“Black Panther: Wakanda forever” the recent Box Office hit had to deal with the sudden, unexpected death of its star, Chadwick Boseman, in 2020. How would the production of this second film played out if he had not died of cancer?
Black Panther is not the only franchise that has survived the death of an actor. Other notable examples include Star Trek, who had to film around the death of Leonard Nimoy, who played the original Spock during the production of Star Trek Beyond.
These incidents have been going on for a long time though with the oldest example being Brandon Lee from 90s favourite The Crow in which he was hit by a piece of stray debris. The producers worked to finish the film by digitally implanting Brandon Lee into the movie. He became the one of the first examples of a practice we now call ‘deepfaking’.
Deepfaking is the practice of creating a computer model or likeness of the actor or actress and layering said model over a real person.
The most recent and famous iteration of deepfaking is the appearance of Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) and Grand Moff Tarkin (Peter Cushing) in Rogue One, the Recent Star Wars movie.
Star wars has been deepfaking a lot of their characters, even ones who are still alive, even deepfaking Luke Skywalker to appear in The Mandolorian.
As technology evolves, will we have the need for conventional actors or will AI dominate?
Written by Oliver & Jamie Yr8
Carre’s Grammar School, Sleaford
This is really interesting. I’m not sure if ‘deepfaking’ is an exciting innovation or a terrifying development.
Artificial intellegence can make decent art from a few prompts, eg DALL-E. Maybe one day they could generate a whole film on demand from a few suggestions.
I like this article because it gives the reader detail about what they are talking about
I also think that it is great in my opinion
I like this article as it demonstrates how modern diverse careers link into traditional aspects, I didn’t know myself that ‘deepfaking’ was even a thing.
A really thought provoking article.
Great article on a topic that is very current, Deep Fakes and AI can be amazing and terrifying addition to the world of tech.
How far could ‘deepfaking’ be utilised? Interesting!
Very interesting article. I didn’t realize this technique was called deepfaking!
Deep Faking – I wonder how current actors feel about this?
Deepfaking is really cool! Considering it’s still a pretty new technology, it’s very scary thinking about the protentional misuse of it in the future… Maybe one day video evidence may longer be admissible in court?
Dystopian Sci-Fi aside, I want to see it used more for less nefarious deeds. The voice for Darth Vader already sold rights to his Darth Vader voice, which is now replicated by AI. I wonder if someday celebrities will sign away rights for their face to be used in movies without them needing to learn how to act! Heck, I’d do that. Put me in the next marvel movie doing something cool, please!