Guy Henry As Tarkin Sans CGI In Rogue One Trailer?

Does anyone know who this is in Rogue One’s 2nd trailer (with their back facing the camera, at 1:20)?

My thought is that it’s Guy Henry as Tarkin, sans CGI, but I’ve never seen anyone mention it before, so maybe I’m way off base. I don’t know which other character/actor would be in the scene, shot like this, with that uniform.

One of the things they claim in the behind the scenes for the (extraordinarily tasteless) CGI Peter Cushing is that they never had any backup plan if it didn’t turn out, and all the released set photos show him with the full dot and camera rig for his face.

If this is Guy Henry, he looks like he’s in full costume and makeup but with his natural hair and no augmentations, which could mean that they potentially shot alternatives as a safety (or if saner voices had prevailed and made them reconsider). Is there another character in the room that fits the bill or is a glimpse at yet another option they had on the table for that film?

Probably didn’t want to give away the Tarkin reveal so they used an alternative shot? Perhaps filmed right before they opted for CGI version.

Right, but the fact that they had this and showed it at all rather than just not showing any bit of Tarkin would indicate to me that they filmed all (most, some?) of his scenes for real with Guy Henry’s actual face and it’s sitting in a vault. Again, they professed that they didn’t shot any of this without the intention of Frankensteining Peter Cushing and they had no safety. If this is Guy Henry, I think it at least puts to lie that notion.

ElectricTriangle said:

Right, but the fact that they had this and showed it at all rather than just not showing any bit of Tarkin would indicate to me that they filmed all (most, some?) of his scenes for real with Guy Henry’s actual face and it’s sitting in a vault. Again, they professed that they didn’t shot any of this without the intention of Frankensteining Peter Cushing and they had no safety. If this is Guy Henry, I think it at least puts to lie that notion.

Maybe, but “discovering” this “lie” will not actually cause that footage to be released in any form so 🤷‍♂️ there’s no point in getting excited about it. Far, far more likely that there was a shot that was usable without much effects work (removing tracking dots without doing the full CG perhaps) for the trailer.

That I know, and I’m well aware of Rogue One’s production woes and extensive reshoots. But it would seem to me that this isn’t an “unfinished effect,” simply because all the other footage set up for tracking shows Guy Henry with a full head-rig: absent here. I posted the question to make sure that this is Henry as Tarkin, which it sounds like everyone is in agreement on.

Everything past that is speculation, but I think it’s evidence that they shot his scenes with the actor’s real face as a backup. (And I for one would love a cut that reinstates those, even though I know that’s not happening. The CGI Cushing is an insult to a great actor, and especially after Andor’s success, it’s a bit of a shame for such engaging television to lead up to a extremely tasteless tech demo John Knoll should have been talked out of).

We could re-do Tarkin with a new CGI face with AI, followed by a well-textured deepfake.

Perhaps I’d bother in the future.

I don’t mind CGI tarkin since his family approved of it. I care about the bad execution of it.

Mocata said:

Oh that’s been done ages ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CXMb_MO3aw

No, that’s just a deepfake on the Disney CGI mask. The facial movements are off - you can see it in the eyes. It’s not the fault of Shamook - who is brilliant, it is due to the CGI mask of Tarkin on the actor’s face. It still has the uncanny valley effect.

With AI, you could replace the original CGI “Tarkin Mask” with one with better eye movements and facial details, and then add a deepfake on top of that - then you would get a pretty lifelike result.

Like, here is a quick deepfake i did (10 min literally) of Ewan McGregor as Old Obi-Wan:

https://streamable.com/lltjip

It’s mediorcre at best. The eyes need more work, and Alec Guinness has a bigger face than Ewan, but this was 10 minutes without me pinpointing it in the right direction to fix these issues. If Alec Guiness’s eyes and beard were CGI, the deepfake would STILL look shit with the best of deepfakes because it would imprint on the computer-generated strains rather than the real-life human.

CGI Artists of 2016 just couldn’t replicate human eye movements and wrinkles around the mouth well enough for a plain deepfake on-top to work wonders, no matter if they had the camera for tracking. It just wasn’t precise enough. You can see this in the eye and mouths in Planet of The Apes movies as well (even the newest one). But of course they can’t deepfake monkey faces (yet) - and they’re not humans, so they get an easy pass.

BUT! With a CGI Mask made with AI (some of them are insanely good models for facial movements), you could replace the awful CGI MASK of 2016 with a 99% believable face trained on millions and millions of faces around the world. And then! A deepfake would do wonders.

And to bring this back to the main topic;

my theory is that they filmed scenes with Guy Henry for deepfake, but some in the production said it wasn’t far enough along and they opted for CGI. The irony is that the latter option would be so much easier to fix post-release (but of course this is not relevant to them, at least not at the time).

If they released Guy Henry’s POV shots from the camera that filmed his tracking dots, a 100% believable Tarkin could be produced (Luke in Mandalorian season 3, but better).