In recent years one popular YouTube trend has been creating deepfake video clips of popular movies. Much of the time these have been replacing one existing actor with another (eg. Bruce Lee as Neo in “The Matrix,” Jim Carrey as Jack in “The Shining”).
One subcategory of this group though has been to use the same deepfake tech to improve existing digital de-aging visual effects in films where the original effects don’t quite work.
A leader in this field on YouTube is Shamook who has posted video clips from “The Irishman,” “Justice League,” “TRON: Legacy” and “Rogue One” that improves on the believability of some of those film’s digital faces – sometimes drastically so.
One key video they did though, fixing the Luke Skywalker appearance in “The Mandalorian” less than four days after it aired, was good enough that the YouTuber has revealed that he has joined the team over at Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic with IndieWire subsequently confirming the hiring.
A Lucasfilm representative tells the outlet: “[Industrial Light and Magic is] always on the lookout for talented artists and have in fact hired the artist that goes by the online persona ‘Shamook’. Over the past several years ILM has been investing in both machine learning and A.I. as a means to produce compelling visual effects work and it’s been terrific to see momentum building in this space as the technology advances.”