With today's technological advances applied to cinema, television or advertising itself, incredible things can be achieved. These advances and the latest movements of the audiovisual sector they have made it fashionable again to talk about completely false elements created by computer, substitution of faces or, even, rejuvenating actors so that they appear to be 30 years younger. Today we want to talk to you, and clarify certain doubts, about himthe two most popular techniques of said sector: CGI and deepfakes.
CGI vs DeepFake: what are they and how are they different?
Despite the fact that talking to you about this topic has become very popular in recent years, these techniques (especially CGI) are something that have been used in movies, TV and advertising for a long time. But of course, the public's ignorance of these techniques can normally lead them to confuse them or even think that they are only "things made by computer". The truth is that these are totally different elements, but they can become complementary.
On the one hand we have the technique CGI or "Computer Generated Imagery", also known as computer generated images. These types of graphics, whether 3D or 2D, are often used in art, movies, TV shows and ads, or video games.
Referring to film and television, CGI is often used to recreate scenes that, on many occasions, would be much more expensive to create in real life than to generate them through advanced computational techniques with computers. But, taking it more to the extreme, there are scenes that if it weren't for the CGI there would be scenes that would not be possible to obtain otherwise, such as a deceased actor or actress appearing in a film or series. An example of CGI could be the computer generated graphics for the popular series The Mandalorian.
On the other hand, the technique of Deepfake, is an acronym in English formed by the union of the word fake ("false" in Spanish) and deep learning (“deep learning” in Spanish). This is a technique carried out using artificial intelligence computing that is often used in film or television mainly to replace faces, rejuvenate or age them in an ultra-realistic way. It is true that it is, once again, something done by computer but this technique requires 2 real sources for its use.
So that we all understand it well and explained in a very simple way, through the use of AI and facial recognition all the features of an «A» model that we want, for example, to replace the face with that of another person, are analyzed. Now with our model "B", whose face has been selected for replacement, we need to create a "database" of each feature of her face either with a video or with many photos from different angles. Once all the morphological data of subject B's face has been extracted, an alignment of subject A's facial features is performed to "fix" his face at all possible angles. Knowing the features of both models, we proceed to align both faces using computer computing techniques, obtaining as a result something similar to a mask on the face of subject A. To finish the task, although this whole process is much deeper , compositing and vfx are used to “remove the clutter”.
El the final outcome of a delivery, not just a part of the process, if it has been done correctly, it means that character A is tremendously similar (in terms of the morphology of his face) to character B. An example of a deepfake could be that of the following image, in which the face has been replaced of Jack Nicholson in "The Shining" by that of the actor Jim Carrey.
The best known CGI and Deekfake
Now that you know a little more about these popular techniques used in film, television, and many other media, we want to show you some of the CGI and most popular deepfakes of the moment. Some have been quite criticized and now we explain why.
The criticized CGI of The Mandalorian
As we have already mentioned a few lines ago, using the CGI technique in the cinema to implement characters is the order of the day. And so they did in the last episode of The Mandalorian 2 with the reappearance of a very young Luke Skywalker.
There is no official statement from Disney that explains the procedures followed for these scenes, but what is evident is that they were not as polished as they should be (and more knowing the budgets that are handled).
After the euphoria of the fans after seeing one of their favorite characters "brought back to life" with the appearance he had in the 70s, criticism of the unreality contained in these scenes did not take long to appear.
Seizing the moment, the creators of Sam & Niko, a YouTube channel specialized in video editing and special effects, decided to try to improve these scenes and they did.
As they explain in one of their videos, thoroughly analyzed the movements and facial features (together to the lighting and texture errors who comment on the clips in which Luke appears). Then, using the archive, they analyzed a large number of videos and photographs of the character when he had the desired appearance. After all this analysis, and with the help of ultra-powerful equipment to process everything, they made use of the deepfake technique to place a Luke Skywalker mask over the scene created by Disney in The Mandalorian.
Was your result better? You can judge for yourself by watching his video but, in our opinion, the improvement is remarkable.
CGI of Will Smith in Gemini
Another of the most popular cases of application of these techniques in recent years was in the film Gemini. In it we can see a 51-year-old Will Smith fighting against another 23-year-old "Will".
Again, the computer graphics generation next to facial recognition techniques and AI They allowed each facial feature of the actor to be analyzed in 2019, and then merged with images of his appearance when he was barely 20 years old. Luckily, Will Smith has a large archive of scenes during this time as in the movie Two rebel cops, In the Men in black.
Will himself explains part of the process (showing many behind-the-scenes images) in a video on his YouTube channel.
Deepfake Lola Flores
A clear example could not be left out of the latest ad from the Cruzcampo beer company in which, using the Deepfake technique, they revived the popular singer Lola Flores.
If you want to know in great detail how this technique was applied to generate said spot advertising, on this company's own YouTube channel they recounted the process in a video.
The mobile era: apps to make Deepfakes with your mobile
As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, technologies are advancing by leaps and bounds, and things for which we previously needed extremely powerful equipment can now be done with our mobile phone.
The technique of Deepfakes is another example of this. There are various applications that allow us to take a selfie and, in just a few seconds, place our face on world-renowned characters such as Harry Potter, Shakira or Captain Jack Sparrow, among many others.
As you can imagine, these are prepared models in which, with fewer calculations than those carried out in a movie or on TV, it allows us to place our face on them in a simple but quite successful way. We are not going to fool anyone, but to post on social networks or have a laugh, it is more than enough.
An example of this is the app Recover. As we told you, it is as simple as following the steps that the application gives us and, after taking a selfie and having it analyzed, we can substitute our face instead of those of well-known characters of different kinds. Of course, we already warned you that if you want to enjoy this app thoroughly, you will have to pay.
Another example is the iface app, available only for Apple phones. The operation is identical to the previous one:
- We start the app.
- He asks us to take a selfie to analyze it.
- We choose from one of the free templates in their catalog and, in just a few seconds, we have our face on that of an actor, singer or well-known public figure.
But, once again, we will have to go through the checkout to take advantage of all the models of this application.