{"id":3514,"date":"2015-05-02T21:24:58","date_gmt":"2015-05-02T21:24:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=3514"},"modified":"2016-08-15T02:46:47","modified_gmt":"2016-08-15T02:46:47","slug":"will-more-dead-actors-be-coming-to-a-theater-near-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/will-more-dead-actors-be-coming-to-a-theater-near-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Will more dead actors be coming to a theater near you?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Peter Krapp<\/a>, University of California, Irvine<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

On November 30 2013, actor Paul Walker died in a car crash before filming of Furious 7 was complete. The accident meant the franchise\u2019s filmmakers had to resort to workarounds to finish scenes featuring Walker. This was made possible by combining footage from outtakes with the construction of a \u201cdigital mask\u201d of the dead actor\u2019s features, which was projected onto motion captured by Paul Walker\u2019s brothers Cody and Caleb, who have similar builds.<\/p>\n

Casting actors after they\u2019ve died is nothing new, and neither is the use of many digital tools in film making. The real question is how the acting profession and the audience will react if this practice were to become more commonplace.<\/p>\n

From editing to animation<\/h2>\n

Three techniques are currently used to \u201cre-cast\u201d actors after they\u2019ve passed away. The simplest is the juxtaposition of older and newer footage. Outtakes of Larry Hagman\u2019s performance as JR Ewing from the TV soap opera Dallas (1978-1991, 2010-2014) allowed him to appear in episodes not actually filmed until after his death. However in the case of The Sopranos (1999-2007), the same trick lacked emotional depth. Livia Soprano was played by actress Nancy Marchand, who died in 2000, and HBO ultimately decided to give her character an off-screen death.<\/p>\n

A second approach, rotoscoping<\/a>, allows clever montages using footage from different eras, showing living and dead performers together in the same shot. Notable examples include Bruce Lee in a recent Johnny Walker whisky ad, or Natalie Cole\u2019s Grammy-winning duet<\/a> with her late father Nat King Cole. A famous Coca Cola ad<\/a> from the same year featured Elton John and put the deceased Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and Louis Armstrong in his audience.<\/p>\n

Rotoscoping was used to \u2018resurrect\u2019 Bruce Lee in this 2013 Johnnie Walker advertisement.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The third and most complex technique involves the computer recreation of someone\u2019s likeness (facial expressions, skin textures and hair modeling) to create synthetic actors. One landmark of this technological feat was The Lord of the Rings’ Gollum (2001-2003). Computer graphics fleshed out the character as played by actor Andy Serkis, who wore a motion capture body suit.<\/p>\n

Oliver Reed died of a heart attack before finishing his role in Gladiator (2000), but computer graphics allowed his image to be recreated. The same is being done with Philip Seymour Hoffman\u2019s character in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay \u2013 Part 2, set to be released later this year.<\/p>\n

Actor Andy Serkis wore a motion capture body suit to create the character Gollum.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Innovations in computer graphics key<\/h2>\n

The high-tech reconstruction of Paul Walker for his uncompleted scenes in Furious 7 is a remarkable feat. But it hardly comes as a surprise given the development of computer graphics, from the early line graphics of the 1960s to the two-dimensional surfaces with simple lighting effects that give the illusion of 3D in the 70s and 80s (1982\u2019s Tron<\/a> is one of the earliest efforts to create a feature length film on a computer).<\/p>\n

Other milestones include the wireframe spaceships in Star Wars (1977-1983) and the particle rendering that has propelled Pixar to success since Toy Story (1995). But just as important is the demand for immersive graphics in computer gaming, which has driven innovation in chip design and animation software.<\/p>\n

Over the past 20 years, accelerating cross-fertilization between computer graphics and film and television has taken place \u2013 from the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park (1994) and the video game Doom (1994), to movies like Wall-E (2008) and the video game Mass Effect 3 (2012).<\/p>\n

Simply put, without the rapidly scaling demands of computer games, today\u2019s special effect movies simply wouldn\u2019t be possible.<\/p>\n

What are the implications for dead actors?<\/h2>\n

As anyone who watches Furious 7 will notice, it pivots on competition between the old and the new \u2013 between a predator drone and a 60s muscle car, between an omniscient surveillance chip and urban street savvy. The film, which can be seen as a sentimental tribute to Paul Walker, is poignant also in its juxtaposition of new and old questions about what audiences expect from film stars.<\/p>\n

Whose body and whose face is it there on the screen? Who holds the rights to these images, to these performances? Tom Cruise was recorded performing in a motion capture suit for the movie Oblivion (2013), but after it opened in theaters, Cruise acquired the rights<\/a> to all data recorded during his performance. It\u2019s unknown whether he did this to enable future use or to prevent future use, but less established actors might not have as much clout in this kind of decision.<\/p>\n

And then there is the question of what will prove acceptable to the fan base of an actor (and of a movie franchise). To what extent are the re-animators of Paul Walker bound by public perception of the actor? And to what extent are they constrained by available technology? Will other filmmakers resort to casting from the beyond, and how will audiences react?<\/p>\n

Ultimately, the technical and emotional range of what can be done with someone\u2019s posthumous digital recreation will be defined \u2013 and limited \u2013 by our living memory of the actor\u2019s onscreen performances.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>.
\nRead the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Peter Krapp, University of California, Irvine On November 30 2013, actor Paul Walker died in a car crash before filming of Furious 7 was complete. The accident meant the franchise\u2019s filmmakers had to resort to workarounds to finish scenes featuring Walker. This was made possible by combining footage from outtakes with the construction of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":6297,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[39,36],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3514"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3515,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514\/revisions\/3515"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6297"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}