Fake Movies (You’re watching and don’t even know it)

The creation of digital environments to fulfill the story objectives of big-budget movies is getting more and more seamless. The infrastructure is very much in place from past productions that entire landscapes can be created easily and cheaply for any production from The Avengers to The Wolf of Wall Street.

Yes, you read that right, The Wolf of Wall Street — according to this viral video depicting the digital efforts that production companies have gone through to create landscapes, even on a movie one would believe would have been created entirely in-camera — has gone through a digital process for reasons we shall never know.

Surely the same story could have been told without VFX?

And this is the point — What can we expect from the films of the future if nothing has to be filmed anymore?

This is the wonder of movies like Batman Begins, or Inception (both Christopher Nolan films). Meticulous efforts were made to achieve every shot in camera. This is why you truly are in awe when you see the imagery on-screen of the ice-capped mountains as opposed to subconsciously recognising the surroundings as a location but nothing more than a digital trick.

The deepfake software application further complicates the road ahead for audiences. With deepfake — Amateur users are engaging imagery from celebrities, their faces and mannerisms and applying it using an AI algorythm to pornography, memes and Hollywood blockbusters of yesteryear, like this example of Sylvester Stallone starring in Terminator 2 — replacing Schwarzenneger.

These methods were further employed on a legitimate scale in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story — where producers sought and were granted access to Carrie Fisher’s appearance in order to give her a digital facelift for the films’ climax — months after the actress had passed.

The faster this innovation, the more we move our filmmaking world to an environment where cameras will become obsolete.

It won’t happen tomorrow, but why bother film something — take the time, money and potential delays in weather and human illness when you can code it into existence. When this happens we can forgive Quentin Tarantino for wanting to throw in the towel after 10 films.

When nothing is crafted by hand anymore, it’s no longer a craft.

The industry will shift its focus to a reliance on AI for the bulk of the work and the technicians and artists will merely be maintenance workers with the joy of occasional adjustments.

Filmmaking in this new digital-only era should have the courtesy of at the very least changing its name to ‘digital world making’ to avoid giving prospective students and future dreamers false hope that they would be going out and crafting stories down the barrel of a lens.