Film & TV: A Synthetic Snapshot
A new age of movie magic
Hollywood has been in the business of special effects and ‘movie magic’ since the very first films hit the silver screen.
In studios throughout Los Angeles, there are SFX wizards whose mastery of CGI tools has opened up rich worlds for storytelling from the Marvel cinematic universe to Pixar’s beloved animated films. SFX is central to the modern film and television industries, but producing computer-generated imagery by hand is remarkably expensive and requires large teams of highly trained experts to make it happen, such as the CGI behind recreating Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia in Star Wars Rogue One.
Synthetic media promises to shake up the industry by making these labor and cost-intensive processes more efficient. There are very real financial benefits to using synthetic media, but the technology also unlocks a huge number of creative opportunities that would have been impossible with traditional SFX techniques.
How is synthetic media already being used in film and TV?
We’ve already seen some examples of the technology at work. Recently, we have seen a number of good quality shots of de-aged Star Wars characters, like Luke Skywalker, and in The Mandalorian a Ukrainian startup called Respeecher synthesized the voice for the young Luke in the final episode.
In other use cases, a French TV soap swapped an actress’ face onto a body double for the show while she was self-isolating with Covid, and acclaimed documentarian David France used faceswapping to protect subjects’ identity while preserving their humanity in his powerful documentary on LGBT persecution, Welcome to Chechnya.
What does the future hold?
These early examples of synthetic media in film and tv have been lauded as pioneering and innovative, but when will synthetic media become as commonplace in film and tv as the SFX we are used to seeing today?
Last year, Disney presented research at a computer graphics conference that detailed its progress on creating megapixel-quality synthetic films with the help of deep learning algorithms. This is roughly the quality that is required to use synthetic media on the big screen.
While there is still a lot of work to be done before the technology is readily available in this form, Metaphysic’s hyperreal DeepTomCruise series provides a glimpse of how studios could license actors’ synthetic likenesses to combine with body double performances in films and television.
The DeepTomCruise project is primarily designed as a campaign to help raise awareness of synthetic media through light-hearted parody, Ume’s incredible work and Fisher’s uncanny Cruise impersonation have delighted viewers around the world and shown that hyperreal experiences resonate with audiences.
In the future, we can expect to see a lot more synthesized media in big-budget productions for both the small and silver screen. It’s clear from existing use cases and ongoing development that studios believe in hyperreal synthetic media’s potential to herald a new age of movie magic in cinematic experiences.
Metaphysic builds software to help creators make incredible content with the help of artificial intelligence. Find out more: www.metaphysic.ai
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About the author: in a galaxy far away, I was a lawyer turned internet & society researcher. In the 7 years before co-founding Metaphysic, I built tech companies in SF and London. I have always been obsessed with computational photography and computer vision, so it is a thrill to work alongside amazing people on the next evolution in how we build and perceive reality — one pixel at a time.
© Thomas Graham & Metaphysic Limited 2021.
