot. The extras are cheap, but if you find an error in the composition of the scene after you shot it, you'd have to bring everyone back in, setup the set, etc.

bluedino• 3 years ago

Looks like the crowd from a console video game

prepend• 3 years ago

This seems like a dumb complaint. Movies have been using painted backgrounds for 100 years. Would that be forbidden?

This is a cheap b movie, so they aren’t going to pay for the extras that a Cleopatra or big production would afford.

The fix for this seems to be better AI (a la Lord of the Rings 20 years ago) rather than employing more extras.

NikolaNovak• 3 years ago

I don't get it.

We've been using CGI for backgrounds for... Decades? And in a direct-to-tv disposable low-budget movie nonetheless.

We also have a whole genre of animated movies with no human actors which are of course bread and butter for Disney.

So while I feel there is outrage to be had, I also feel we are going waaaaaay over any reasonable line which will diminish the impact of our outrage. This seems like a silly distraction away from real systemic issues.

vlunkr• 3 years ago

Yeah they are taking a viral clip of bad CGI and conflating it with current AI controversies.

And although it’s Disney, these Disney channel movies have always been made on the cheap.

Nothing to see here folks.

DoesntMatter22• 3 years ago

Why would people be outraged about something like this?

wahnfrieden3• 3 years ago

vfx were favored when presented as an option over actor/set talent because vfx studios were not union

cyanydeez• 3 years ago

The next generation won't even know what a fake crowd scene looks like.

FireBeyond2• 3 years ago

Yeah, this is just SAG-AFTRA acting as the union it is, trying to protect jobs for its members. Next it'll be "Studios shouldn't be allowed to use CGI as long as there is a SAG member willing to play that role."

xwowsersx• 3 years ago

A few questions since I'm clearly missing some basics here: 1) we've had CGI for a long time, right? What's new here is using AI to automatically generate the CGI so some CGI designer doesn't need to go and generate the whole thing by hand? 2) There has to be better CGI than that second row of "people" in the clip here, no? I mean this is so bad, but there is or will be AI that can do way, way better than this, no? Perhaps not enough to cross the uncanny valley, but what we're seeing in this clip is just comedically awful, obviously.

jncfhnb2• 3 years ago

This is not AI generated. This film is not worth the effort to do good CGI and that’s about the short of it. These characters are probably reused from some other context where they would be much further away. The thing that makes them look so awful here isn’t the rendering (which is bad) but the fact that they’re animated in a way that clearly uses an awkwardly small amount of bones. E.g. their fingers don’t move. And their faces.

We can surely do better CGI. But it might not be worth the cost here. To be clear, a background actor probably is worth the cost here because they are incredibly cheap.

AI could bridge this gap in both quality and cost though. Just need better tooling

jncfhnb2• 3 years ago

Ughhhh

this is not AI generated nor is it “capturing background actor likeness”. The guild needs to stop pushing this stupid argument. It’s not going to help anyone. Background actor likeness DOES NOT MATTER. It is not a valuable asset. This is digging their own grave. Those protections would not have avoided this at all.

gedy• 3 years ago

Yeah if anything it's a sign of directors making changes in post production vs reshooting the scene. Looks like a "we need more excitement in this scene, add some people", etc tweaking

simbolit• 3 years ago

The website claims cookies for 890 different adtech vendors as covered by the "legitimate interest" clause. Eighthundred-and-ninety.

yomly• 3 years ago

off topic, but if I view using incognito then just click YES or REJECT ALL->confirm is that a way to escape this madness? Or should I just nope out of pages like this, seems like the content was pointless anyway

ganzuul• 3 years ago

It really disturbed me that I could not distinguish between CGI and YouTube compression artifacts during a stream of one of the key moments of SpaceX's technology demonstrations, some years ago. The scene composition seemed artificial but that could also have been over-eager production.

It made me think deeply about the Moon landing conspiracy theory, and mankind's transition from mythos to logos.

Disney Mocked for Ludicrously Fake CGI "Actors" in Crowd Scene

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