Originally published at: Lucasfilm hires deepfaker who improved upon its digital Luke | Boing Boing
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Normally I’m against changing a movie (or tv show) once it’s been released (step away from the editing room, Lucas) but I’d make an exception for improved deep fakery.
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The video led me to a Deep Fake of Solo… that was impressive. I dare say I would rather watch the fakes version than the original with whoever that was.
If Star Wars (or even Star Trek) is going to mine the past for storylines then I’m OK with this technique. They want us to buy into their universe, to appreciate the lineage and continuity then offer up as close to the originals as you can get.
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This work is very impressive. I wonder how long it will take for this to look less convincing; like how Jurassic Park was gobsmacking at the time, and now seems less convincing.
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I don’t know. I think the deepfake Luke looks better, but his mouth… still isn’t moving quite right? Something off about it. Deepfake Tarkin looks as fake to me as original fake Tarkin, so that’s a wash.
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They both look very good to me, but the latter seems better because the Rogue One fake-Moff was pretty bad.
Anyone else remember that uneasy feeling at seeing Bogart in The Last Action Hero?
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I kind of feel like they shouldn’t “hire him” so much as “acquire him”. Instead of being an employee, he should be his own business, and they are paying to own his intellectual property. As it is, how does he know they won’t just fire him after he divulges all his various techniques to improve their modeling.
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Joke’s on them. They actually just hired a deepfake of Shamook.
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The deepfakes definitely look better, but are still hamstrung by the underlying animation that they’re being mapped to. It looks like there was a lot of manual keyframing, or at least inadequate finessing of the mo-cap, particularly in the case of Luke. Deepfakes won’t be truly convincing until that nut is cracked.
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Can this "expert’ do something with my drivers license photo?
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I love when things like this happen. It’s great to see an artist getting a job offer instead of a C&D. The only downside is we likely won’t be seeing any more fan-made work from Shamook, as I’m sure it would violate his ILM contract.
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For the “fake” …hm ‘simulacrum’ …? of Tarkin/Peter Cushing significant plaudits should go to the voice actor Guy Henry - he nailed every subtle Peter Cushing nuance that i grew up hearing via the numerous Hammer Films. This really papered over any CGI glitches for me even better than the dim lighting of the Death Star bridge. (news article about the choice of Guy Henry)
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One of the problems of deepfakes is that even in the best scenario it comes down to some combination of human and machine doing an impression rather than an original performance. So instead of, say, celebrated actor Peter Cushing putting everything he had into becoming Grand Moff Tarkin you’ve got some other guy putting in everything he has to approximate how he thinks Peter Cushing would have played Grand Moff Tarkin.
Even when it’s an actor trying to play a younger version of their own character it still ends up being one level further removed from an ordinary performance.
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I think the problem with this is that there is no intellectual property to buy: it’s all working with established footage and available software. So they’re surely hiring him for his unequaled skill in this particular set of tools rather than to get access to the tools.
(His work-so-far and the AI models will be untouchable, I guess, because Disney’s lawyers will never trust what went into them—Improved Tarkin surely owes a lot to Hammer Horror, for example)
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And that voice will surely get its own layer of AI Cushing sooner or later!
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And in this case, the problem is compounded by the fact that Shamook didn’t have the original footage of the human actor’s performance - he was working from rendered footage of a keyframe-tweaked mocaped digital model of Peter Cushing. So there’s in effect additional “generation loss” in the realism of the movement. It’s even worse in the case of Luke. If Shamook had been able to work directly with the original as-shot-on-set footage, I suspect the result would have been a lot better.
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Median Hollywood Producer: Who needs new actors and scripts when we can digitally recycle a hundred years’ worth of previous actors and scripts?!
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They both look wonky to me.
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Funnily enough, that’s what my Doctor said about my testicles.
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Even though they got the hair and age wrong, I like what Corridor Crew did. They basically replaced the Lucasfilm Luke and recorded a new performance that they deepfaked over. The mouth motions and nods look much more natural, IMO.
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