Film studio Lucasfilm and Industrial Light and Magic have hired deepfake YouTuber Shamook, who literally provided Luke Skywalker with a new face in The Mandalorian with his deepfake algorithm. The original was seen as mediocre by many fans.
Fans of The Mandalorian collectively raised their eyebrows when Luke Skywalker stepped into season two of the series. Without giving too many spoilers, a young Luke Skywalker can be seen, a computer-generated rejuvenated version of actor Mark Hamill. Many fans thought Skywalker looked fake.
YouTuber Shamook felt he could do better and deepfaked the scene, using old footage from Mark Hamill. The video has been viewed over two million times at the time of writing and it landed Shamook a new job. He has been appointed senior facial capture artist at Lucasfilm/ILM.
In a comment under a recent video Shamook says he hasn’t had time for his YouTube content since he has a new job at the Star Wars studio and famed special effects company Industrial Light and Magic.
IndieWire has confirmed the signing of Shamook received by ILM. A spokesperson says that ILM is always looking for talented artists and that the company has invested a lot of time in machine learning and artificial intelligence for special effects in recent years.
Shamook made Luke Skywalker’s deepfake in four days. He used for that open source deepfake tool DeepFaceLab. He trained the algorithm with old footage from Mark Hamill. He says that he could do very little to improve the animation and the synchronization of the mouth. To do that, he’d have to have the original image of the actor who played Skywalker in the reshoots of The Mandalorian before his head was replaced with CGI. And he had to make the video quickly for his Christmas vacation, so he himself wasn’t “100 percent happy with the quality.” Nevertheless, it got him the job.
Shamook is one of the best deepfake YouTubers out there right now. Among other things, he made a deepfake Harrison Ford in the Solo movieby Mel Gibson Mad Mad: Fury Road and an upgraded Tarkin and Leia in Rogue One. Shamook isn’t alone in using deepfake technology to improve Luke Skywalker’s scene. Also filmmaker collective Corridor Digital made an attempt. Those makers replaced Skywalker’s body double from the original with a different actor, in order to solve the problem Shamook encountered.
Note: This video is a spoiler for Season 2 of The Mandalorian.