Deep Fakes Will Revive Actors for Whole Movies

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The Disney Plus Book of Boba Fett episode 6 was a great episode for entertainment but it was also significant for a technological milestone. They used Deep Fake video and audio technology to allow seventy-year-old Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker) to perform for about thirty minutes as a convincing 30-year-old Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker).

Luke Skywalker was 28 years old for Return of the Jedi. Mark Hamill was about 31 during the filming of Return of the Jedi.

Deep Fakes and de-aging have been used in movies before. De-aging does not look as convincing.

Deep Fakes have been used around Youtube for short clips but this is using a high resolution for an hour-long TV show.

This shows that actors can be substituted for entire high-resolution movies. They can be made to look and sound convincingly younger or older. People can be substituted. Aliens who look more like any animal can be created.

The ABBA performers are making a permanent exhibit which be like a Vegas Residency where you will be able to see youthful performers forever. If the ABBA World is financially successful then we will see equivalent of Vegas shows with virtual capture of performances by the remaining Rolling Stones, Beetles, Michael Jackson and the other mega-acts of the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s. The actual performers have greatly aged and some have died. The biggest performing acts will be preserved in Deep-Faked Virtual Reality.

SOURCES – Book of Boba Fett, HMV Official, Stephen Vitale
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

21 thoughts on “Deep Fakes Will Revive Actors for Whole Movies”

  2. There is a obvious result of the perfection of this technologies. Credible natural-looking but totally artificial non-existent actors will be created.

    Because a artificially created appearance could be owned by a company, so they could be played by any actor that match the body requirements.

    This way, they could use multiple actors for the same character. Guide actor contracts will be cheaper because won't be royalties and exclusivity around the appearance beyond the company that owns the character.

    This will be very useful and convincing for characters of fantasy stories that are long living or immortal, or references to a past when the film/series could be developed in a decade timeline.

  3. I am sure the guys that run the film studios (& their accountants) are ecstatic. So, we will have recycled scripts and recycled actors. What could possibly go wrong?

  4. Yeah, I've always thought it was a shame Harrington didn't live long enough to see his Hunt begin.

    "The immortalist argument holds this ground and will not step back from it: that death from deterioration of the body is an outrage and should be unceremoniously treated as such. "Do not go gentle into that good night" does not apply here. Rather aim not to go at all; mobilize the scientists, spend the money, and hunt death down like an outlaw."

    Took long enough, but you can hear the hounds finally baying on the trail.

  5. I'd like to think that deep fakes combined with AI agents doing the acting, will eventually permit a much larger selection of works being made into decent movies. Maybe drop the costs enough that they stop doing mostly remakes, and feel they can risk making movies of reasonably popular books.

    The number of SF books alone that would make fantastic movies must be in the hundreds, maybe thousands.

    And can you imagine Dunsany's novels made into fantasy movies? Or maybe a decent Lovecraft adaptation for once. (Though the first Color out of Space, without Cage, was pretty good.)

  7. What do you call the scores of fed agitators and enablers who were "caught" on jan 6th and never prosecuted? You think boomers being let in and walking around behind the satin ropes kind of confused and unarmed is an insurrection?

  8. It's an anecdote, of course, but in my town there was a long staying Korean eatery that had the most delicious dishes. I went there relatively often with my s.o. and we usually chatted with the owners. The couple who owned the place didn't seem to be any older than their 50s, both pretty energetic and doing a lot of the cooking and the cashier jobs.

    I was later saddened to hear they were closing when the husband passed away, and surprised to learn they were both in their 80s!

  9. There is a movie from 2013, The Congress, which explores this topic in an interesting way. Based on the Stanislaw Lem novel The Futurological Congress.

  10. Unless cancelled = dead I think you are kinda barking up the wrong tree.

    No amount of technique/algorithmic improvement is going to magically make deep fakes work flawlessly off the shelf without VFX teams touching it up.

    People thought motion capture would end the need for traditional animation, it didn't – VFX teams are still fixing state of the art mocap data decades later.

  11. It's not an exaggeration to state that some Asians have a nigh on supernatural lead on the rest of us for aging looks wise

  12. The main problem with almost all visual deep fakes is the audio which immediately breaks the illusion if you have heard the actor before.

    The other problems with deep fakes are:

    1) They so often look like a weird amalgam of the source and target faces.

    2) They sometimes just look like a one face moving on top of a body and the body and eye movements don't match the face.

    3) The facial detail itself is often lackluster – shadowing of pits, wrinkles etc don't materialise or when they do don't match the scene lighting well.

    As the great Dr Fahir on Two Minute Papers often says just wait for a couple of papers further down the line – but for now I'm still less than impressed, and they still need to do both the visuals and voice to make it work either way if they are switching actors completely rather than simply using footage of the same actor at a different age.

  13. I’d like to see a young Traci Lords put into the role of Little Orphan Annie, just to shake things up a little.

  17. Na, that’s wrong. I think deepfake technology should be used to change actors who have been cancelled by the left wing.

  19. I’m curious what the first movie will be that’s made as a vehicle for a dead famous actor. Presumably their estates can and would be interested in making deals. Elvis?

  20. Speaking of de-aging, the actress who plays Fennec Shand (Ming Na Wen) is 58, only 3 years younger than the guy who plays Boba Fett (Temuera Morrison, 61). Old enough to be my mom, looks like someone I would date.

    In the future though, they'll probably just pay college students to come in the scanning studio and pay them a trifle for the rights to their likenesses. Studios will just build up a library and figure out who has a likeable face later. The face could get its big break long after death.

    They could also use randomly generated faces, but this way you have a clear paper trail for legal rights. With random faces you might accidentally look like someone and they would sue you for face infringement.

  21. It's cool that we could soon rejuvenate and maybe believably revive some actors for all the the foreseeable future, with both their likeness and voices. But it's also a sham, a trick.

    That and seeing ABBA's virtual concert with digital young replicas recalled me again that the greatest injustice of life is that people get old and die.

    In the long term, no other endeavor is more important, more impactful than fighting against those great enemies.

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