What a joke. Is there anyway to prevent the producers from the eternal hack. What schlock. Hey let’s make Jurassic Rocky Scream Air Saw Fast forever. Six. I know that there has to be a track for finding your new “Golden” boy girl he/him she/her they/them diredtor. But Jesus! have a god dam original thought.

There’s gonna come a point where it would feel like a real dog.

Especially as video models let people specify ‘copy the motion from video 2’ and then all they need is footage of a dog doing the right action. Not necessarily on greenscreen. Not necessarily the right dog. Obviously you still grab a couple golden retrievers trained to ignore video cameras, for any shot where the dog does normal dog activities. See The Art of Dog Acting. But this insistence that a big-budget project don’t use modern technology will gradually stop getting clicks… and it won’t be because the technology goes away.

All films are deception. The most powerful trick ever invented is the jump cut. Characters walk up to a house and then into a sound stage. Conversations happen between actors who weren’t on set together. A dog jumps and a basketball arcs. I’m sorry if this is news to anyone, but for reasons unrelated to the rules, a dog cannot in fact play basketball. Even the comparatively low-tech original film used every gimmick available to let you turn your brain off and roll with the premise.

There will be times where you go, “That was AI?!” - and when it happens, I implore you to leave off any performative distaste. You didn’t secretly always hate that shot, retroactively. You probably didn’t actually suspect it. Maybe you can spot the tells, now, the same way you can see the string once someone’s pointed it out to you frame-by-frame. It’s just another tool for telling stories and you’re gonna have to get over it. Just like CGI, it can be overused, undercooked, or as magicians put it, “too perfect.” The worst tell for any trick is when there’s no other way it could have been done. If Air Bud the Fourth manages to dunk, yeah, probably not a real dog. But if they composited two takes together, by briefly replacing the dog with a photorealistic cartoon, why do you honestly care?

That’s because it wouldn’t BE a real dog.

The article keeps saying over and over that there’s no CGI or AI in the entire movie, but unless I missed something, every time the director was actually quoted, he said specifically that it wouldn’t be a CGI or AI dog.

So he could still film with CGI, for example, a real dog in front of a green screen. Honestly, I sort of expect every movie is going to have some CGI in it these days.

Thanks, I now have John Oliver going off on one about air bud for half an hour, stuck in my head.

One of the last actual movie makers who doesn’t want to rely on fake effects. And he’s making Airbud. The world just isn’t fair.

There’s no rule that an AI dog can’t play basketball!

Having just watched the CGI eagle in Peacemaker, I’d be interested in how convincing a CGI dog could be these days.

Nice that they plan to do it with a real dog, though, not that I care much. I didn’t see the first one, and I won’t see this one.

They should get that dog from good boy. Terrible movie, but the dog was great.