Technology of the future: Could deepfakes replace VFX?

Jennifer Lawrence with Steve Buscemi's face. (Youtube/VillainGuy)

Films can be an escape from reality, taking you on unimaginable journeys, even putting you in the middle of an epic battle happening in space or underwater.

Filmmakers increasingly rely on visual effects (VFX) to take us there, as their fantastical visions become impossible - or astronomically expensive - to capture on camera.

While special effects have been around since the dawn of film more than 130 years ago, the use of computer generated imagery began in the 70s, and they began to revolutionise mainstream filmmaking in blockbusters like The Abyss, Jurassic Park, and Terminator 2 which were all considered breakthrough CGI movies.

But though it seems to be an unshakeable and impenetrable industry, it is ultimately incredibly costly and there is a new AI technology that may be able to reduce the price and could even eliminate the need of some of the artists.

What makes VFX difficult?

Allar Kaasik, senior VFX tutor at Pearson College London, told Yahoo Movies UK: “It requires a large set of artistic and technical skills, ranging from sculpting, painting and animation to algorithm design, maths, physics and biology.

“The artist takes into consideration the underlying bone and muscle structures, which are animated under the constraints of what real human faces are capable of.

Avatar was heralded for its innovative VFX use of motion capture. (Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation)

“The model is then textured to give the skin a realistic colour and surface appearance, which includes complex algorithms calculating how light should reflect off the skin or scatter underneath the skin in the softer parts of tissue, such as the ears or the nose.

“It needs to be lit by lights in 3D space to match the lights in the real scene and after rendering the model into an image sequence (a video) a compositing artist has to combine it with the original footage of the real actress or stand-in.”

Thanks to the technological advances of VFX, we can now make people younger again, like Robert Downey Jr in Captain America: Civil War, or even bring someone back to life - like Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

However, there is a new form of computer-generated imagery that could potentially change the industry - deepfakes.

A deepfake of Trump superimposed over Putin. (Getty)

What is a deepfake?

A portmanteau of "deep learning" - an AI technique where algorithms are inspired by the structure and function of the brain called artificial neural networks - and "fake", deepfakes have exploded over the internet in just a few years.

They first entered the public eye late 2017, when an anonymous Redditor under the name “deepfakes” began uploading videos of celebrities like Scarlett Johansson stitched onto the bodies of pornographic actors, while non-pornographic content included many videos with actor Nicolas Cage’s face swapped into various movies.