Speaking on stage at the conference in San Francisco, Rob Bredow, also senior vice president of creative innovation at Lucasfilm, said the company tends to use the term «face swap» rather than «deep fakes.»
Machine learning and A.I. have gone beyond what Bredow expected. Once trained in the technology and material, Bredow said, they can get results in seconds on minutes of footage, something that used to take 10 artists six weeks to accomplish.
During the interview, there was a clip showing a younger version of Mark Hamill in The Mandalorian, only it was a younger version of himself. According to Bredow, there was a stand-in for him while he was acting off camera.
The studio’s job was to turn the stand-in actor’s face into that of the character. Industrial Light & Magic used machine learning technology and their own system to do it. It wasn’t good enough for the highest quality of film streaming, so artists went back in with other techniques, sometimes to add more detail.
He said they get to collaborate with filmmakers who want to make something that no one has ever seen before. We get to be their visual storytellers when they call us. There are a lot of different techniques, from 30 years ago to the latest machine learning techniques.
Bredow said the company is all about innovation. He shared a story about an artist who posted a version of their work that was very, very good. What did Bredow think? He asked the audience how he could get a hold of the man. Two weeks later, the artist started at Ilm.
He said that someone who does great work is the kind of person you want to bring in.
Abba is touring again for the first time in 40 years with a bit of a twist, and Bredow spoke about it. The band members have a digital recreation of their younger selves.
He said that the illusion is that you can go back to the 1970s and see Abba perform live. We were working on the show for three and a half years and we were wondering if it was going to work. Is the audience going to like it or is it going to feel like someone is pressing play on a screen?
They were able to create a show that would never have been done without the machine learning technologies he mentioned.
So what will happen next? The fifth movie in the Indiana Jones franchise. The trailer shows a look into the past with a younger depiction of Harrison Ford, made possible through A.I.
Bredow hopes that you will continue to see our focus on those details that make a performance of an actor playing, in this case, himself at a younger age as believable as possible
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