Deepfake 'Silence of the Lambs' with Willem Dafoe and Gillian Anderson [video] | Hacker News Reader

Deepfake 'Silence of the Lambs' with Willem Dafoe and Gillian Anderson [video]

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87 pointslaurex27 comments

The Gillian Anderson (Scully) replacement looks particularly good. The Youtube video only has Willem Dafoe in the title and I didn't even realize the woman was injected until I read the top Youtube comment. IMO it's the real star of the deepfake.

Maybe because she doesn't have a fluorescent light above her nor is the camera constantly zoomed in on her face, so probably nicer scenario for the deepfake. Or maybe because they have all of X-Files to train the brain?

I think it definitely helps that Gillian Anderson actually looks like Jodie Foster. I kid you not, I for some years thought they were the one and same!

I'm pretty sure Silence of the Lambs influenced the design and casting of the Dana Scully character. In both Silence of the Lambs and the X-Files pilot episode, you have young women with shoulder-length red hair starting their new job at the FBI investigating the death of women, including the examination of corpses (Dana Scully specializes in forensic pathology while the examination of corpses is more incidental to Clarice Starling's work, but is a very memorable scene in the movie.)

From the article "...Anderson's most famous role, FBI agent Dana Scully on The X-Files, was directly inspired by Starling, according to The Truth Is Out There: The Official Guide to The X-Files...".

Over the decades I have personally experienced several pairs of actors who "look the same" until I figured better. One early example of mine is Harrison Ford and Dennis Quaid [I was roughly 11 years old at the time].

The Gillian Anderson replacement looks good to me in a sense, namely that it doesn't look manipulated. It looks different from Jodie Foster but if I'd not seen the movie before I wouldn't suspect the footage of being tampered.

But on the other hand, it really doesn't look like Gillian Anderson either. If I didn't already know it was meant to be Gillian Anderson, I don't think I'd be able to guess it was. To me, it looks like somebody other than Jodie Foster or Gillian Anderson.

I actually found her to be somewhat CGI-looking. Her face is almost a bit too smooth, and it looks like its using an emissive material to do a poor man's subsurface scattering.

The Dafoe fake looks much more 'correct' but that may be because the skin texture there can hide the smoothness.

Part of me is somewhat grateful deepfakes are only now a thing, and not when video was sub-HD. If this was shown to me in VHS quality, I would be completely convinced that Gillian Anderson and Willem Dafoe were the main performers.

Direct link to youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJB5W2beVZ0

thanks !

the thing that ever so _slightly_ ruined it (for me atleast) were the eyes of the characters. they were just plain and utterly white without any blood-vessels. once i noticed that, it became kind of hard to ignore.

Pretty remarkable. Never the less...

Faces convey the emotional content well but I think that in case of Dr. Lecter there is something missing. Maybe the look is not as intensively gleeful or something...

The second strangeness is the background handling. The deep fakes are not handling the background near the face faces well. Maybe the different shape of faces forces the algorithm to generate the background and it's obviously not doing that part well. It gives sometimes the face the feel that is has been plastered on top of an image.

Here's another deepfake that looks really well done https://youtu.be/8OJnkJqkyio?t=11

Its the original audio performances, and I think this shows how important the actors are. Test deep fakes only on image and I think they fall down a lot.

When Dr Fakenstein drops a video, he does the voice AND the face. Really missing that, here.

I particularly like Jim Meskinens stuff as an impressionist because you get the audio as well: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5rPKeUXjEvE

When you see his face in profile near the end, it's clearly not Willem Dafoe's head shape. And in the middle his ear lobes were jumbled. But other than that it's pretty creepy! But that's probably because of the scene they chose :D

I'm still waiting for a full release of Home Stallone, where every character is played by a deepfake of Sylvester Stallone except for Sylvester Stallone, who's played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson

This is incredibly impressive. For a while I've wondered when it will be possible to "fork" movies and create different endings/scenes. I know that is a long way from this technology, but this kind of things gives me hope that will eventually be possible.

Could someone just make a deep fake technique that auto matches dubbing to the lip sync and make some $$$ and pushes foreign TV to everyone to help work towards world peace and create a real peak TV.

It might not be possible but I'd like to see attempts.

What are some of the fastest and easiest tools for creating something like this myself ?

You can try things such as:

- https://github.com/joshua-wu/deepfakes_faceswap

- https://github.com/Oldpan/Faceswap-Deepfake-Pytorch

You might have to run on a frame by frame basis, e.g. using `ffmpeg -i file.mpg $filename%03d.bmp` [1] and stitching the results back together [2]. I haven't tried it, though, and there might be better alternatives.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/10962408 [2] https://hamelot.io/visualization/using-ffmpeg-to-convert-a-s...

And guess who’s been producing them lately ... Hollywood. Makes me wonder who’s got some dirty videos that are gonna come out soon.

The pupils are often not centered or circular for hannibal. Was actually a bit creepier at first because of it.

Visually the face looks real. There must be some code that can prove evidence of alerting?

There’s going to be videos coming out in the next couple years that are going to shock the world and those recorded in the videos are going to claim they’re deep fakes which is why the media has been trying to make the public think deep fakes are easy to make

Starting with the desensitization now

They are though. It helps that I have a background in film and video but still.

It's not really an improvement on many of the others out there. It has some of the same problems as well, such as oddly smooth skin tone, deformed or blurry ears, and the face looking like a morph with the original rather than completely different. It seems that some deep fake authors try to find faces similar to the original to make the deep fakes work.

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