Disney and Face-Swapping: Real Actors Days Numbered

July 27, 2020

It took big bucks and a lot of time to insert virtual models of Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing into 2016’s Rogue One: a Star Wars Story, but Disney may soon pull off similar tricks much more easily. The Verge tells us, “Disney’s Deepfakes Are Getting Closer to a Big-Screen Debut.” The studio presented the technology at the recent Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2020 in London. The article shares Disney’s video illustrating the studio’s latest developments and contrasting them with earlier face-swapping technologies. It is well worth the investment of four minutes for anyone who is at all curious. Reporter James Vincent writes:

“The deepfakes you’ve probably seen to date may look impressive on your phone, but their flaws would be much more apparent on a larger screen. As an example, Disney’s researchers note that the maximum-resolution videos they could create from popular open-source deepfake model DeepFakeLab were just 256 x 256 pixels in size. By comparison, their model can produce video with a 1024 x 1024 resolution — a sizable increase. Apart from this, the functionality of Disney’s deepfake model is fairly conventional: it’s able to swap the appearances of two individuals while maintaining the target’s facial expressions. If you watch the video, though, note how technically constrained the output seems to be. It only produces deepfakes of well-lit individuals looking more or less straight at the camera. Challenging angles and lighting are still not on the agenda for this tech. As the researchers note, though, we are getting closer to creating deepfakes good enough for commercial projects.”

Left unmentioned are such projects’ darker possibilities—false video evidence of a crime, for example, or faked fodder for political scandal. Still, it is fascinating to watch this technology evolve. It is not surprising Disney’s financial motivations have gotten them this far.

Whitney Grace, July 27, 2020

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Financial, News, Technology

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.