brainwagon

I have a love/hate relationship with Slashdot. They do occasionally point me at interesting stories, some of which I shamelessly swipe for this site. But often they post stories with an editorial slant which doesn’t even border on absurd. No better example can be the story today entitled
Will CGI Collapse the Hollywood Economy?

The basic premise that "CmdrTaco" seems to be stuck on is that the decreasing cost of computer animation will eventually put all sorts of people out of work. All the camera men, costumers, casting companies, and model makers will be put out of business.

It’s absurd.

The single biggest fallacy of this is that computer graphics and effects are inexpensive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Animation is expensive, almost by design. It is insanely labor intensive, and labor is the single biggest expense in any movie production. Far from eliminating human labor, animation amplifies human labor.

The second biggest fallacy is that animated films decrease the need for actors. Ed Catmull once expressed it to me this way. Let’s imagine that you have a totally autonomous thinking machine that can be directed with simple verbal commands, has the capability for independent thought, and is capable with interacting with its environment in a completely physical way in real time. We actually don’t need to wait for the latest breakthrough in artificial intelligence to see this, we have them already. They are called people. So, imagine you are the director.
You tell your autonomous agent to “act funny, kind of like Robin Williams”. How many people are able to handle this kind of direction and create an interesting performance?

To make humans obsolete in movie making, we pretty much need to make humans obsolete period. Frankly, I don’t see that happening very soon, so I am not particularly worried about it.

Thirdly, the idea that animation makes for smaller crew sizes is highly suspect. One need look no further than the crew sizes on films like Monsters Inc. or Shrek to be convinced that small crew sizes aren’t exactly a given.

There is little doubt that computer graphics are making certain kinds of effects and productions more feasible, and allowing the delivery of films which have visuals that exceed what have been capable in the past. If we look at LotR, one could ask how this movie could ever have been made before. The answer is simple: it couldn’t. But LotR wasn’t particularly inexpensive to make, nor did it have a particularly small crew size.

People fear change in the short term, and don’t understand it in the long term. Computer graphics will change the way that movies are made, but Hollywood realizes this, and it will succeed in changing with it.
If I were an actor, I wouldn’t be especially worried, at least not beyond the usual worries that actors have about making a living in a field in which probably less that one percent make a living wage.