Disney Face Director allows for directors to change actor’s facial expressions.
Acting talent does not matter. Don’t believe me? Disney just invented a computer program that will probably chang acting forever.
Project Casting has posted this over and over again. In Hollywood you are constantly told that you need acting classes, drama school experience and maybe even a doctorate degree in acting before you will ever make it in the film industry.
However, time and time again, casting directors have revealed that Twitter, Instagram and Facebook followers are more important than acting talent. But, if you still believe that you need to be a talented actor in Hollywood, then get ready to have your mind blown…
Disney created a computer program that changes an actor’s facial expressions.
Disney created a computer program that allows for directors, producers and editors to change actor’s facial expressions in post production. That means if your favorite actor is unable to look sad enough on camera, then producers can simply change the actor’s face with a simple click of a button.
Basically, editors can take two separate takes featuring two different emotions and blend them together in post production. “As an example, given sad and angry video takes of a scene, our method empowers a movie director to specify arbitrary weighted combinations and smooth transitions between the two takes in post-production.”
Here’s how Disney’s Research Group describes their new invention.
We present a method to continuously blend between multiple facial performances of an actor, which can contain different facial expressions or emotional states. As an example, given sad and angry video takes of a scene, our method empowers a movie director to specify arbitrary weighted combinations and smooth transitions between the two takes in post-production. Our contributions include (1) a robust nonlinear audio-visual synchronization technique that exploits complementary properties of audio and visual cues to automatically determine robust, dense spatio-temporal correspondences between takes, and (2) a seamless facial blending approach that provides the director full control to interpolate timing, facial expression, and local appearance, in order to generate novel performances after filming. In contrast to most previous works, our approach operates entirely in image space, avoiding the need of 3D facial reconstruction. We demonstrate that our method can synthesize visually believable performances with applications in emotion transition, performance correction, and timing control.
Check out how they do it in the video below:
