ThaOGDreamWeaver

Farewell to a legend. A voice that shook the galaxy. And, incidentally, one of the finest actors of his or any other generation. He took up acting after finding that reciting poetry helped him beat a crippling stammer - again, showing the value of smart and sympathetic teachers. After military service, headed for NYC, Jim hooked up with a crowd of young actors, and started making a name for himself. He took hefty Shakespearean roles alongside the likes of Christopher Plummer - not just Othello, but Lear, Claudius, Oberon, all the big shots. Moviewise he got lucky early on as well - that's a young trim James as Slim Pickens' bombardier in Dr. Strangelove, following it up with an Oscar nom for Great White Hope. He was also one of the first guest actors on Sesame Street, doing some of their test films while they were developing the series. And once you hit Star Wars... well, things just took off from there. Although I didn't know until today he was uncredited for the first two flicks on their original release, as he thought he was "just another special effect." As I've mentioned on another thread, there never needs to be another Darth Vader: he licensed his voice to Respeecher. But to be honest, I'm not sure there ever could. So. To a great actor, a king amongst men (and lions), and the guy who scared the living [redacted] out of me at age three... ...rest well in the light of the Force.

FYI, Keaton & co's return (don't call it a comeback) is a palpable hit... https://on.ft.com/3MwNcPl And if you'd like to read a rather nice, laidback interview with the man himself, have a look below. https://on.ft.com/3MwNcPl

Prompted by a thread on, well, Threads... ...which characters would you transplant from any particular show to any other favourite show? Way before any Multiversal malarkey, great characters can and do show up more or less anywhere. Like the late great Richard Belzer's Det. John Munch, who started on Homicide, then scored a transfer up to NYC on Law & Order. But he's also been at home in 30 Rock, Deadpool comics, X-Files, Luther, Kimmy Schmidt, Sesame Street, The Wire, A Very Brady Sequel, and many others. So following on from the Threads thread about X-Files and Trek: regardless of how she got there (Cryonics? Time Travel? Alien portals?) Admiral Dana Scully is now close to retirement as head of Starfleet Engineering Medical Corps, with a fleet of three specialised flying field hospitals.

Ah... if Chris Ford and Jon Watts (Spidey: Homecoming) are writing this, I'm feeling a lot more positive about the whole deal. Spoilery stuff...

Never seen it before, instantly loving/loathing Alan Tudyk in full smarm mode. Not sure how many stories you could go with around cape insurance, as it's not a profession fondly looked on Stateside. (Kind of SuperHMOs, I suppose). They changed this to be Wayne Security, which specialises in creating self-defence devices for hapless citizens. Much better ACME gag potential and doesn't instantly make you hate the cast. Plus it's already in-world, and provides for a neat bait-and-switch with Alan's character being a different Wayne. If you can stand having your ad blocker turned off, there's a lot more episodes on DailyMotion... (https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7yiwnh?retry if the frame doesn't load) And having looked on Wikipedia, the series did have some really nice ideas. However, the series got in trouble with ratings and was pulled after nine episodes, and had variable script quality. BTW... one of the many Marvel projects was supposed to be a Damage Control series, and I could see that being a lot of fun with a similar cast. (Think the world's most dangerous garbage trucking job combined with Warehouse 13 style investigations when stuff goes missing).

Small thing #2: I dunno who's doing the marketing for this, but they're good. I mean, I'm quivering with antici...

I'm not sure AI will ever replace acting. But it might eventually replace language dubbing and ADR. In my line of work, I'm starting to regularly get punted a number of re-voxing technologies. https://www.rask.ai/ is an auto-translator that can voiceclone you and then use your voice phonemes to speak other languages. I think it would be fine for short clips at the moment, like news or viral clips. However, one of the creative folks we work with laid into me for even taking the meeting, and then helped me dig why, by running a show through it into French. Aside from being oddly choppy, there's enough misuse of accents, phonemes and pacing to give it away as AI. That can be learned. What's trickier is that it's doing a very literal translation of each sentence, in a way that doesn't necessarily fit with the destination language, or the action it's covering. (My favourite example of this is that there aren't many French swearwords you can draw out, so a specific scene in Pulp Fiction uses three expletives to cover one very long one.) https://www.respeecher.com/, which m'learned coll' mentions above, works differently. Let's say you were doing, I don't know, the French localisation for Star Wars: Outlaws, and you're doing Vader's voice. (Which oddly enough, they didn't use JEJ's actual voice for - he's permanently licensed it to Lucasfilm. NO-ONE ELSE WILL EVER BE VADER ON SCREEN.) What you do is you record a performance first, putting as much suitable menace into the pacing as you can muster. Then some clever Ukrainian AI types take your phonemes apart, replace it with the equivalent ones from the destination actor, and give it a manual polish. Presto: your words are being spoken by the Dark Lord Of The Sith himself. You can also try out some of this stuff for free on https://elevenlabs.io/ and others. All of which gives me a headache... now audio nerds like me are being asked to find ways of spotting faked audio, both to protect the original authors and prevent ad fraud. Fun.

[looks up briefly from PUBG Mobile] ...nope, never heard of it. It's a crowded market these days, and the only one that piqued my attention briefly was SW: Hunters. It's decent, the mobile port's pretty good, and it had a quite serious marketing spend behind it (as well as being connected with that IP). Oh, and it's free, with the usual paw out for Battle Passes and skins and such. But none of the characters really suited my playstyle, and some of the jokier elements don't really land. Not a complete load of bantha poddu by any means but not my cup of blue milk.

Today's #tarot cards: Death and the Two of Wands. Evil laughter soundtrack not included...

You can also recast key roles - and get different performances- if someone’s too expensive. Or, for that matter, just too difficult to work with. (eg: the “no-a**hole” rule instituted by Feige…) …ouch. Adding an edit here for context - but spoilered for Alien:Romulus...

I believe that's how the Taurus awards work, although the "Hardest Hit" category suggests otherwise... A "Stunt Ensemble" technical Oscar would do the trick for that, as it covers everyone from performers to riggers to safety crews. Dragging this back on topic... I finally caught the flick last night and...

Not strictly a comic book/nerd movie topic, but... California has recently passed two AI bills, AB2602 - preventing studios from using a performer's likeness or even movements without consent for AI recreations - so covering MoCap as well - and AB1836, which covers dead performers in the same way, passing the rights to their estate. (FYI: that uncanny-valley horror in Rogue One may have been an insult to Peter Cushing's memory, but LucasFilm did seek permission from his heirs first. Not everybody does.) TBH, I'm not sure studios should be using generative AI in that way at all. I'm sure the quality will improve exponentially over time with learning, but it's still much more expensive than actually hiring an actor. And if the original actor has passed away, giving somebody new a crack at it can add to that performance rather than trying to teach a machine how to be a bad copy. What do you lot think about deepcloning in movies? Do you want to see a digital Hugh Jackman being Wolverine until he's ninety (or more)?

Quick thing… in the new trailer, Joe Locke’s mouth is erased by a CGI rune when he tells Agatha his name, and he’s just credited as “Teen”.* 1) Do we think that’s just for this trailer, or an actual plot point that he CAN’T speak his own name? 2) Who do we think he is? There’s a rumour he might be Billy Kaplan, aka "Wiccan", who's a reborn Billy Maximoff - but in this series, I wouldn’t trust anything or anyone. *oh, and his IMDB character page has been erased. Which gave me a laugh…

Yep. 🐿️ Okay, maybe a little bit more detail. If you’ve played Goat Simulator or Untitled Goose Game, there are a few similarities - but your fluffy avatar isn’t purely mischievous and has a (short) plot and missions. It’s also more of a platformer, and playing with physics gets more interesting when you can fly by Uzi. The game is quite short and at the moment quite glitchy - hopefully patches are coming soon - but nonetheless fun. Next up: Labradors with Lasers?

Kodaline - Brand New Day

There is a Taurus World Stunt Awards (founded by one of the guys from Red Bull, oddly enough), and the SAG Awards have one for Best Crew. And yes, some folks think the industry might go for increasingly wild and dangerous stunts if there was an award (stunt crews are crazy, sure, but not suicidal). However, there is also a certain sniffiness at the Academy that movies are supposed to be art, dahlink.

You Quite right. You didn't have to explain "p*gging" after the first one. And I would never have shown those two that mov... *blink* ...hold on one chicken-fried minute here, how come their dad asked them to ask me?

Nerd joke level… astronomical. …let’s see how many of you dig that one.

The Borg must have assimilated a developer in the past, and are keeping weekly offline backup Queens. This is also why they never attack on weekends, or even deploy on a Friday.

Sick burn.

I seem to remember Coulson wisecracking about SHIELD being the only secret org that has branded everything. Two options for successful movie spycraft: The Classic: Make sure no-one's looking at you The Bond: Make sure everyone's looking at you (but not where they should be looking, and/or not for the right reasons) Given the opening scenes seem to be in a club or casino, I think it's Door #2.