It’s not going to be much fun being an actor in the brave new multimedia world. Already the technology exists to create the new James Dean movie, with Marilyn Monroe, aged 36, playing his young mother, a colourised Tom Mix playing his father. Speech synthesis may not quite be up to speed when it comes to doing a naturalistic soundtrack, but that is no problem, simply sample the characteristic frequency mix of dear Marilyn’s voice, and any old voice that can mimic her speech patterns will do: a simple frequency-shifting process makes the voice sound like convincing Marilyn. All the technology already exists to do this, and already it costs no more than $50,000 to $100,000. Within the next five years or so, it will be down to between $5,000 and $10,000. Tomorrow’s budding young creative writers won’t slave away at a hot typewriter – their garrets will be furnished with a multimedia personal computer with access to a sound and video database. Creating a movie will consist of first choosing all the locations from the database, allocating them to scenes while speaking a first pass at the dialogue. Next step is to introduce the characters, as stick figures to start with, complete the screenplay and record it with the figures. Choose your actors from the database, and animate them – without faces to start with, to fit your action. Next add the faces, set the expressions, and leave it to the computer to animate them to the speech track. Et voila! You too can create your own feature-length live-action movie.
