1y ago

With Studios Attempting To Own Digital Likeness Forever, Lets Have a Look at Posthumous Performances

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

Tupac Coachella Performance

Prince Posthumous Album

Whitney Houston Hologram Tour

Anthony Bourdain Voicover

Amy Winehouse Hologram Tour

Paul Walker Furous 7

Peter Cushing Rogue 1

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

16 comments

The Bob Ross Mountain Dew video is incredibly eerie. Don’t think Bob Ross would have ever done anything like that.
- This singular example contributed to me posting this. Honestly I was enraged when I first saw it. I just don't think he would do that, but more importantly, you cannot ask him.
- Everything I'd ever read about the Bob Ross "company" that manages his used to be so protective of his likeness being used anywhere he wouldn't approve. I guess if you're offered enough money, you can become okay with anything.
  
  I doubt Bob himself would have, for any price.
- I feel dirty. That was very uncomfortable to watch.
  It's like hearing the voice of a dead relative outside your room. Just wrong.

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.

It's pretty creepy to want to use people's likeness forever, so it can be used for any purpose in the future. It's perfectly fair for these actors to be pissed.
Companies will never do the right thing without being forced to do it, it's just not in their nature. So having strikes and forcing their hand along with regulation is the only real solution

Maybe if Hollywood would stop doing endless sequels and reboots, they wouldn't need to own the digital likenesses of actors forever...

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

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.
- Same as the guy they had be Like recently. It was wild how much he looked like a young Hamil. Just let him use his real face.

I think Phillip Seymour Hoffman was all CGI in the last Hunger Games movie.
- On the case of this and Paul Walker I think it’s Ok, it’s productions they were already involved in and it’s avoiding risk to jobs etc. especially in the case of walker where they had has family involved and iirc his brother was the on set actor.
- 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.

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 …

16 comments