Much in keeping with the tradition of hiring a safecracker to do security for a bank, Lucasfilm’s Industrial Light and Magic have hired a YouTube creator who came to internet attention for their work “fixing” a digitally de-aged Mark Hamill that appeared towards the end of the most recent season of “The Mandalorian,” making an already spooky bit of CGI just that little bit spookier and detached from reality. According to Decider, Shamook revealed the new job in a comment on YouTube, saying, “As some of you may already know, I joined ILM/Lucasfilms a few months ago and haven’t had the time to work on any new YouTube content. Now I’ve settled into my job; uploads should start increasing again. They’ll still be slow, but hopefully not months apart. Enjoy!”
This seems inevitable considering Lucasfilm and Disney’s only growing insistence on using digital de-aging in their television and feature film productions, having created a likeness of both Peter Cushing and a young Carrie Fisher for “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” as well as the more recent “The Rise of Skywalker.” To be honest, even at its least uncanny, it’s rarely a good effect, and that’s without even touching on the ethical questions around borrowing and altering people’s likenesses (the ones who can’t give permission, anyway).
In any case, Shamook has been making deepfakes for some time now, their work on the digitally altered version of Mark Hamill being their most prominent as it received over 2 million views on their channel. It impressed Lucasfilm, and now Shamook has been hired as a “Senior Facial Capture Artist.” As noted by Decider, this isn’t the only official job Shamook has been hired for recently either, having recreated a young, 60s-era Paul McCartney’s face on the body of a dancer in a video for the Paul McCartney/Beck collaboration “Find My Way,” off the album III Imagined. It, too, looks just ever so slightly weird.
