What is Autorship in the Digital Age?

This is what I want to explore in my creative writing assignment. It comes from a discussion me and Barry were having about digital media's effect on film authorship. The conversation led us to the nature of the actor role in the new face of film, with the emergence of motion capture and photo realistic 3d characters. Are these tools as in the prosthetics that john hurt wore in elephant man in which he won an Oscar for his performance or do they diminish the role the actor, who plays Gollum, Andy Serkis or an unsung group of animators labouring away in post production? With the more and more examples of such digitally created actor driven characters coming to the fore in the modern holly wood blockbuster the actor’s world is slowly having digital media creep across borders.
Actors have had performances altered in post production; a tear was added digitally to Jennifer Connolly's performance in blood diamond. And actors have even been able to finish shooting a film despite the significant disadvantage of being dead. This can be seen in the Movie gladiator where Oliver Reed appears quite animated on screen in comparison to his real life state.
While Old stocks of film have been altered in the past and collaged digitally to create something new for example in Forrest Gumps many meeting with U.S. Presidents. Subverting the camera never lies mentality of old film. New forms of delivering Films in digital on line have given a whole generation of new film makers the flexibility to warp and use existing works to their own ends.

The first widely published of the kind of "fan edits" came with "The Phantom Edit" a reworking of "The Phantom Menace" which even George could see the value in. "The internet is a new medium, it's all about doing things like that," he told Zap2it.com. A better publicised event in on line manipulation of existing stock came during the last presidential election of America. Political satirist Stephan Colbert after realising that in one of his speeches John McCain had stood in front of a large green background this meant that when altering the footage you had what was a very effective green screen for colour keying. So Stephan Colbert launched the John McCain green Screen challenge asking his viewers to place John McCain in many funny scenarios.

So what would be the most interesting way to use this new media to push the limits of authorship in acting and screenwriting? I believe that collaging over the existing image is th

e best way leaving the majority untouched adds to the effect of the offending article. And similar to splicing Forrest Gump in to footage of Presidents, add another head of actor's performance to body of another completely changing the mood of the piece. But in doing it that way you would still be taking your ques from the original performance much like Serkis did with Gollum.

My plan therefore is to subvert the character of Frodo in The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings being picked for its identification of being a landmark in digital movie making) and similar to the green screen challenge where John McCain head is placed on different bodies altering the narrative I shall place a new actors head.
The actor I’ll choose is Joe Pesci because of his highly animated facial expression and because the nature of his roles is very different to the character of Frodo. Using all the back catalogue of Jole Pesci's films i shall try to find dialogue that still carrys the main story along so that the presence of this artifact blends more discretely.

The creative writing element shall come from working in to the lord of the rings script the dialogue of other films to create one coherrant new film experience. Here's a still of a test shot in the blending style I wish to employ. I put the old school film around it to make it easier to be accepted as an original image.