This is why extras are scanned by Hollywood studios (video)

An excerpt from Prom Pact, on Disney+, is filled with fake actors.

At the beginning of August, just a few days after the actors’ union joined the writers’ union on strike, we learned that extras from WandaVision had been entirely scanned during the production of the Disney+ series. Their bodies and faces had been copied during their single day of filming, so that their image could be reused by the company for other Marvel productions. The idea being to make them appear in the background in crowd scenes, for example.

This approach caused a scandal, because the actors in question were not paid additionally to carry out this scan: simply a hundred dollars, or the fee for an entire day of extras. While potentially, the firm will be able to reuse their image in the future without ever calling on them again.

Three months after this shocking revelation, a video perfectly illustrates what the actors’ union denounces. An extract from the TV movie Prom Pact, a romcom also broadcast on Disney+, since March. It has resurfaced for a few hours because of this short sequence filled with fake spectators, created 100% digitally from a scan of extras:

WandaVision: Disney created digital doubles of several extras

“I note that there is a whole range of AI actors, writes Christopher Mark, a journalist from The Playlist And IGN sharing the video. Yuck! Disney is crazy, and this just gives more reason to AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television, editor’s note, the producers’ association which makes joint decisions in Hollywood and interacts with the unions) to abandon its objectives of replacing real second-rate actors with artificial intelligence. Otherwise, the‘uncanny valley‘ will make all your films and series look like this s***. They will churn as quickly as milk.

I don’t know what’s worse about this excerpt. Whether Disney thinks no one will notice that they replaced background actors with digital copies or whether this is a studio technique to provide fewer opportunities for minority extras… Both are extremely pathetic. “

L’“uncanny valley”, it is this unpleasant discomfort that we feel when faced with an image that is close to human, but which is not quite human, which creates an uncomfortable gap. Here, the effect is frankly missed, but that is not what shocks the most, it is above all the moral aspect of these practices that the union denounces, designating them as abuses of the use of AI.

Could this video help SAG-AFTRA make their demands heard? The union is asking that this type of actor scanning be abandoned, or at worst better supervised: that actors sign a contract with a firm knowing how and for how long their digital double will be reused. Above all, they want the extras to be paid specifically for this.

Their screenwriting partners have just succeeded in banning another form ofuse of AI impacting their own work, so negotiations continue…

In Hollywood, negotiations between actors and studios are at a standstill