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)."
...based on the various ways that Kim Cattrall the Vulcan and Kim Cattrall the Coach, Kim Cattrall the seductress, Kim Cattrall the slutty friend, etc have been collaged together...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
...John Wayne in Blazing Saddles, as Mel Brooks wanted.
Disinfect the GNU General Public Virus!
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.
"What you are about to see is a true story. Only the names and faces and backgrounds and timelines have been changed to protect the innocent..."
...omphaloskepsis often...
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.
John_Chalisque
This is all about producing new content with old characters. Sometimes using a replacement is the only option, as the current actor is dead or no longer fits the part (like new episodes of the original Star Trek or old Doctor Who). Or perhaps the Disney model of making low-budget direct-to-video sequels is another application.
The important point for the entertainment industry now is to anticipate the technology and to add the future use into the contract negotiations now.
Is it the really long neck?
I was watching "Band Of Brothers" the other day. If anything, his son looks even weirder.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That sound you just heard was the Screen Actors' Guild shitting their pants.
Expect soon to see lobbyists' tame legislators writing laws prohibiting this.
-Styopa
The problem with actors is that after they become famous, they start demanding huge salaries. But if your "actor" is just a product that you hold all the IP rights to, suddenly you can get all the fan obsession (and the money it brings in) without the pesky salary demands. We still have a ways to go - synthetic voice acting (Hatsune Miku's songs are vocaloids) is woefully behind in technology compared to 3D graphics recreating human faces. And movements are still almost always motion-captured. But this is the direction all of this is heading - performers completely produced and controlled by a studio with no real lives of their own.
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.
Remember that scene from The Running Man, where they inserted a digital copy of a real person into a 'live' video, because he didn't want to do his job. Also, conspiracy theorists will have a field day with this.
She would be the donkey of course!
Take that back! Looker is an awesome movie! An awful kind of awesome, but awesome nonetheless.
Uh oh, did someone say "porn"? Because I see limitless possibilities for porn using this technique.
Wanna see Rick Perry bang Rick Santorum?
Wanna see Fred Phelps having a BDSM tryst with Divine?
Wanna see Donald Trump going at it with Hillary Clinton?
(For me, the answer is a resounding "NO!" to all of those, but you know that someone somewhere would go, "Oh yeah, baby...cue it up...")
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
There are people who have already "reverse engineered" the appearances and behavioral mannerisms of others, and made long successful careers from it: people like Al Hirschfeld and Rich Little. Why not just ask them how they do it?
Max Headroom, 1984
If I wasn't before, I'll be questioning the integrity of what I see in videos. Watch Barack Obama as Luke Skywalker? Funny. Watch me in some crime I did not commit? Less funny.
I've put in a lot of effort over the years staying the hell out of courtrooms, but if I were a judge, I would seriously question ANY photographic evidence these days.
Fifty years of Yippie! 1968-2018
So, you'll have a scenario where physically attractive candidates are filmed for a day or so going through a standard catalog of expressions, which are then stored then mapped onto performances done by a handful of pro actors, who are never actually seen in the movie. This is not a new thing but may become more pervasive as time goes by. SAG is going to have to come up with some kind of personal likeness IP so the people who are seen on camera are paid by the movie instead of just a flat fee for a couple days' work.
The first, and probably only, out loud laugh that Slashdot has given me all day. I don't know who they are but I assume they're a pretty actress. Either way, it made me chuckle loud enough for the missus to notice and wonder what was so amusing.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
Ooooh, Natalie Portman, you're in trouble now...
So now video evidence in court can be easily challenged. I guess once an event happens, there is no 100% fail-safe way to prove that it did happen. No wonder the world is run by lawyers.
It seems to have a bit of a limitation - it can only do people wearing hijabs.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
When I see ed Norton fucking, I see brad Pitt.