For over a year, YouTuber Shamook has been producing popular DeepFakes of well-known Hollywood films in which he alternately casts the title roles - for example, using the DeepFake tool DeepFaceLab, he has Burt Reynolds play James Bond instead of Sean Connery in Dr No and Tom Selleck portray Indiana Jones instead of Harrison Ford.
Princess Leia in comparison CGI vs. DeepFake
Among the most successful, however, are his Star Wars DeepFakes, in which he replaces, for example, Alec Guiness as Obi-Wan Kenobi in scenes from the first three Star Wars films by Ewan McGregor or the young Luke Skywalker by Sebastian Stan instead of Mark Hamill.
Shamook achieved the most attention, with over 2.8 million views, when he replaced Han Solo, played by Alden Ehrenreich, with a young Harrison Ford in a sequence from "Solo: A Star Wars Story" (2018):
These clips, as well as his per DeepFakes of Lucasfilm&s CGI-revived Star Wars characters like Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in "Rogue One" (2016) and www.youtube.com/watch? v=_CXMb_MO3aw (Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin) as well as the CGI-rejuvenated Mark Hamills as young Luke Skywlaker in "The Mandalorian", which were clearly superior in quality to Lucasfilms and CGI versions, seem to have so convinced the film studio of his abilities that they not only did not block his videos on YouTube, but even hired him.
In a recent comment, Shamook stated that he has been working at ILM/Lucasfilm for a few months and therefore has not found the time to work on new YouTube content. However, he plans to resume his uploads soon (at a slower pace).
Industrial Light and Magic confirmed this in its own statement, "ILM is always on the lookout for talented artists and has indeed hired the artist who calls himself &Shamook& online."
Disney is already developing DeepFake tools
Disney, the parent company of Lucasfilm, is after all already developing improved DeepFake technology for their professional use in motion pictures, which allows DeepFakes with higher resolutions, adjusts the contrast of the new face to the exposure situation and also avoids unwanted differences in facial expression between individual images. That&s why a specialist who knows the work of training and optimizing DeepFakes comes in handy to push the use of DeepFakes in Disney movies.
The interest in DeepFakes by a major film studio such as Disney is logical - after all, until now, re-animations of dead actors such as Peter Cushing (Grand Moff Tarkin) or Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia) for Star Wars had to resort to complex virtual models of the actors in order to produce very time-consuming, few-second film scenes with them. With the help of a sophisticated DeepFake algorithm, such tasks would be much easier to accomplish and would save a lot of money in production - not to mention the many other ways DeepFakes can be used in movies.
What are DeepFakes?
DeepFakes (a play on words from "deep learning" and "fake") are realistic-looking media content (be it photos, videos, or sounds) that are manipulated using machine learning techniques (aka AI or neural networks). For example, the image of a person in a video can be replaced by that of another person. The prerequisite for a successful illusion is (still) sufficient training material in the form of recordings of the facial expressions of the person who is to be newly inserted into the film. more infos at bei www.indiewire.com