I'm totally screwing this up, lol. This is just pure laziness on the casting side. I should call and see how much The Rock charges for his likeness rights.
directing You're not supposed to cast yourself as the main character of your film
- Thread starter Nate North
- Start date
That's a good looking dude with a very cool vehicle. I don't see the problem. 
Tell that to Mr. Slingblade, Billy Bob Thornton.
Tell that to Mr. Slingblade, Billy Bob Thornton.
Last edited:
Touche! Billy Bob ended up doing pretty well for himself.
I do like my new ride. Gas milage is terrible though.
I do like my new ride. Gas milage is terrible though.
thanks for the reply. i have to learn this. otherwise i'm left behind. i'm a mechanical special effects technician but i know nothing about cgi.
Hi, Nate -- you can find good talented actors using Actor's Access and Breakdown Express, and set parameters to your area so they will be local. These are trained, hard-working, talented people who will bring their all to your project. For me, it's liberating to hand acting duties over to others so I can concentrate on everything else. It's not a mistake per se to cast yourself as the lead. I think it requires one to be very honest about the best choice for a given role. Is it you, or someone else who can bring more attention and skill to the work? If you act, then you will need a good DP and other crew. Unless you're shooting a movie about a single character trapped inside a house ; )
it's good if you have actors who will do the work for you but in my experience most of the time suitable actors are hard to find. also i try to pay actors a little bit even on micro budget films. things can add up quick. so if you can do the role yourself then you have a definite advantage. also if you write your own scripts then you write the story to suit your capabilities. in this short i did three roles
sci fi fantasy short film "extinct no more"
a surviver from an ancient, extinct race surfaces in the present time.
rumble.com
thanks but i am much older now than on my films. also i know i have to learn how to do cgi, probably on unreal engine but that means buying a much stronger computer and then knuckling down to learn it.You look like
lol
PS. I love your filmmaking attitude. It's old school. Seen it in a few posts now. Getting it done no matter what and with a real story. Kudos!
true, old school by old man. but i still have the passion. i just like telling stories.That explains the old school attitude.
You're actually right on time to build a UE5 computer, because the 3090 card prices crashed due to the crypto market crash. So what would have cost you 6 grand 2 years ago would cost you $2,800 now. 19, 64gb ram, 3090 w/24gb ram, SSDs, etc.
Thanks for the tip. I do film live action at times still. In this case the OP was kind of a joke. This is a video from a long series following the development of a custom tech pipeline for an AI\3d based film project. In this project, all actors are essentially mannequins, who are then deepfaked (to oversimplify it, it's not really deepfake, but that's the best laymans description I can fit in a sentence). So in this system any actor can have any characteristics I need them to to fit the role. Only the voices will actually require human actors, and that's a lot easier for me to work with, both in terms of geography and expense.
Basically, I just used myself for this first mannequin as a joke.
I'll post a new character demo soon. We have most of the human animation tech online already, but still haven't gotten to producing a full fledged demo of that.
thanks for the info but it will have to wait for some time yet i just bought a canon legria but i am going through some medical treatment at the moment which i want cleared up before i continue investing. at the moment i am using imovie hd 6 and imovie 10 on a mac book. imovie 10 is rather useless but i need it to import footage into my imovie hd 6. i am a mechanical special effects technician by trade which allows me to build many things myself but i am fully aware that cgi opens enormous possibilities for filmmakers. and when i look at your work and also other cgi filmmakers i become envious. it also tells me that a combination of mechanics and cgi is a very powerful tool.
thanks for posting. i'd like to see the result. i assume that you know that speechelo (i'm not sure how to spell it) produces very realistic voices.
that might help you with finding voice overs.
We tried a lot of artificial voice stuff, to see if it could work, but it doesn't work. Where we did end up using some of them was for the voices of robot characters, which makes sense if you think about it. AWS has a mass server backend that runs neural net voices that are far superior to commercial stuff like speechelo, but even those are just not good enough for commercial production.
Here's a thread from a while back where I tried it out. This is basically the best robot voice that you can get right now, and it's not terrible, but just not quite there yet. Maybe another 6 months of AI research into voice changers, and I can just do this with 10 actors and the voice changer. Right now it's still at the gimmick stage.
Narration Test - The Red Mansion
So this is something I had intended to try out for a while. With no voice actors available, I had planned to do this as a non narritive project, but as the scope expanded, it felt like choices would become repetitive without the context that a narrator could provide. With next gen nueral...
Here's an earlier one that actually turned out fairly well, using the robot voice. It's ok for some VO narration, but for emotive line delivery, it's no good.
sometimes i write stories simply because they come in my head and won't let go. so i write them down to get them out of head. so i also wrote a couple of scripts for animation even though i can't animate.
one is about a wolf pup which is abandoned by his parents for being too kind and who is adopted by a sheep.
the other is about a single unemployed father who buys a haunted house very cheap but must find out that it is actually haunted. this film could also be done with real actors but it contains children and that is very difficult without a budget.
one is about a wolf pup which is abandoned by his parents for being too kind and who is adopted by a sheep.
the other is about a single unemployed father who buys a haunted house very cheap but must find out that it is actually haunted. this film could also be done with real actors but it contains children and that is very difficult without a budget.
Last edited:
ok. i watched your trailer maerd 1. i actually think the voice is very good. but please remember i am aware that i work with micro budgets so i don'r expect myself to reach big budget level. except for acting perhaps because good acting is not dependent on money. if i am allowed to make a critique i would say that. the background music is too loud. it drowns out the monolog. i worked in heavy industry all my life and i am hard of hearing but i am not the only one. i couldn't understand any of the voice over. i think it's a mistake many filmmakers of the highest level make today because many people over 40 have this problem. in fact most films deliberately muffle the sound in order to make it more "impressive". it's called FILMSOUND. if i watch a movie in the cinema i might understand about 20 % of the dialog.We tried a lot of artificial voice stuff, to see if it could work, but it doesn't work. Where we did end up using some of them was for the voices of robot characters, which makes sense if you think about it. AWS has a mass server backend that runs neural net voices that are far superior to commercial stuff like speechelo, but even those are just not good enough for commercial production.
Here's a thread from a while back where I tried it out. This is basically the best robot voice that you can get right now, and it's not terrible, but just not quite there yet. Maybe another 6 months of AI research into voice changers, and I can just do this with 10 actors and the voice changer. Right now it's still at the gimmick stage.
Narration Test - The Red Mansion
So this is something I had intended to try out for a while. With no voice actors available, I had planned to do this as a non narritive project, but as the scope expanded, it felt like choices would become repetitive without the context that a narrator could provide. With next gen nueral...indietalk.com
Here's an earlier one that actually turned out fairly well, using the robot voice. It's ok for some VO narration, but for emotive line delivery, it's no good.
We tried a lot of artificial voice stuff, to see if it could work, but it doesn't work. Where we did end up using some of them was for the voices of robot characters, which makes sense if you think about it. AWS has a mass server backend that runs neural net voices that are far superior to commercial stuff like speechelo, but even those are just not good enough for commercial production.
Here's a thread from a while back where I tried it out. This is basically the best robot voice that you can get right now, and it's not terrible, but just not quite there yet. Maybe another 6 months of AI research into voice changers, and I can just do this with 10 actors and the voice changer. Right now it's still at the gimmick stage.
Narration Test - The Red Mansion
So this is something I had intended to try out for a while. With no voice actors available, I had planned to do this as a non narritive project, but as the scope expanded, it felt like choices would become repetitive without the context that a narrator could provide. With next gen nueral...
Here's an earlier one that actually turned out fairly well, using the robot voice. It's ok for some VO narration, but for emotive line delivery, it's no good.