|
As
it appears in The New York Times Magazine's Article, "Tech 2010: A Catalogue
of The Near Future", wherein NYTimes looks at dozens of futuristic concepts
and devices that will be filtering into the mainstream of American Society
on or around year 2010.
Sunday, June11, 2000  
HEAVEN
SENT
#26:
The Dead Celebrity Who Comes Back To Life.
by
Austin Bunn
Peter
Riva is the grandson of Marlene Dietrich, and he is determined to see
her reborn. He talks about a day when a "Dietrich in a tube" will be
commercially available, when she can star as a Parisian femme fatale
who scorns Humphrey Bogart and sends him lovelorn to Morocco. She would
have wanted it that way, he says: "When the first talkie came along,
she was determined to be in it. When the makeup came, she adapted instantly.
When she lived in Paris as an older woman, she went through five VCR's
because the standard kept improving. This is somebody who didn't have
an aversion to new technology."
A
good thing, because sooner or later for all movie stars, the technology
will find them -- even after their tombstone is set. Last month's "Gladiator"
resurrected Oliver Reed, who died during the filming, for a pivotal
scene, and next winter, a pair of special-effects and animation companies,
3dMaxMedia and PentaMedia Graphics, along with Hewlett Packard, will
unveil "StarWay," a full-length motion picture starring two of India's
most famous dead celebrities, M.G.R. and Raj Kapor. (It is scheduled
for release only in India, but a version may be put on the Web.) Death
may no longer mark the conclusion of a star's career, just a pause before
rebooting.
The
resuscitation process is deceptively simple. To recreate the actors'
bodies, 3dMaxMedia compiled "motion libraries" of the actors' moves
from their films and "emotion libraries" of their expressions. Live
actors, with similar builds to M.G.R. and Kapor, studied the moves and
imitated them. These sequences were scanned into rendering machines
using "motion capture," in which sensors are placed on the body that
record tiny degrees of movement. The digital body was then adjusted
to the size and shape of the original star.
The
face, of course, is the litmus. Engineers can build close approximations
of the mien from the emotion libraries, but the trick is mastering the
"visemes" -- visual building blocks -- that constitute expression and
speech. Just synchronizing the movement of lips with speech is hard
enough. 3dMaxMedia employs an Indian dental expert to advise on the
architecture of a smile. "How many teeth should come to the front?"
says the company's chief executive, Srini Vasan. "How many to the back?
You've got to know."
3dMaxMedia
is not the first to work with deceased celebrities. Jeff Lotman, a Los
Angeles-based entrepreneur, secured the digital rights of more than
20 dead actors -- including Dietrich, W. C. Fields, and Clark Gable
-- from their estates and then licensed those rights to Virtual Celebrity,
his effects company. Three flashy demos were produced as the company's
proof-of-concept. ("Do you want to know what separates the men from
the boys?" asked Dietrich in one of them. "It's skill, and when I think
about skill I think about Virtual Celebrity.") And Lotman even batted
around the concept of a prequel to "Casablanca" with Riva and Steven
Bogart, Bogart's grandson. "I always said it would have been great to
see Dietrich win her first Academy Award," Lotman says. But after waiting
years for a project, this spring he closed Virtual Celebrity. "We loved
doing it," he says, "but there was no business for it."
Not
yet anyway. Certainly, the concept has proved very popular in advertising.
Ghosts crop up routinely in commercials: Fred Astaire dances and vacuums
with a Dirt Devil, Picasso puts the finishing touches on a B.M.W. These
aren't new creations -- they're just cut and pasted from archival footage
-- but they do illustrate the appeal of dead celebrities.
A
danger is that once digital fascimiles are made, controlling their use
might be close to impossible. James Dean could be traded like an MP3,
and end up "starring" in pornography. Legally, the field is wide open.
The Screen Actors Guild has lobbied to protect actors from digital manipulation,
but the Motion Picture Association of America aligned against it. "The
M.P.A.A. represents the money people," says Joseph J. Beard, a law professor
at St. John's University who served on the board of Virtual Celebrity,
"and if you make it more difficult for them to exploit a dead celebrity,
the M.P.A.A. will be opposed to it because it will be harder for them
to get clearances."
In
India, where the majority of the population believes in reincarnation,
Vasan feels confident his film will be a hit. Next he wants to bring
the effect to America. "We will use it to recreate Marilyn Monroe,"
he says. "Even in 25 years she will still attract people."
For
More Information Contact:
Corporate
Headquarters, Florida
Office:
2021 Westover
Reserve Blvd.
Windermere,
Florida 34786
tel: 407-295-7424,
fax:407 295-7125
email: srini@3dmaxmedia.com
Los
Angeles Office:
22212-5 Germain
Street
Chatsworth,
CA
91311
tel: 818-678-6510, fax: 818 678-6510
email:
info@3dmaxmedia.com
|
