04 November 2018

Digital Actors for Making Movies After Death

Visual-effects company Digital Domain, which has worked on major pictures like Avengers: Infinity War and Ready Player One, has also taken on individual celebrities as clients, though it hasn’t publicized the service. The suite of services that the company offers actors includes a range of different scans to capture their famous faces from every conceivable angle, making it simpler to re-create them in the future. Using hundreds of custom LED lights arranged in a sphere, numerous images can be recorded in seconds capturing what the person’s face looks like lit from every angle—and right down to the pores.


The lights can also emit different colors, emulating a variety of outdoor conditions where the digital human may be placed. This allows for more detailed and accurately colored, shaded, and reflective skin. They capture basically how the subdermal blood flow will change in the face. Even with all the advances in CGI, digitally re-created people don’t look perfect yet. Therefore, detailed and sometimes frame-by-frame adjustments have to be made if they aren’t picked up by the model generated from the live actors. But the special effects continue to improve, and with more actors preserving their digital likeness at a young age things could get easier.

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