Stallone in Terminator 2? How one deepfake prankster is changing cinema history
July 15, 2019
In some parallel
universe, there’s a version of Casino Royale with Hugh
Jackman playing everyone’s favorite suave British agent, James Bond. And one in
which Matthew McConaughey took the Leo role in Titanic. And
DiCaprio and Brad Pitt co-starred in Brokeback Mountain.
And Saved
by the Bell’s Tiffani Thiessen played Rachel in Friends.
The entertainment industry isn’t exactly short on “what if?”
scenarios in which actors came close to, but were ultimately passed over,
playing iconic roles. For more than 99% of movie history, fans have been able
to do little more than squirrel away this trivia for use in pop quizzes. That
is until the arrival of deepfakes.
Springing to life in the past couple of years, deepfakes use
artificial intelligence technology to combine and superimpose new images and
videos onto existing source footage using machine learning. That could mean
anything from face swaps to mapping one person’s body onto someone else’s movements.
The results can be jaw-droppingly realistic, which is why many people
rightfully worry about its potential to be used for malicious
hoaxes.
One tech enthusiast and movie buff thinks different, though.
Operating under the YouTube username “Ctrl Shift Face,” this
high-tech Hollywood fan has used deepfake technology to create some astonishing
remixes of iconic movie scenes — complete with all new actors. Ever wanted to
see The
Shining starring Jim Carrey instead of Jack Nicholson? Sly
Stallone in Terminator 2: Judgement Day? Heck,
he’s even broken with the movie theme by dropping David Bowie into Rick
Astley’s infamous song-turned-meme Never Gonna Give You Up.
“The Bowie one is my
favorite,” its creator told Digital Trends. “I wanted to Rickroll people and
blow them away at the same time. Bowie fitted the role of Rick Astley, and had
interesting facial features for a deepfake.”
“The more the network learns, the more detailed the result will
be.”
So who exactly is this prankster mogul who can put some of
the world’s biggest actors into movies they never actually appeared in with a
few clicks of the mouse? He’s not telling. “I don’t want to share my real name
really,” Ctrl Shift Face’s creator explained.
“It’s not important, I think. I let my work speak for itself.” He did mention a
few personal details, such as his age (31), his place of birth (Slovakia,
although he no longer lives there), and the fact that his job involves computer
graphics on some level.
Ultimately, however, the
fact that we don’t know who is behind Ctrl Shift Face raises an important point
about the world of deepfakes. No longer confined to a few top Hollywood special
effects houses, this kind of smart CGI wizardry is now available to all comers.
It’s code that’s freely available online, capable of placing any actor alive or
dead into any movie you can think of. No multi-million dollar salary
negotiation or air-conditioned trailer conversation necessary!
“I’m not a coder, just a
user,” said Ctrl Shift Face’s creator. “I don’t know the details about exactly
how the software works. The workflow works like this: You add source and
destination videos, then one neural network will detect and extract faces. Some
data cleanup and manual extraction is needed. Next, the software analyzes and
learns these faces. This step can sometimes take a few days. The more the
network learns, the more detailed the result will be. In the final step, you
combine these two and the result is your deepfake. There’s sometimes a bit of
post-process needed as well.”
THE FUTURE OF FAKES
While his favorite video is, as noted, the Bowie one, the
one he feels is objectively the best is the Jim Carrey version of The Shining.
Placing the face of the actor behind Ace Ventura: Pet Detective on
the body of Jack Nicholson shouldn’t work, but it really, really does. “I had
the idea to put a comedic actor into a serious dark scene,” he said. “Jim on
Jack seemed like a good match.”
In the near future, it’ll be feasible to realistically recreate
an actor’s speech using similar training data.
As for his least favorite? Terminator 2’s face
swap with Stallone taking the role made famous by Arnold Schwarzenegger. “I
guess my videos mirror my sense of humor,” he said. “For T2, there’s this
joke from Last Action Hero, where it’s a sort of alternate
universe where Sly played the Terminator.” But he doesn’t feel the results
entirely worked, due to his choice to edit the audio to incorporate an
impressionist doing a Stallone impersonation.
“I wasn’t able to edit it in seamlessly so the background
music and ambient sounds have this noticeable jump,” he noted. “My version of
the movie had had only 2.1 audio. Later, I realized if I had used 5.1 audio I
could separate the audio channels and easily edit the new voice in. Another big
regret was that the Bad to the Bone closing song
really should have been Eye of the Tiger. It would have
been a far better video than it is now.”
He said that he has heard from studios but “I can’t talk
details.” That means we don’t know whether the remixes have been held in high
regard or the total opposite. Given Hollywood’s enthusiasm about digitally de-aging actors,
or even reincarnating deceased ones by putting their heads onto other actors’
bodies, it seems this technology will increasingly find its way into big-budget
blockbusters. But it’s less clear if Tinseltown is happy that such tools are
available for everyone.
“That’s out of my
expertise,” Ctrl Shift Face’s creator said. “But I may collaborate with people
that can do these types of AI voices in the future.”
Comments
Post a Comment