SAG-AFTRA has gone on strike for many reasons, but one that stands out to me is an effort to make digital copies of extras and maintain the rights to use them in perpetuity. There are many implications of this, from people losing an opportunity to work, to Ethical implications ex:your likeness is used in a movie/tv show/commercial you would not want to be involved in.
I wanted to take a look at some of the past examples of entertainers likeness’ being used posthumously.
Fred Astaire Vaccuum Commercial
Bob Ross Paints the Mountain Dew
Carrie Fisher Rogue 1 Turns out this is incorrect, Fisher passed after filming of Rogue 1. It was Rise of the Skywalker
There are definitly more examples out there, if you know of any, post them here.
On a personal note, I find this all to be deeply unethical without specific permission granted by the entertainer.
Some souces:
Actors are digitally preserving themselves to continue their careers beyond the grave
Dead celebrities are being digitally resurrected — and the ethics are murky
My take: Companies can not take actor’s body image «for free forever» like they are trying to do, it is just theft and illegal.
If Disney wants to , say, take Harrison Ford body and make an Indiana Jones 6 with ‘‘him’’ (an animated rendering of his body), then they have to pay royalties, negotiate a contract, etc with the person, the same way any of them would do with their IPs. In general, everybody should have their body as their own IP really, by default and retroactively. With largely the same rules as the very IPs of these mergacorporations, so they enter public domain after a while too.
PS: i really want my AI-generated Buster Keaton and OG Popeye short films …
I thought the actor who did the MoCap for Tarkin actually looked a lot like Cushing, and they could have easily aged him up with makeup.
Carrie Fisher died after the premiere of Rogue 1, so she doesn’t belong on this list.
You are absolutely correct, and I’m going to change the body of the party to reflect that.
I knew I had read about Carrie Fisher doing apostomus performance and mistook her de-aging in Rogue One as that performance. Turns out it was Rise of the Skywalker that included previously shot footage which was her posthumous performance. https://www.ign.com/articles/2019/12/31/how-was-carrie-fisher-in-star-wars-rise-of-skywalker-cgi
Unethical does not even begin to cut it. It’s firmly in horrifying territory for me.
If a construction company taxidermied their dead workers into animatronics and used those unholy puppets to perform the same job, it wouldn’t shock me more.
I think Phillip Seymour Hoffman was all CGI in the last Hunger Games movie.
Not really according to what I read. He had filmed quite a bit of his scenes, so they used what they had, with only a bit of editing. Mostly they rewrote parts of the script to account for missing scenes.
Most notably they made his final dialogue as a letter so that another character could read it.
