Why the Hollywood Acting Game is about to change forever!
The Hollywood acting landscape is on the brink of a major transformation as the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) contract with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers (AMPTP) is set to expire on July 1st, 2023.
One of the key concerns in this negotiation is the role of artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential impact on the livelihood of actors.
But can they really protect AI from making the bulk of their 160,000 members unemployed?
It’s reported that Hollywood employed 32,753 actors in 2020 (a far cry from the number of SAG dues paying members). In the next 5–10 years I believe that number could drop to 1,500.
There’s going to be uproar about the lack of jobs but with only 2% of SAG actors making a full-time living, this impact isn’t going to be as crazy as people fear but things are about to be shaken up in a big way so you better be prepared.
Here’s what’s about to happen:
- Talented actors rise to the top regardless of looks, age, ethnicity, being previously cast in a hit show/movie, or how many social media followers they have.
- Less money going to big stars. Better economics for the majority of actors who are working.
- Actors will have more time to hone their performance with a director.
- Production will move away from expensive cities to places with a better quality of life.
- Long shooting days will disappear and everyone will be working 9–5.30.
- SAG will (quite possibly) become redundant (ish).
How is this going to come to pass?
- Talent Will Rise To The Top
Epic Games just released Metahumans which both cheaply and quickly can track and scan an actor’s face using something as simple as an iPhone. This isn’t AI creating performances based on past data from the internet. This is real actors giving real performances that are captured in real time and allow us to place another face over the actors’ performance.
In one form or another actors have been wearing masks that make them unrecognizable for years. Think about Gary Oldman’s oscar-winning transformation into Winston Churchill for “The Darkest Hour”, Jim Carrey in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”, or Jared Leto as Paolo Gucci in “House of Gucci”.
Actors have spent tortuous hours in the makeup chair transforming themselves.
Only now with MetaHumans the possibilities are endless and the hours in the makeup chair have gone.
Will big name directors embrace this technology?
Many have already been working with it.
Think about Cameron’s “Avatar”, Zemeckis’ “Polar Express”, and Spielberg’s “Tintin”. They’ve all been working with motion capture and recreating actors performances with digital skins. But the cost of capture is going to change the game now that you can do it on a $500 phone.
Why does this help talented actors rise to the top regardless of looks, age, ethnicity, or being previously cast in a hit show?
Because we (now any filmmaker with a decent computer) can change the actors looks, age, and ethnicity at the touch of a button. What this means is a production now only needs a few very talented actors on their payroll to perform all the different parts in a movie, reskinning (re-facing) them for each role and using AI to adjust their voice.
At film school back in England, I spent a lot of time with the BBC Radio Drama Company. Five or so fantastic actors who were all on salary, went to the office each day, and recorded 1–8 different characters for that day’s play. They were/are brilliant actors who really understood their craft. Often a big name such as Dame Judy Dench would be brought in as a visiting actor to play one role in the audio play but everyone else — EVERYONE else in a full year’s worth of radio plays — were played by a handful of people and most of the audience had no idea.
This is going to happen in Film and TV.
Great actors (not necessarily celebrities) will get yearly (reliable and dependable) contracts and one minute they will be playing a character usually suited to Zac Efron and 5 minutes later they will be playing a character more suited to Oprah Winfrey.
The true actors who are both craftspeople AND artists will win.
Note: I am not saying these actors will perform with a Zac Effron’s skin digitally layered on their face (SAG are working to protect name and likeness with AI in the new contract) but characters that are ‘like’ these celebrities.
2. Less Dependency on Big Stars
Let’s face it, with streaming changing the game as far as audience acquisition, and the industry’s increasing reliance on existing intellectual property (well known books, old movies, even consumer products such as Barbie, etc), we as an industry are creating less and less big stars for the future.
Who is today’s Tom Cruise or Harrison Ford?
Yes, there are younger celebrities but it’s a different type of celebrity.
But as we move into a world where an actor’s mask is owned by the studio and ANY actor can wear that mask, the big stars are going to become digital skins.
From an actor’s standpoint you could end up playing the lead in the next ‘Indiana Jones’ movie in the morning and then doing pickups in the afternoon playing Maggie Smith’s character in ‘Downton Abbey’ .
Big name actors are already working with companies such as Deepcake; an AI-powered content creation platform that creates ‘digital twins’ of celebrities such as Bruce Willis. This way filmmakers can license the actor’s name and likeness for another actor to play them in the future (even when those big name actors have long since departed this world).
Check out this deepfake of Jim Carey playing the lead in ‘The Shining’ — this wasn’t some big Hollywood studio spending millions of dollars to make this happen:
And yes, for the moment, audiences will want to see the big names we know and love but as audiences get more and more used to seeing non-human digital skins showing up regularly in leading roles, the dependency on recognizing ‘real’ human stars will become less and less.
All this will give birth to a new type of star!
Think about Andy Serkis (Gollum in “Lord of the Rings”) and the amount of press he does around his movies even though we don’t recognize him in the film — the audience still wants to know who the artist is behind data.
I believe actors will still get attention but it will be different — more akin to the way we appreciate painters for their craft and artistry vs actors and the way we idolize the way they look (often over their skill).
And background performers? They’re gone.
Think about the magnitude of Martin Scorsese’s upcoming ‘Killers of The Moon’. You only need to look at the enormous numbers of background actors, the cost to clothe them, feed them, the support staff needed from Costumers and Makeup Artists to Background PAs and Passenger Van Drivers, to see how millions of dollars is about to be saved in this area alone.
With fewer actors needed, premier acting schools and old school repertory theater, where you can truly learn your performance craft, will become more and more important. These will be the main recruiting ground for tomorrow’s performers.
A 21-year old leaving a quality acting school can suddenly play anything. Now they may not have the life experience that a more mature character needs, but that’s why the BBC Radio drama rep made sure they had a mix of ages for their radio characters. Oh and diversity in film… it doesn’t matter if you are black, white, female, male, non binary. All that matters is your ability to embody different characters. In fact, we can also deliver different versions of the film for different markets adjusting skin tone and ethnicity of each actor all at the touch of a button.
Note: I haven’t formed an opinion whether this is a good thing or not, but it’s possible to enable global audiences to watch a movie like ‘Mission Impossible’ and see someone that looks more like them play the lead — the ethnicity of the characters can easily change depending on the market.
Oh, and all those foreign language versions are going to look amazing. Thanks to AI we are now able to manipulate actors’ mouths to better fit foreign dubs and, perhaps more impactful for actors and directors, there is a potential for this technology to sample an actor’s voice so that AI can remove the need for ADR to replace badly recorded location audio and even adjust accents.
Check this out:
3. Actors will have more time to hone their performance with a director
I started my professional directing career on the London Fringe directing theater. A stage manager, and a glorious bunch of talented actors and me as the director. We’d get to spend a few weeks diving into the text, searching for authentic moments, reacting to each moment — moment-to-moment.
As a director it was magical.
Film very rarely works like that.
Once you are into principal photography you’re under massive time constraints, we’re chasing light, reliant on focus, camera ops, lighting, costume, makeup, so many things that could mean that a great performance can’t be used.
If we start shooting purely to capture performance with MetaHumans (or any number of similar technologies that are in the works right now) we can work in a black box theater setting where nothing else matters but the actor and director relationship and how we are bringing the text to life — it’s almost like a rehearsal studio or actors studio with the pressure of production removed. Nothing else matters.
We can easily reset and try something new, actors aren’t having to recreate the performance over and over again for different angles. We get back to searching for that true performance and that’s what MetaHumans is going to bring to every filmmaker and quality actor: time and space to feel an authentic moment.
Now, we’ve all seen the photos of the capture studios for ‘Avatar’ like the one below. Bright, slightly sterile environments — but in my mind there really isn’t any need for it to be like this.
In approaching these stages from a creatives point of view, we can create environments more suited to helping the actor live in the location — but still without the massive expense of shifting locations and building big sets.
Props Masters, Set Decs, Costumers, there’s still work for you in this new world, just as there is working on the volume stages used for the ‘Mandalorian’. But these volume stages will never be seen on camera, they are there to enable deeper performances as we will be recreating everything digitally. As Professor Scott Galloway from NYU Stern and co-host of the Pivot podcast says, “AI isn’t going to put you out of work, someone skilled in AI will put you out of work”.
4. Production will move away from expensive cities to places with a better quality of life
Why is Los Angeles still a mecca for production?
Well we all know that production has been moving away from its OG Home. But Hollywood still has a number of things going for it. The most important is access to acting talent.
Hollywood is the honey to the bears and each day more people arrive to pursue their dreams of stardom. There’s a lot of naive dreamers getting off that bus for the wrong reason but Hollywood is still a mecca for talent and when you have 72 roles for your movie it’s one of the best places to cast and shoot making sure you have the pick of talented and authentic artists who can show up and do the job.
Of course NY and Chicago have good talent pools (but are also expensive) and Atlanta is rising fast as many actors realize their chance of working there is higher than LA.
But when a studio can put actors on staff, with those actors able to play any number of roles, the studios will seek out more and more economical locations where the talent will then relocate and have a quality of life almost unthinkable in LA.
For example, on a $1M movie, the cast and background budget line item is going to be around $125,000. If a studio is able to capture one movie a month (with two months vacation per year because, of course, in building this future we want quality of life right!), that’s $1.25M a year to the cast.
If you paid 5 great actors $200,000 per year plus health insurance and pension we’re now giving actors a great living, doing what they love, and in a place where they can live comfortably. Oh, and let’s not forget job security as it doesn’t matter how old you get as you could be under contract for 30–40 years, all the time playing all sorts of ages across all sorts of movies and TV shows.
How does this work for a $10m movie or a $100m movie?
No difference.
The actors are all going to be on salary employed full time by the production company vs independent freelancers (more on this in a moment).
All departments are going to see this economy of scale, it’s not just talent.
Let’s be clear, the economics of movie production are about to change drastically.
It won’t be overnight but it is coming.
It’s been happening for the last ten years.
The barriers to entry are getting lowered which means the power is slowly moving away from key AMPTP members into the literal garages of startups that will become the next hundred million/billion dollar entertainment companies.
5. Long shooting days will disappear and everyone will be working 9–5
With studio capture being the norm there’s no need for night shoots; no more working around location availability, the weekly deals on equipment that have driven long working hours will become a thing of the past, and agents will no longer be negotiating for their star actor to shoot their scenes out in 4 days (because the studio now owns the actors time so talent agents don’t get involved) — Overtime and long hours will become uneconomical for a production as there’s no financial benefit to shooting shorter weeks and longer days.
Even looking at the cost of renting studios, we’re not going to need the massive 20,000 sqft stages which we spend weeks, possibly months, renting to build elaborate sets on.
We only need to look at the development of game production to get a glimpse of where we are going.
A few years ago, as I started to see where film was going and began the journey to build my own sound stages and film campus, I took a trip to Vancouver to see the motion capture stages at EA Games (a quarter of all video games employ actors in some form for content capture).
A large sports field ready for pro athletes in mo-cap suits ready to shoot a scene. On the sideline was a wooden shell of a Humvee so they could pick up a scene for the first person shooter game ‘Battlefield’ during lunch — they had everything they need for any number of projects all on one stage. A veritable playground for an actor. (Incidentally, the longest SAG strike in history was against 11 American video game developers and publishers. The strike lasted 340 days — No traditional studio has been able to last that long.
With less reliance on employing readily available freelancers and the availability of jobbing actors, all of which can now be on salary, there’s no need to focus production around ‘film cities’.
A company can build a small 10,000 sqft stage with support facilities anywhere in the country that enjoys lower costs of living for personnel and a lower cost of production for the company. One example of this is the innovative sound stages and post production facilities located at Green Pastures Studio in Oklahoma City.
But just for a moment, imagine 9–5 movie-making where you can live affordably, be at home at a reasonable hour to spend time with your family, and have a life during the weekend instead of being zoned out simply trying to catch up on sleep and getting the laundry done.
All this is just around the corner.
And the good news is, as I mentioned, this isn’t just for talent but for the crew as well.
A BIG issue with the past IATSE negotiations (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts of the United States) has been the crazy hours the crew have to work and the dangers of driving back and forth to work after sixteen hour days. Those days will largely be over in this new world.
6. SAG will (quite possibly) become redundant (ish)
I’ve saved this for last as it’s going to raise some eyebrows. But think about this…
With a much smaller membership base — as the idea of employing day players and supporting characters fades into the background coupled with actors being able to play any number of roles on a single project — there will be fewer actors working which will reduce the ability for SAG to operate as a standalone union with its own pension and health operations.
I also believe that in the not so distant future, production companies will look to employ actors full time much like a theater rep. This isn’t a step backwards to the old studio model of contracts, but rather a new model that is closer tied to the benefits offered to those who work in Silicon Valley.
Let’s forget movies for a moment and think about the amount of actors who rely on commercials (the way many upcoming actors stay in the game and a large revenue driver for SAG). Agencies and clients sit through hundreds of different actors to find exactly the right person with exactly the right look to represent their brand.
But with life-like Meta Humans — — Boom — — The lucrative commercial actors’ contracts and residuals go away and a commercial production company can have 4–5 actors on salary who they reskin with exactly the look the agency wants.
It really isn’t a big leap to see this happening.
There are already versions of this with radio commercial companies in London where 5 actors sit in a studio and perform scripts all day long using different accents. They bang out one radio spot after another playing different roles. These are fantastic voice actors. The best of the best. All earning great money.
But let’s get back to the movies… And why SAG, and other dedicated unions, *might* be in trouble in the future. For a start, they represent a focused group of industry players.
For a long time unions have fought to protect the roles and duties of each named crew member. But with the democratization of production, the model of how movies are structured has the ability to shift dramatically.
There’s a world where when actors are employed full-time for studios and production houses, where they become an integral part of script development, review, and production process. Essentially the actors become multi-hyphenate creatives who happen to step in front of the camera. This again is nothing new. Think about how the ‘Saturday Night Live’ cast are writing and acting or about the way award winning director Mike Leigh develops his scripts in the rehearsal room with his cast.
At this point, professional, talented, productive actors will be seen in the same way that an engineer is seen as having long-term value to Google or a great UI designer is vital to Apple — and these companies will go to great lengths to keep these people. These are professionals who are paid handsomely upfront for their work and rewarded with stock options, famously lavish perks, and are rewarded based on the overall success of the company, not just the small part/department/film they are working on.
Think about Pixar which makes the most fantastic films and is non-union.
That’s right, Pixar is not a union shop for most of its employees. Actors dropping in for voice overs are covered by SAG, but most of the other unions do not have blanket agreements covering projects at Pixar.
The argument has been that apart from a few blips, Pixar has been able to keep their staff both happy and well rewarded so there hasn’t been a need to unionize. That, in of itself, has enabled them to work in different ways from conventional Hollywood.
Is it those ‘different’ ways that has lead to Pixar’s success? Who knows…
When an actor isn’t tied to the ‘look’ of their physical body they become so much more valuable. And in that instance, we have to look at a new way of employing those actors so that they are not just brought in for a few days and then dumped; so that they can be longstanding members of the production hub, continually employed across a multitude of projects and participate in the success of the company as a whole not just for single projects. How does SAG fit into that?
Conclusion
I hear a lot of people fearing the future and what technology will bring. During these negotiations I hear people say we have to stop AI at all costs. And maybe the unions will be able to restrict AMPTP members’ use of AI. But very rarely do the technological advancements that propel an industry forward come from the legacy companies.
Ford didn’t lead the way with electric; a new car company operating differently called Tesla did.
Kodak and Panavision didn’t lead the way in how we shoot movies; RED Digital Cinema did (with Arri doing a great job of pivoting their camera business and catching up fast).
Blockbuster were so stuck in their old ways of operating that they turned down an offer to buy the upstart Silicon Valley company Netflix (which all the studios, and to a certain extent unions, failed to see as the big future that would reshape how creatives made a living).
And look, I get it, change is scary.
It was scary when vaudeville performers started to see motion pictures.
And it was scary when my uncle, an amazing commercial artist in the early 1980s, saw the shift to using computers and couldn’t see a future where he could adapt his art to use these new tools.
There will be those that won’t be able to shift their mindset — studios, distributors, creatives, talent, union reps, agents, crew, and many of these will end up fading into the background.
Some of these will be able to fully see the future but, even so, have tied their financial stability to such a big incumbent that there’s no way they can shift their career or business model quick enough to maintain their position in the market.
But the opportunity for those that want to do good work, that are willing to take creative risks, and, most importantly, lean into their artistry and craft is huge!
And does EVERYONE actually need to embrace this?
No… Not yet. A few people will never have to.
Just as when digital cameras came out so many people said they’d never use them, they’d say that film is the only way to work because digital cameras can’t reproduce a movie-like image.
For a good amount of time the digital and film worlds worked side-by-side with many a drunken conversation happening over a table full of dirty pint glasses in a dimly lit bar at a wrap party. But twenty years later, almost all productions capture using 1s and 0s in the digital realm.
The same conversations are beginning to happen — and will be happening more and more — with this Meta vs Real world.
Christopher Nolan still shoots film, so too does Quentin Tarantino. But it’s expensive. I just finished my latest feature film shooting on the amazing Red Komodo (a $6k digital camera that we’ve been able to produce fantastic images with — — thanks to the great color team at the world renowned PictureShop — -that are reminiscent of 16mm film) and there is no way that this story’s budget could have supported shooting on film. Just no way!
But if you’re looking at the future…
If you are looking at what’s possible as an artist sitting at a blank canvas…
If you are looking at how to play with other artists where most of your time can be spent focused on the art of the story, performance, creative visual and audio elements vs fighting impossible locations, schedules, budgets, and mistakes, errors, lack of talent/skill from a weak link in the cast/crew…
Then I think you will be able to see how the Hollywood Acting game, in fact the Hollywood game in general, is about to change forever. Again, it is scary, but I believe this future could be an exciting thing for anyone who wants to embrace it.
And that’s who I personally want to be working with. Pioneers. Those who are wanting to play with how bright the future can actually be vs being scared of it.
Will all my future projects use Metahumans and will I stop shooting on location tomorrow? No, not yet. But I prefer to lean into a positive future vs being the next Blockbuster or Kodak.
I truly believe the Hollywood game is about to change forever: 1 year, 5 years, 10 years? Who knows. But it’s going to come quickly. Are you ready?
