Had an interesting thought after a visit to the movie theatres tonight…
The way the polarized lenses work to show you a 3D movie is essentially them projecting images for the left and right eye, and the glasses blocking the opposite displayed image for each eye.
SO… imagine this: say for example you decide to go see Captain Marvel, even though you don’t really like the lead actor. You wonder, while buying your ticket, what it would have been like with another actor in the lead role. Say, you want to see the movie, but don’t like Brie Larson… and you wish Natalie Portman had taken the role.
What if you could have a choice between those TWO lead actors for the film and you could watch each in the role, at the same screening, by using one of 2 different colour coded 3D glasses - the film would be a NON-3D film, but the glasses could have two left polarization lenses in blue frames for Brie and two right polarizations in the red frames for Natalie. Say both actors came in to do the dialogue on a weekend between their other projects, and for your theatre experience, you could be provided with headphones that play both actor’s vocal performances, but the built-in noise cancelation makes it so that you hear only one of those performances at once.
NOW… imagine that you use the Deep Fake (or similar) facial animation software.
The end result is the ability to go to a theatre, watch the one lead actor that you choose out of two options, and by using Deep Fake, the actual A-list actors can license their likeness and their voice to the project while a professional stunt person (or team of them) does the physical performance for the entire film.
Actors make royalties on their likeness and minimal voice work. You get to choose the lead actor that you want to see in the film you’re watching.
(Obviously, acting is more than just reading lines and being in the environment helps drive vocal performance, but it wouldn’t be any different than the voice cast performing for animated films.)
Imagine the implications for foreign versions of blockbuster films… eventually, we’ll be able to do caucasian star in English in one pair of glasses/headphones and a Chinese star speaking Mandarin in another pair of glasses and the remapped noise-cancelation in your same headphones.
The only downside that I can see is that Deep Fake isn’t good enough yet, though it is improving really fast, and that this approach would mean that films made this way could never be shown in (polarized) 3D.
Am I missing some reason why this wouldn’t work?
PM for address where to send my Technical Oscar.