This website is a no-AI zone. All of our horrible ideas and views are human. You can probably tell this from our low SEO performance to our lack of followers on Facebook and X. But we are the genuine bad article. Whether we succeed or fail is on us. But we don’t complain about AI, for it is no threat to us if we don’t use it. Which leads us to the issue at hand.
Tilly Norwood had all millionaire actors horrified. Even the ones who had been acting in front of a green screen or in a studio booth for a voiceover for a computer-generated animation movie. And they would be right to be worried. Tilly will always turn up as long as her programmer does. Tilly won’t get more expensive when she gets popular. However, Tilly is not groundbreaking. There was no groundbreaking moment in this evolution. It was actually a very slow march away from sets, proper period costumes, actors who looked the part (unlike Robert De Niro in The Irishman) and models replaced by CGI.
We should also reserve our sympathy for famous actors in the same way they had sympathy for the video game actors who had to politely stand by as Hollywood stars took their roles in major video games. I don’t recall at any time that Hollywood actors who participated in these games for motion capture had a single problem with they likeness being used to do all the moves and acton that a stunt double needed to be hired for. Indeed, the stunt double had to go home without a paycheck on that. I guess we saved them from the risk of that. And did anyone think of the poor developer who worked 70-80 hours a week or the action coordinator who was diminished in his role as the computer could merely churn out all of this faster than the coordinator could even think. No, actors from Hollywood took the additional paycheck. The PS4 and PS5 were littered with these games, and each new game had a bigger name. Did it have artistic merit for the actor who was already set up financially for life? Or was it an extra paycheck with easy money at that. Learn your lines, be motion captured and get in the booth and stand in front of the green screen. The games didn’t hold on to showing you this. One of the vital pieces of any game is the ‘behind the scenes’ to show you how much the developer was spending to bring in these A-listers. The gaming industry helped this along. Soon, they won’t need the IP. Soon, Tilly and her brood are going to be the next big stars. Only politics and pay hold them back at the moment.
Tilly and AI are not to blame here. They are the next step in movie-making. The audience accepted and even praised the innovations of the past. The actors embraced it, too, while they were still making a profit from it. But Tilly won’t get tired. Tilly won’t sue. Tilly won’t say anything stupid independently, and Tilly won’t be blighted by scandal. You may really hate this new evolution as much as the green screen and GCI in general but the audience voted to pursue this new way of doing things.
Actors and their little (video) games
When great directors (and probably the best ever) like Martin Scorsese use anti-ageing software instead of using several actors to play young and old versions of the same person, you had to have known a line was being crossed. That line was clearly seen on the footpath when De Niro’s Frank Sheeran beat up the grocery store manager. Rather than admit defeat and bring in a younger man, they left ‘that’ scene in. This is why we have video game ideas. We are picking at the corpse.
It looked awful but we praised the movie. Tilly Norwood won’t make it but she is the mother and her children will be your future entertainment. Enjoy but history needs to be read correctly. It didn’t start with Tilly Norwood. It was a gradual mission creep. It was to make movies faster and more epic with CGI and to compensate for real-world events (like Henry Cavill’s moustache avoiding CGI). It was to entertain the masses and give them what they wanted. AI actors won’t have any traction if there is a rejection by the mass audience. But CGI tells us they will go just fine. It might be a little embarrassing to give them an award, but I am sure there is a way to squeeze them in.