“Mangold would "shoot Harrison on a Monday as, you know, a 79-year-old playing a 35-year-old, and I could see dailies by Wednesday with his head already replaced."
They must be thinking of the age he was (roughly) in the first two movies, with 1936 and 1935 settings (respectively). He'd be 35 or 36 for Temple, and 36 or 37 for Raiders.
I've watched Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, with Owen Wilson acting like the usual Woody Allen insert. Good actors can convincingly imitate other actors.
Why use an insert when you already have the real thing? Like the rest of the movie has Ford in it, so why not just have him act the first part - you'd have to hire another actor to play the first whatever minutes?
On first principles, this is unfortunate. A good example of how technology enables the old to maintain a grip on power. I generally like Harrison Ford and his movies, but deciding to continue with this franchise feels wrong, somehow. Undignified. Similar to Biden running again or Feinstein (or RGB!) not retiring.
Real politicians being elected and leading people in real life is not similar to a movie studio trying to squeeze money from a nostalgic audience for a pure luxury purchase that no one has to buy.
Film and TV is a multi billion dollar industry that produces, whether purposeful or not, whether with nefarious intentions or not, mass media propaganda, memes and narratives that millions of people around the world consume, and which then informs their views on and understanding of the world, history, culture, the human condition etc. To say their is no power involved in this process is naive.
"... the father of public relations". His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He worked for dozens of major American corporations including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and nonprofit organizations.
Of his many books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) gained special attention as early efforts to define and theorize the field of public relations. Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and Sigmund Freud (his own double uncle), he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and he outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desired ways."
Marc Bernays Randolph - an American tech entrepreneur, advisor and speaker.[1] He is the cofounder and first CEO of Netflix.
Another paternal great-uncle of Randolph was Edward Bernays, an Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda.
Analogies compare dissimilar things with a common attribute
Up to you to figure out the context or point out how there are no common attributes, or just how you don’t understand it for clarification, there’s almost never a reason to unilaterally correct a person making an analogy
He's said it's the last time he will play the character, and that he won't be involved with the upcoming TV show. In a quite stern way, saying he "expects that it will be the last time you see the character", i.e. making sure that future digital resurrections will get bad press for going against his will.
4 should have been a hand-off to a grown up Short Round, who'd carry the franchise from there. '60s geopolitics were full of conflicts and great power games in relatively-wild regions featuring the ruins of cool ancient civilizations and such, would have been great. Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, some stuff going down in South America, tons of fertile soil for '60s-updated Indy. Put it in the early 60s and Short Round ("Actually, I go by Wan Li these days—Junior.") could start at about the same (fictional) age Indy did in the first three movies.
De-aging doesn't really work when the actors have the tonus of a 80yo like in The Irishman. You get those young looking actors that are mostly static, slow moving and struggling to stand up.
Lucasfilm/Disney is hoping positive reviews of this tech will allow them to make unlimited CGI/AI/Deepfake movies in the future starring any actor from the past at any age, eliminating the need for an actor's involvement beyond a likeness rights contract.
Generative AI will bring about widespread deflation in the cost of entertainment… which will be great for society. Can’t really put the genie back in the bottle once it’s out.
Why even pay licensing fees to existing actors? Just create your own personas to repackage. Of course there’s some value in the immediate term to using recognizable likenesses, but not likely to be a longer lived trend.
We can look back 10, 20, 100 years and easily recognize the huge benefits technology has brought to society, and still whenever something new gets created there are people that will fight it tooth and nail over very shortsighted concerns.
The only deflation will occur for the producers and corporate owners. You, me, and everyone else will pay the same prices while 95% of these who went into making movies will be unemployed.
Look up what a “competitive market” is, and the implications on cost to the consumer.
To be more direct, if content is cheap for everyone to produce, then they will have to compete on price to get consumers to engage with their content. This is obvious from both historical record and first principles.
Look at margins in any mature industry with high levels of competition.
Its also clear from history that unemployment created by technology gets absorbed into other types of roles. How can the US have close to an all time low unemployment rate after the industrial revolution obviated so many factory jobs?
People who fight technology have no understanding of history. Some lose, most win
>> Look up what a “competitive market” is, and the implications on cost to the consumer.
I'll pass since I have more important things to do.
I've worked with the industry (entertainment that is) and it is graft covered in glitz. Trust me, the major studios including Netflix all collude with one another. They'll use AI to drive down their costs while slowly creeping up their streaming fees.
Deflation for me and not for thee is the name of the game, especially when it comes to AI.
Or will it lead to an increase in the quality of the results?
Anyone can make a very funny homemade movie on a shoestring budget in their backyard... But those aren't the movies that earn all the profits.
Entertainment is a battle for attention, and whoever spends most tends to win most attention. And the amount you can spend depends on your expected revenue, which in turn is some chunk of everyone's entertainment budgets.
So... If you invent a clever way to make movies cheaper... It won't make movies cheaper to make - it will just make the resulting films more elaborate.
The two are effectively the same. If you produce a more valuable good with the same or fewer inputs, thats deflationary in real terms.
There will always be content across the quality spectrum. Look at the hundreds of videos of Presidents playing video games or harry potter by balenciaga on youtube. These would never exist at this scale without generative AI due to level of effort required to create them versus ability to monetize the result.
Suddenly many types of content are able to be created in a rapid and cost efficient way that weren’t previously possible. Greater supply of content versus roughly neutral demand leads to lower prices (on average)
I wonder if it will extend to generating off-screen content like interviews and paparazzi photos.
I think you're right though, it will happen. Probably in some cheap corner where it makes economic sense, then to the bigger roles. Perhaps you don't want to manage thousands of extras for battle scenes, paying them and feeding them. Just generate them. Then eventually you also end up doing away with minor speaking roles, then the big ones.
The plot can also be generated. If you like fantasy, the AI can generate a new world for you with its own lore.
Fully generated and high quality voice acting for games. Likely much more realism and ease to open world generation, without using traditional procedural generation techniques or hand creating everything.
Extras in movies and TV shows adding realism on a low budget. Voice overs of all kind.
Virtual friends who give you attention without asking for anything in return. Human like AI to play games with.
Content is the most important and impactful thing in the average person’s life as it relates to leisure. The impact of mass deflation and an explosion in both quality and quantity of content shouldn’t be underestimated.
Much of society’s problems can be solved by raising standards of living and giving people the means to live a more enjoyable life on less money.
> Generative AI will bring about widespread deflation in the cost of entertainment… which will be great for society.
Really, that's what we need, cheaper entertainment? You can already be entertained effectively infinitely at zero marginal cost with YouTube or a streaming service that costs $10/month. Most of us already probably spend more time on such entertainment than is beneficial for us. I don't see how cheaper entertainment will be of any use to anyone.
It won't just be cheaper entertainment. It'll be cheaper "literally every video content that includes humans".
I suspect this will result in an increased production value or quality of the lower tiers the same way that cheap camera/mic hardware and good/cheap software upped the production value of your average hobbyist tier youtube channel.
I have concerns about how technology is affecting our entertainment right now.
Forget the future, I'm talking about the Netflix/YouTube, etc. Obviously it's not all bad, there's amazing stuff out there.
But the professionally produced stuff? I don't want my entertainment produced from focus grouping and number crunching. I want entertainment that challenges me and makes me think, shows me something I haven't seen or felt before. The machine ain't solving for that.
I was thinking about this the other day as my family was watching the Obi Wan TV show.
Darth Vader is in it, and he's a composite of I think only two actors this time; Hayden Christensen doing the physical performance, and a James Earl Jones-trained voice filter on him when he was in full costume. James Earl Jones got a line in the credits, but I'm not sure he read any lines.
Got me wondering if LLM technology and its successors might yield fictional character/actor composites that no longer correspond to physical people anymore, Hatsune Miku, or Gorillaz-style. If there will be a time when Darth Vader is credited as being performed by Darth Vader. He already is a composite as it stands.
I know James Earl Jones last year before fully retired worked in doing a lot of vocal donation for tools like this for probably exactly what you’re stating
Harrison Ford keep saying this is the last one with Indiana Jones. It seems like he must have been careful to avoid signing over the rights to have a virtual Harrison Ford. At the very least he would be against it. I guess he's deep. Fake characters are going to get good enough that we can't tell them part and I'll be cheaper eventually than paying a real actor. And I don't look forward to that.
I imagine this technology is only going to get better - I suspect it won't be long before Harrison Ford appears in dozens of movies every year even after his death.
What makes you think that isn't the ultimate goal? Little by little CGI will cross more lines. Fully virtual actors are probably the wet dream of Hollywood.
I don't know what it is that makes Harrison Ford a star, but he attracts attention. People go see movies just because he's in it. He's a talented actor, but that's almost incidental. Plenty of stars are poor actors by almost any measure, but people nonetheless love to look at them on screen.
Hollywood has a certain talent for manufacturing stardom, but it's still far from a science. They can't turn just anybody into a star, and most of the people they put up for stardom fizzle out. We have no idea how many potential stars are waiting tables and doing the occasional hemorrhoid commercial.
When they do find it, they latch on. So they put up "de-aged" Harrison Ford rather than a younger actor, even though the audience consciously knows they're not looking at Harrison Ford. It'll have his voice, which helps, but there's more to it.
Some day, somebody will figure out how to make a completely digital actor with "it", whatever "it" is. All hell is gonna break loose that day.
For the most part, John de Lancies' young Q in Star Trek Picard was very convincing. We're fast approaching where this tech gets over the uncanny valley.
55 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Jones_(character)#:~:t...).
“Mangold would "shoot Harrison on a Monday as, you know, a 79-year-old playing a 35-year-old, and I could see dailies by Wednesday with his head already replaced."
Let go, man.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
"... the father of public relations". His best-known campaigns include a 1929 effort to promote female smoking by branding cigarettes as feminist "Torches of Freedom", and his work for the United Fruit Company in the 1950s, connected with the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government in 1954. He worked for dozens of major American corporations including Procter & Gamble and General Electric, and for government agencies, politicians, and nonprofit organizations.
Of his many books, Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928) gained special attention as early efforts to define and theorize the field of public relations. Citing works of writers such as Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Trotter, Walter Lippmann, and Sigmund Freud (his own double uncle), he described the masses as irrational and subject to herd instinct—and he outlined how skilled practitioners could use crowd psychology and psychoanalysis to control them in desired ways."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Randolph
Marc Bernays Randolph - an American tech entrepreneur, advisor and speaker.[1] He is the cofounder and first CEO of Netflix. Another paternal great-uncle of Randolph was Edward Bernays, an Austrian-American pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda.
Up to you to figure out the context or point out how there are no common attributes, or just how you don’t understand it for clarification, there’s almost never a reason to unilaterally correct a person making an analogy
Instead we got... what we got.
Tell me you're under 30 without telling me you're under 30.
"INDIANA JONES AND THE RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xQSIdSRlAk
Something uncanny about his face. Takes me out of the scene.
What's the point of making the faces look young when the rest doesn't add up.
Generative AI will bring about widespread deflation in the cost of entertainment… which will be great for society. Can’t really put the genie back in the bottle once it’s out.
Why even pay licensing fees to existing actors? Just create your own personas to repackage. Of course there’s some value in the immediate term to using recognizable likenesses, but not likely to be a longer lived trend.
We can look back 10, 20, 100 years and easily recognize the huge benefits technology has brought to society, and still whenever something new gets created there are people that will fight it tooth and nail over very shortsighted concerns.
To be more direct, if content is cheap for everyone to produce, then they will have to compete on price to get consumers to engage with their content. This is obvious from both historical record and first principles.
Look at margins in any mature industry with high levels of competition.
Its also clear from history that unemployment created by technology gets absorbed into other types of roles. How can the US have close to an all time low unemployment rate after the industrial revolution obviated so many factory jobs?
People who fight technology have no understanding of history. Some lose, most win
I'll pass since I have more important things to do.
I've worked with the industry (entertainment that is) and it is graft covered in glitz. Trust me, the major studios including Netflix all collude with one another. They'll use AI to drive down their costs while slowly creeping up their streaming fees.
Deflation for me and not for thee is the name of the game, especially when it comes to AI.
adam_arthur is living in a just-world Liberian dream world where markets are free and fair. They never are.
Or will it lead to an increase in the quality of the results?
Anyone can make a very funny homemade movie on a shoestring budget in their backyard... But those aren't the movies that earn all the profits.
Entertainment is a battle for attention, and whoever spends most tends to win most attention. And the amount you can spend depends on your expected revenue, which in turn is some chunk of everyone's entertainment budgets.
So... If you invent a clever way to make movies cheaper... It won't make movies cheaper to make - it will just make the resulting films more elaborate.
There will always be content across the quality spectrum. Look at the hundreds of videos of Presidents playing video games or harry potter by balenciaga on youtube. These would never exist at this scale without generative AI due to level of effort required to create them versus ability to monetize the result.
Suddenly many types of content are able to be created in a rapid and cost efficient way that weren’t previously possible. Greater supply of content versus roughly neutral demand leads to lower prices (on average)
I think you're right though, it will happen. Probably in some cheap corner where it makes economic sense, then to the bigger roles. Perhaps you don't want to manage thousands of extras for battle scenes, paying them and feeding them. Just generate them. Then eventually you also end up doing away with minor speaking roles, then the big ones.
The plot can also be generated. If you like fantasy, the AI can generate a new world for you with its own lore.
Fully generated and high quality voice acting for games. Likely much more realism and ease to open world generation, without using traditional procedural generation techniques or hand creating everything.
Extras in movies and TV shows adding realism on a low budget. Voice overs of all kind.
Virtual friends who give you attention without asking for anything in return. Human like AI to play games with.
Content is the most important and impactful thing in the average person’s life as it relates to leisure. The impact of mass deflation and an explosion in both quality and quantity of content shouldn’t be underestimated.
Much of society’s problems can be solved by raising standards of living and giving people the means to live a more enjoyable life on less money.
Uh, seriously? You actually want this?
Really, that's what we need, cheaper entertainment? You can already be entertained effectively infinitely at zero marginal cost with YouTube or a streaming service that costs $10/month. Most of us already probably spend more time on such entertainment than is beneficial for us. I don't see how cheaper entertainment will be of any use to anyone.
I suspect this will result in an increased production value or quality of the lower tiers the same way that cheap camera/mic hardware and good/cheap software upped the production value of your average hobbyist tier youtube channel.
This is a good point to reference the Al Pacino movie S1m0ne (2002). (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258153/)
Forget the future, I'm talking about the Netflix/YouTube, etc. Obviously it's not all bad, there's amazing stuff out there.
But the professionally produced stuff? I don't want my entertainment produced from focus grouping and number crunching. I want entertainment that challenges me and makes me think, shows me something I haven't seen or felt before. The machine ain't solving for that.
Darth Vader is in it, and he's a composite of I think only two actors this time; Hayden Christensen doing the physical performance, and a James Earl Jones-trained voice filter on him when he was in full costume. James Earl Jones got a line in the credits, but I'm not sure he read any lines.
Got me wondering if LLM technology and its successors might yield fictional character/actor composites that no longer correspond to physical people anymore, Hatsune Miku, or Gorillaz-style. If there will be a time when Darth Vader is credited as being performed by Darth Vader. He already is a composite as it stands.
When too for the Marvel cast?
https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1821641/
I don't know what it is that makes Harrison Ford a star, but he attracts attention. People go see movies just because he's in it. He's a talented actor, but that's almost incidental. Plenty of stars are poor actors by almost any measure, but people nonetheless love to look at them on screen.
Hollywood has a certain talent for manufacturing stardom, but it's still far from a science. They can't turn just anybody into a star, and most of the people they put up for stardom fizzle out. We have no idea how many potential stars are waiting tables and doing the occasional hemorrhoid commercial.
When they do find it, they latch on. So they put up "de-aged" Harrison Ford rather than a younger actor, even though the audience consciously knows they're not looking at Harrison Ford. It'll have his voice, which helps, but there's more to it.
Some day, somebody will figure out how to make a completely digital actor with "it", whatever "it" is. All hell is gonna break loose that day.
Body movement by Jackie Bradshaw.
Facial acting and expressions from Tony Armstrong.
Nose performance (closeups) by Vic Ganderton.
Hands: Industrial Light & Magic