Arking

I’m a bit of a geek for all the miniature set shots and explanations from Weta and LucasArts so I hope Adywan includes some of these behind the scenes shots of his work in the special features. It’s a lot of work to record ones development of props but having had the pleasure of seeing what he’s developed it would be great to see the effort celebrated and credited. I don’t care too much for knowing how he does it, trade secrets etc but a photo series like the recent Wampa shots are really awesome.

I’ve been a fan of this page for some time, enjoying numerous fan edits and reading about the different methods people go about working on this franchise. I myself enjoy pretty much every edition pure, revisited, enhanced you name it. I guess my topic ties into the recent CG character debate regarding resurrecting characters played by deceased actors. While I don’t mind bringing a character back to life through the magic of CG I understand the ethical questions it brings up.

With relation to this topic it now appears the technology for editors to do something akin to what Hollywood already has done may soon be available at home. Both Adobe and Stanford University have released information on some amazing technologies that would not only allow editors to mimic an actors voice but also reenact close facial dialogue.

http://www.graphics.stanford.edu/~niessner/thies2016face.html

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/after-20-minutes-of-listening-new-adobe-tool-can-make-you-say-anything

The technology Face2Face appears to be very limited and is not currently an application that’s being produced commercially at this point in time but the development is promising nonetheless.

Personally I could see some much needed dialogue editing in the prequels using these technologies but it begs the question whether editors would adhere to the same principals as Hollywood or would they take it further? Would anyone actually use this technology in their edits?