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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)."
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!
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
A good actor is not a robot reciting lines, and a role is not some sort of hole into which a peg (actor) must fit precisely and in one way only. Part of what makes a good actor good is the ability to provide an interpretation of a role.
Roger Moore was actually the first choice for the role of James Bond in Dr No. Sean Connery got the role instead, and did a fine job of it. But it would be interesting to see how Roger would have done that film.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
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.
No offense, but your views on the matter don't seem to be very representative as there's a ton of decent actors who'd do just as good an acting job as the stars and cheaper too, but we seem to prefer the same known faces we've seen in other movies. Because no matter how well they act the role it's pretty glaringly obvious that an "identical twin" just appeared in a different story universe, regardless of make-up and such.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
For that matter, Tom Hanks animated himself with a somewhat different technique, and the picture died a horrible death in the Uncanny Valley.
Huh? I'm not saying the LoTR films are the bestest thing evaaaah. But I can clearly see that Gandalf is, in his spare time, Sir Ian McKellen - even if I'm not going "crikey, that's Sir Ian McKellen!" every time he pops up.
So I recognised him. Does that mean he's failed?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
My word, these Sir Ian refugees get everywhere. Even Middle Earth, you say?
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...
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.