The latest Star Wars spin-offs from the movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story to the series The Mandalorian, had a ‘small’ problem: the cameos of historical characters reconstructed with computer graphics, from Princess Leia to the Jedi Luke Skywalker, had not completely convinced fans of the saga. Computer animation, while credible enough, was not able to compete with the appearance of real actors. That gap was filled, surprisingly, by a Youtuber, Shamook, who improved the cameos of the most famous characters using artificial intelligence-based deepfake technology. His videos, on YouTube, have been viewed millions of times and have been a huge success. So much so as to push Lucasfilm, through its special effects company Industrial Light & Magic, to hire Shamook for future jobs. The position assumed by the Youtuber is that of “Senior Facial Capture Artist”.
