Tag Archives: VFX
High-Quality Background Removal Without Green Screens
Human matting is an extremely interesting task where the goal is to find any human in a picture and remove the background from it. It is really hard to achieve due to the complexity of the task, having to find the person or people with the perfect contour. … The MODNet background removal technique can extract a person from a single input image, without the need for a green screen in real-time! Read More
The creators of South Park have a new weekly deepfake satire show
It’s the first example of a recurring production that will rely on deepfakes as part of its core premise.
The fake news: A new weekly satire show from the creators of South Park is using deepfakes, or AI-synthesized media, to poke fun at some of the most important topics of our time. Called Sassy Justice, the show is hosted by the character Fred Sassy, a reporter for the local news station in Cheyenne, Wyoming, who sports a deepfaked face of president Trump, though a completely different voice, hair style, and persona. Read More
The technology that’s replacing the green screen
Why ‘The Mandalorian’ Uses Virtual Sets Over Green Screen
Agence is an experience that is never the same twice.
A dynamic short-film that merges cinematic storytelling, artificial intelligence, and user interactivity, Agence is never the same twice. In this simulated universe, you have the power to observe or interfere with tiny AI creatures, called the “Agents”, as they react to each other and their emerging world. Once you meet these little AI creatures, their story will never be the same. Read More
We Remade TRON in One Day
AI Magic Makes Century-Old Films Look New
Denis Shiryaev uses algorithms to colorize and sharpen old movies, bumping them up to a smooth 60 frames per second. The result is a stunning glimpse at the past.
On April 14, 1906, the Miles brothers left their studio on San Francisco’s Market Street, boarded a cable car, and began filming what would become an iconic short movie. Called A Trip Down Market Street, it’s a fascinating documentation of life at the time.
… Well over a century later, an artificial intelligence geek named Denis Shiryaev has transformed A Trip Down Market Street into something even more magical. Read More
High-Resolution Neural Face Swapping for Visual Effects
In this paper, we propose an algorithm for fully automatic neural face swapping in images and videos. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first method capable of rendering photo-realistic and temporally coherent results at megapixel resolution.To this end, we introduce a progressively trained multi-way comb network and a light- and contrast-preserving blending method.We also show that while progressive training enables generation of high-resolution images, extending the architecture and training data beyond two people allows us to achieve higher fidelity in generated expressions. When compositing the generated expression onto the target face, we show how to adapt the blending strategy to preserve contrast and low-frequency lighting.Finally, we incorporate a refinement strategy into the face landmark stabilization algorithm to achieve temporal stability, which is crucial for working with high-resolution videos. We conduct an extensive ablation study to show the influence of our design choices on the quality of the swap and compare our work with popular state-of-the-art methods. Read More
How an AI graphic designer convinced clients it was human
Nikolay Ironov had been working as a graphic designer for more than a year before he revealed his secret.
As an employee of Art. Lebedev Studio — Russia’s largest design company — Ironov had already worked on more than 20 commercial projects, creating everything from beer bottle labels to startup logos.
But Ironov was not the person he claimed to be. In fact, the designer was not a person at all. Read More
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