Deep Fake Trailer Imagines Obama, Miley Cyrus & Ian McKellan In A Heist

[D J C]

A newly released deepfake trailer shows Barrack Obama, Miley Cyrus, and Ian McKellan joining forces for a heist that goes terribly wrong. In recent years, deepfake technology has gone to a wide variety of strange and at times outright creepy places, providing viewers with the opportunity to see what some of their favorite films would look like had they been cast differently and even affording career opportunities for deepfake artists who gain viral fame.

 

At present, the technology has largely been used online by a handful of fans of franchises, such as Star Wars and Back to the Future, who have applied it to entertain other fans. But this certainly isn’t the sole use for deepfakes, and to date, it has been used to some degree in TV commercials, with performance capture (the basis of deepfake technology) used in major films such as The Irishman and Rogue One to either turn back the clock of aging, or, in the case of the latter film, to bring back an actor who had passed away. Perhaps what is most engaging (and admittedly somewhat frightening) about performance capture is that it holds the potential to completely create a performance out of thin air, without the need for actual human actors to stand on location or on a set delivering their lines.

 

The latest venture into the bizarre world of deepfakery comes courtesy of actor, writer and comedian Katia Kvinge’s Instagram account. The trailer (which Kvinge refers to as a pilot on her account) starts off simple enough with actors playing the roles of armed thieves preparing for a heist of some sort. But things quickly go off the rails as the three stars transform into Miley Cyrus, Barrack Obama and Ian McKellan before viewers' eyes. What follows next needs to be seen to be believed before the entire production segues into a highly peculiar trailer for an Olivia Coleman film called My Favourite Places to Sit. Check it out in its entirety below:

 

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CZXCAOfqnDG/?utm_source=ig_embed

The trailers were apparently made all the way back in 2019, but were only just released on Kvinge’s Instagram account recently. There is definitely a lot going on in the production, and as is to be expected with this sort of performance capture, it’s something that takes viewers into the possibilities of deepfake technology in a way that few could have anticipated. Again, this is one of the most exciting prospects of the technology – the ability to pull off strange new pairings of stars in even stranger scenarios. In that sense, it opens whole new creative worlds, which are really only limited by legal barriers – the likes of which are wisely safeguarded against via disclaimer at the start of the above video.

 

On the more practical side of things, there’s a big difference between making brief trailers and distributing them via social media and utilizing performance capture for something much more meaningful or larger in scale. But perhaps being able to experiment like this is exactly what the entertainment industry needs at this point. A common complaint from film audiences is that creativity is in short supply in many modern productions. Videos like Kvinge’s will likely never result in a heist film that stars Obama, Cyrus and McKellan, but the sheer insanity of it ultimately has the power to inspire creatives to think, "What if?"

 

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