According to Variety, photorealistic moving images ostensibly of the late, great movie star Val Kilmer are going to be used to make it seem as if he is starring in an upcoming movie about a Native American Catholic priest with tuberculosis called As Deep as the Grave.
Per Variety:
“Even though he didn’t shoot a single scene, [director Coerte] Voorhees has been able to realize his vision of having Kilmer in the ensemble by using state-of-the-art generative AI. And he’s done it with the cooperation of the late actor’s estate and his daughter Mercedes (Voorhees says Kilmer’s son Jack is also supportive).”
“Despite the fact some people might call it controversial, this is what Val wanted,” Vorhees claimed to Variety. Before his death, the ailing Kilmer had been cast in As Deep as the Grave, and Vorhees claims it he felt it was an “important story that he wanted his name on.”
Variety notes that Sonantic worked with Kilmer on a facsimile of his voice when his vocal cords were damaged by a medical procedure, but it’s not clear what piece of video-generating tech Vorhees plans to use to essentially deepfake Kilmer into his movie. However, depending on what Vorhees’ standards are, that question might be purely academic at this point. Variety says he has many images of Kilmer “provided by his family,” along with “footage from his final years.”
Since he has photos he’s legally allowed to put into an AI still image generator, even a small movie budget should provide Vorhees with enough tokens to churn those into splashy text-to-video outputs featuring Val Kilmer via a video generating tool along the lines of Kling 3.0. Workarounds for consumer AI applications already enable influencers to make fairly convincing deepfake videos of celebrities that social media sites like Instagram seem to tolerate as long as they’re labeled as AI-generated.
But whether or not such a workflow can generate something that would satisfy a paying movie audience expecting the digital resurrection of Val Kilmer remains to be seen.
It’s doubtful we’ll get certainty about whether or not Kilmer really would have thought this was okay. But it’s been documented that he thought so highly of the profession of acting that he believed actors understand the experiences they act out at a deeper level than people who experience them in real life. He said this point blank in a 2005 interview, going as far as to say that if Jude Law had acted in a movie about young Val Kilmer, Jude Law would know more about what it feels like to be Val Kilmer than Val Kilmer.
That’s certainly an unconventional belief, but Kilmer was a guy with a lot of unconventional beliefs, and this one could easily be construed as a sign that he of all people would have preferred that someone like Jude Law be hired to act in As Deep as the Grave, but, once again, we’ll probably never know.
Source link
#Val #Kilmer #AIed #Movie #Blessing #Family
Post Comment