You don't hear Beyoncé talkin' 'bout some "oh, shoutout to my mic!"
SAG doesn't understand AI, breaking even, and even more exposition
¿What you heard?
My producer on Aisha Been Leimert Park has been battling against some of the folk who most need to hear these things — the Screen Actors’ Guild.
We’re only training an AI on the style of a visual artist who has consented in exchange for credit, compensation, and a restriction of the model to this project.
Yet, as soon as SAG hears AI, they assume that we are setting out to manufacture performances and steal likenesses.
Actually, our animated character won’t look like our actor, and if we wanted to prompt a performance, we wouldn’t waste time talking to SAG.
But how do you explain such sensical things to folks so full of ignorance and fear?
What you doin’?!
I’ve been especially soured to SAG this week because, in addition to holding up our casting call, their anachronistic bureaucracy has cockblocked our collaboration with one of the three community members we wanted to feature in the film.
Turns out Darryl is a union actor, which would be fine if we were a live action production, but as an animated film, we do not qualify for the SAG Ultra Low Budget agreement, which means we would have to pay Darryl a $1,130 minimum to participate, over a fifth of our budget.
Before becoming aware of this SAG restriction though, I called Darryl to negotiate his fee, and he asked about getting residuals, an idea I scoffed at because I don’t expect Aisha Been Leimert Park to make any money, but then, a few days after the call, a small venue in Venice Venmo-ed me a hundred bucks to screen Aisha Been Watts at one of their events… and just like that, I broke even.
What you seen??
JUJUTSU KAISEN (2020-) stays perplexing me with its unabashed exposition dumps like this one, where they just write the exposition on screen…
Or this one, where they write even more exposition on screen…
Or Episode 50, where the entire 25 minutes is just a character explaining things over what looks like a fancy PowerPoint with some basic motion graphics.
Episode 50 actually broke me a little bit because they are so beyond attempting to hide the exposition by this point that they even call the episode “About the Culling Game,” which is the thing they’re expositing the whole time.
The thing is, despite the success of the show, I still question the effectiveness of this type of storytelling because I watched all of “About the Culling Game,” and a day later, I’m not confident I can tell you much of what the Culling Game is actually about.