Screen Acting - Playing Dead?
The divergence of stage and screen
You never know what you’re going to get if you go to the movies with me.
On the one hand, I am the most suspension of disbelief type individual you’re ever going to meet. Whether the story is in canon or true to the original doesn’t bother me in the least. Many of the most underrated and critically berated movies that were ever made had me entranced from start to finish. There was plenty wrong with almost every Star Wars or Marvel movie that’s ever been made, but I’ve dutifully trekked to the cinema for them all and sat through with a big grin. Of course, I’ve walked home later and gone “…erm…hmm…wait a minute…”.
But I am not terribly off put by this sort of thing.
On the other hand, a lot of single camera filming drives me bananas.
Pieces in which the camera looks at the face of one character over the shoulder of another during a conversation, so that all you see of the person with their back to you are their emotionless out of sync jaw movements wrench my attention away from the enjoyment of the piece and trigger the voice in my head to start ranting. If the characters are engaged in a meal or a drink, I find it utterly impossible to ignore the continuity anomalies of whatever is on the table!
Glasses mysteriously empty and fill themselves. Pizza slices appear and disappear…
I can’t not mention them when I see them.
You can imagine what the process on set must look like for the talent. A weird start-stop, backwards and forwards in the action as the single camera shoots one half of the dialogue then goes back, relocates and shoots the other half, with the actors recording these disjointed chunks one at a time. I suppose it requires a special sort of performance mindset to do that. The end result must look and feel very different for them when they see it. The tedium of take after take must be a drag, and the pressure of trying to maintain the same emotional delivery cannot be at all easy - hence the fact that they rarely do.
Compare that to the process of a stage play. No retakes, no gaps to cram the next few lines, actors actually acting and reacting at one another.
Live theater is of course a completely different medium to film and television, and both are entirely different media to animation or what we’re about to see emerging from the generative AI world. Imagine going into a booth and having a few snippets of sample text to read. Maybe you strip to your underwear and have a few ping-pong balls glued to yourself for a 3D scan, then get sent home before lunch. A movie appears six months later with you in it, but you never even saw the script or met the director. So much for the creatives being the last to lose their jobs to the machines.
If I am honest, I don’t really think that the majority of people will give a hoot. The monotony of soap operas and the vapid nonsense of reality TV keep so much of the population utterly entertained already that nobody is going to notice if it is suddenly replaced by nothing but pixels in a computer.
A movie of a live action play is still just a movie. There’s nothing to prevent computers from producing those too - projected onto a big screen in front of a live audience, perhaps wearing 3D glasses to achieve the impression of stage depth.
At least there would be no continuity errors, and at least those noddy shots of the backs of people’s heads would line up with the dialogue. My continuity obsessed brain would be satisfied and the SFX would be enthralling. If the character types and the plot were specifically tailored to my preferences and biases by that ever present algorithm, then it really would be a perfect night at the movie theatre.
So what then will be the point of making lousy old television shows the lousy old way?
One of the barriers to this becoming a reality right now is that although the tools for making picture perfect motion pictures with computers is not incredibly complicated, it does still come with a learning curve that’s significantly higher than simply shouting at an actor to follow a stage direction. We can all play dress-up at home and stand in front of the iPhone to make a TikTok video without needing to be members of the Screen Actors Guild or study at RADA, but that situation is somewhat similar to the way it was in music a while back. Learning to play a musical instrument and being able to afford to own a reasonable quality one were once the barriers to entry in that world, with access to professional studios and engineering facilities often stopping aspiring young artists from gaining a record contract and finding fame. The advent of relatively cheap home recording equipment and the DAW have demolished those barriers and ushered in the age of the top-ten hit made in the bedroom.
This same demolition process must surely be happening as I type in the video world.
Remove the need for makeup and costumes, sets and SFX, background music and lighting, then substitute living talent with their deep-faked alternatives and we’re maybe going to see an amazing surge of real indie movie and television making. Perhaps the writers and actors currently striking for fair pay in their world won’t even see real resolution in that struggle before the alternative begins to pop up and replace them all. Certainly the commerciality of the whole business will change when the studios and distributors lose their power to the individual creators and the big tech enablers who own the platforms and the data centers (those guys always win these days).
But will we see a purist backlash that saves the craft of acting and traditional performance?
When I was in college, the electronic pop world was beginning to be obsessed with bands like Depeche Mode and the Human League. One of the members of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark had passed through the hallowed halls of my school a few years previously, and a rich tradition of bleeps and bloops from cheap monophonic synthesizers had established itself there in his wake.
One of my peers - a person who’s name I completely forget, who had impressively tall but fragile looking hair who carried a Casio VL-1 around everywhere he went - told me that I was obsolete as a trumpet player because he could make any sound he wanted, including - or so he claimed - that of my instrument. As I explained to him at the time, although he could produce the different sounds of the instrument reasonably accurately, probably the most user-friendly interface through which to access all of the different sounds of the trumpet was going to be via something shaped a bit like a trumpet…in which case, why not simply use a trumpet.
Of course, he didn’t agree, and flounced off somewhere to write a song about the woes of not being able to find a girlfriend when you have big fragile hair and like electro-pop music, or something like that.
I am wondering whether or not a similar fate could await the next generation of synthetic movie makers. Will they surge into existence and dominate the medium for a decade then slowly fade away as people realise that dressing up and putting on makeup in front of a camera is actually something that some people really like to do.
Taking a break from a purely security focus but still wondering about the technologies that are going to shape the society of the next half century. Stay up to date with everything on Securiosity by Subscribing, all throw your hat in the ring and tell me where I’m wrong. Drop a line and let me know.