I had a thought about CGI & the future of movies and movie stars years ago (and I’m sure I wasn’t the first) and today I was reminded of it….
So, what better way to archive my thoughts than right here where I can look back and see how incorrect my predictions were! Here are some of the thoughts I have on this subject that raise some very serious questions for the future of our society.
- I’m not sure if it will be in my lifetime, but I think someday computer generated characters (movie stars) will be the majority.
- Production houses will control everything about these new age stars/celebrities. Our society will embrace these CGI characters similar to how we currently embrace human movie stars like George Clooney, Angelina Jolie etc… These CGI stars will have huge fan bases just like a human celebrity.
- These production houses will also control or partner with the tabloids and the celebrity magazines, and create complete lives for these CGI characters, increasing their visibility in our pop culture and quickly making it the norm.
- The production houses will create life stories about each character (for humans to follow and take interest in) just like we do with human celebrities today. These characters will have Britney Spears like breakdowns, DUI’s, divorces, African-baby adoptions….the full kitchen sink of what our current celebrities go through.
- Red Carpet events could be 100% digitally controlled, without ever taking place in real life. Production houses could partner with each other to produce various aspects of the event, from who arrives with who, what advertisements are shown, and what the Oscar winning speeches are like. Imagine an award ceremony where the winner isn’t being told they have 10 seconds left and they need to wrap it up as the outro music begins to play. The production would be flawless.
This is only the tip of the iceberg of my thoughts on this…and I’m sure someone out there has already discussed this, but it’s definitely an interesting topic that hit me the other day…..the more I think about it, the more I see the enormous potential for corporate America to benefit from CGI characters, not to mention members of the political game! Imagine if Rupert Murdoch owned a few of these huge CGI celebrities; there are obviously huge negatives to any sort of technological advancement like this though.
Obviously the technology used in Avatar is a really small jump off in relation to everything discussed above….but how far the CGI stuff goes is yet to be seen.
Do you know of anyone discussing this topic, or any movies or tv shows that have represented it to some point? My memory is telling me that there’s a movie out there about a female CGI character that the production company tries to turn into a real celebrity…but I’m not sure if that’s just my imagination on this topic running wild..
Would love to hear your thoughts on my general ramblings above. Please share in the comments below.