This is mentioned in the article. They wanted essentially to own the IP to every martial arts move Li would have recorded for them, allowing them to essentially have him or even just his moves with someone else's face superimposed, so what would they need the actors for at that point?
And of you are just going to digitally do the fight scenes then why not just use moves already recorded without any IP?
That said, they will find some other young but starving martial artist and record all his moves. He may not be as famous as Li, but he will be cheaper and easier to manipulate.
I wonder how far are we from making movies completely with software, with no human actors at all
Perhaps there's an interesting ML research project there. Get a voice actor to record a bunch of lines, with facial capture, and then see if the AI can produce the correct facial expressions for a line it hasn't heard before.
Then, take it a step further by trying to produce the voiced line from a sufficiently detailed narration and transcript. Obviously GPT-3 is close to being able to produce narrated stories, so that would give you a pipeline that turns a vague story idea into animated speaking faces.
Generating the movements of bodies and props might be harder, but I'm guessing that in some CGI movies for kids they don't have any human characters so they don't need to capture any actor's body movements or have any physical props or a stage at all.
“I realized the Americans wanted me to film for three months but be with the crew for nine. And for six months, they wanted to record and copy all my moves into a digital library.”
The difference is they wanted to motion capture his moves in addition to the regular filing process.
Again, clearly I'm not tapped in to Hollywood like some here seem to be, but it wasn't clear to me how what he says there, "they wanted to record and copy all my moves into a digital library", was any different than what happened when he was in any other movie, say The One. Motion capture wasn't mentioned in the article at all, nor is it clear that other martial arts movies didn't/don't use it.
Again, motion capture wasn't mentioned in the article, nor was it clear to me that even if that assumption is made that it isn't something commonly done in martial arts movies or limited to the Matrix movies.
It’s now basically done in every CGI enhanced movie - e.g. all Avenger movies, Maleficient and all modern Disney movies.
It wasn’t unheard of, but wasn’t yet common in the early 2000s when the Marrix sequels were made.
Also, Matrix has lots of Bullet Time rigs, which aren’t motion capture rigs, but we’re clearly usable even back then for some “transplanting” of recordings to another scene, much more so than regular shots.
Jet Li was extrapolating into the future, but not far into the future. It was already common and happening 10 years later.
Maybe not common, but The Fellowship Of The Ring (full motion capture and CGI for Gollum) was released in 2001, while The Matrix Reloaded was released in 2003.
I don't think Jet Li needed to extrapolate into the future at all.
Jet Li did motion capture for a video game within a year of the second Matrix release, so it wasn't the motion capture he was opposed to. Presumably it was Warner Bros' contract for him.
Giving up the IP in perpetuity is what would be different.
>He added, “By the end of the recording, the right to these moves would go to them.”
Li said back then, he was already worried that future technology would allow US filmmakers to digitally reproduce his moving body and superimpose the face of any actor onto it.
“I was thinking: I’ve been training my entire life. And we martial artists could only grow older. Yet they could own [my moves] as an intellectual property forever. So I said I couldn’t do that,” Li said.
And of you are just going to digitally do the fight scenes then why not just use moves already recorded without any IP?
Seems to me like he was smart to Nope TF out.