Doesn't the definition of background actor preclude being in SAG though? I thought extras had to be in three or four productions in a year before they got their SAG cards.
May be not all. But certainly if those under SAG-AFTRA did certainly. I don't remember specific actor adding much to my experience ever. I don't even recognize their voices or names, so can't be bothered.
That’s just insane though. People don’t care about continuity in background actors or what they look like. Many background actors will be reused in different contexts as different people.
If studios can apply their likeness to a cheaper actor, they can also apply a made up likeness to a cheaper actor. Or the likeness of a model. Or the likeness of a volunteer who thinks it’d be cool.
The only case where this applies, maybe, is for characters with speaking roles that have enough positive reception that they have negotiating power for their cost to return for future works. But that’s a tiny segment far removed from the majority of this guild. And if it’s actually sensible to do this over hiring the actor then they could probably just do this from the beginning.
Nobody seems to realize, the value is in inserting ordinary people into media with celebrities! Perfect for brand name advertising, you with a celebrity telling you how smart you are for using they brand they pitch.
I formally built an ad agency with a feature film VFX pipeline for actor replacement advertising - but I built it back in '08, years before "deep fakes" and nobody believed what I had working was possible.
Where are you getting these numbers from? I was under the impression that people can and do work as professional extras. And then there's voice work too. And to be honest if any roles in TV/movies/Ads are going to get AI'ed it's them.
"recognizability" has nothing to do with why actors are striking.
If I'm a background actor, of course I want to get paid to be in multiple movies instead of just getting paid once to serve as AI training data.
Plus, many famous actors started out in bit background parts, and there is a valid fear this is "pulling up the ladder". Brad Pitt's first movie role was as an uncredited waiter in the 1987 film No Man's Land, for which he was almost fired trying to ad lib a line (i.e. to "upgrade" his part to a speaking role).
Could be: a lot of the 'branding' of the actor these days is about curating what films they show up in. Like, if Johnny Depp is in a movie, you know generally what kind of film it'll be. The AA (Artificial Actor, haha) would benefit from having an agent, much like real actors, to keep consumers' meta-dissonance down.
That said, actors swap between wildly disparate roles all the time and no one seems to care!
Do you need a reliable, efficient way to cast background actors for your films, TV shows, and commercials? A background casting agency can provide you with the background actors you need.
reply