Create Your Favorite Actor From Nothing But Photos (i-programmer.info)

mikejuk writes: If you always wanted to see John Wayne play the lead in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, you might not have to wait much longer. A University of Washington team has essentially reversed engineered what makes an actor recognizable as that actor, or as the title of the paper puts it, "What Makes Tom Hanks Look Like Tom Hanks." It explains how using nothing but photos and videos from the web it is possible to create an actor puppet that follows the expressions of a driver (i.e. a puppeteer). Now you really can see actors perform things they never got around to performing. The model of the "puppet" is first created using photos from the web. The next stage is to analyze a video of the "driver", i.e. to work out the deformations in the puppet needed to make it follow the driver. ... What they discovered: "After a great deal of experimentation, we obtained surprisingly convincing results using the following simple recipe: use actor B's shape, B's texture, and A's motion (adjusted for the geometry of B's face)."

Comments

Don't beat around the bush

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are we even pretending this is intended for anything but the porn industry? Just grab some pictures of that girl from Chem class you have a crush on, and suddenly you can have videos of her doing whatever you want.

Re:Failed Actors

[ranton]

An actor who I 'recognize' is an actor who has failed at their job. The job of an actor is to take on a role, and part of that process is immersing themselves in the role. If I see a 'star' actor and not the character being portrayed, the aesthetic distance has been broken and the actor has failed.

But if you are interested in creating a sequel or some other derivative work involving a character, you do want to be able to recognize that character.

Two uses: political satire and something else

[John Allsup]

I can see two uses for this tech: political satire (making politicians visibly move like the puppets they often are) and a certain slightly naughtier sort of entertainment.

An interesting application

[CanadianMacFan]

Something that would be very neat is when an actor gets older one could have them play a role but use video of them when they were younger to overlay. Actors could go for younger roles or you wouldn't need different actors to play the younger role. Of course it only works for actors who have been working for a long time. Image Arnold being able to play in a new Terminator movie but looking like he did in the second movie. Since it's the same actor you wouldn't have to worry about different mannerisms or facial expressions or the rights to the actor's image. It'd just be a copyright issue for using part of one video in another.