\n\tIn a professionally lighted brick-walled space in Venice, not different from many other professionally lighted brick-walled spaces all over Los Angeles, actors routinely come in to have their photos and video taken.<\/p>\n
The process is quick and unremarkable to anyone familiar with the studio-shoot culture of the city, where the backdrops change but the conventions stay the same.<\/p>\n
\n\tYet the similarities with a typical Hollywood shoot end after the camera switches off at the offices of this boutique firm known as Deep Voodoo<\/a>. The images and video are converted into data bits and sent to AI<\/a>-model experts employed all over the world. One in Eastern Europe, another in Argentina, a third in Vancouver. They work their machine-training magic, relying on compute from a data center at an undisclosed location. Eventually all that data gets turned into the desired object: a de-aged actor or deepfake or other synthetic image that can used for various forms of entertainment.<\/p>\n \n\tAll of that would be intriguing even if the founders of Deep Voodoo weren\u2019t\u00a0South Park<\/a>\u00a0instigators Trey Parker<\/a> and Matt Stone<\/a>. But among all their taboo-busting, the\u00a0Book of Mormon\u00a0pair, it turns out, are also burgeoning AI pioneers. And for the past several years they have been quietly deploying their company to help production labels achieve their effects goals, making housecalls as doctors of deepfakes<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cI find that a lot of discussions about AI become tiresome. You know \u2018put your taxes in and it can do them,’\u201d says Stone, 54, in a rare interview about Deep Voodoo. \u201cAnd it\u2019s like, \u2018cool, but a human can do your taxes.\u2019 What we\u2019re trying to do is something no amount of humans can do.\u201d<\/p>\n Something like, well, the more than half-dozen viral projects Deep Voodoo was behind that you may not have even known it was \u00a0behind. If you\u2019ve watched that Kendrick Lamar<\/a> music video from a few years ago where the rapper\u2019s face morphs surreally<\/a> into O.J. Simpson, Will Smith and Jussie Smollett, you\u2019ve already seen its handiwork; ditto that Bill Clinton food-counter eruption<\/a> in\u00a0Ted\u00a0earlier this month, or the Affleck &\u00a0Co. \u201990\u2019s-revisionism<\/a> for Dunkin\u2019 Donuts at the Super Bowl last month, or the shocking Donald Trump<\/a> full-frontal deepfake<\/a> in the Season 27\u00a0South Park\u00a0opener last summer.\u00a0<\/p>\n But with Generative AI now poised to become a mainstay in Hollywood, Deep Voodoo videos could come at us even more often. If a studio or production house needs something shape-shifting or face-switching, chances are they\u2019ll call Parker & Stone. And chances are something strange \u2014 and, \u00a0perhaps even more surprising when it comes to AI, potentially ethical \u2014 will result.<\/p>\n *** \n\tIt only exists because of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n Late in the first Trump administration, Parker and Stone were developing a Donald Trump deepfake movie. Their plan: to graft his face onto another actor\u2019s body and have him progressively lose his marbles, and then eventually his clothing. But the duo couldn\u2019t get a studio to match the quality of the tech they needed. \u201cA couple of effects houses in LA \u00a0just kind of gave us the runaround. This has happened before in our career, where we go, \u2018okay, well, we\u2019ve got to go figure it out ourselves,’\u201d Stone says. So they went online, rounded up some AI whizkids and formed an outfit to do it themselves.<\/p>\n \n\tThe movie may not have \u00a0come to fruition \u2014 it was scrapped by covid \u2014 but the team endured. One product:\u00a0Sassy Justice, a Web series parodying public figures. A 14-minute episode with a deepfaked Trump<\/a> went viral. While the visuals and audio seem clunky from the vantage point of 2026, they were downright renegade five years ago \u2014 good enough that Parker and Stone even used some of them for the July\u00a0South Park\u00a0season opener.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tAnother result: a full-blown company. By late 2022, Deep Voodoo was so established it had raised $20 million,<\/a> in part from a CAA-connected venture, before many people thought a lot about AI in Hollywood.<\/p>\n The firm appears engineered to keep a low profile. Its two executives are even-keeled to the extreme. An animation veteran named Jennifer Howell, who once produced\u00a0South Park and worked at half the studios in town, is its chief content officer, while its CEO, Afshin Beyzaee, is an unflashy lawyer who came to the job after serving for years as chief counsel at Parker and Stone\u2019s Park County production company.<\/p>\n Neither is likely to dazzle (or rage-bait) you with Silicon Valley grandiosities; they are prone to saying strait-laced things like \u201cit\u2019s very inappropriate to be taking and making use of someone\u2019s likeness without their permission,\u201d as Beyzaee did in an interview. Let us blow up the Internet with Tom Cruise-Brad Pitt fights this is not.<\/p>\n But such hall-monitor vibes are how Parker and Stone like it. If you\u2019re going to use generative technology that already has everyone all touchy, better to be the Mr. Mackey of the startup world.<\/p>\n Deep Voodoo prides itself in particular on licensing. The company won\u2019t work with any studio that hasn\u2019t obtained authorization from actors or estates (it didn\u2019t have permission from the White House for that\u00a0deepfake of Donald Trump last summer, but execs says they relied on fair-use images of the ubiquitous president).<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ve got a situation that some are paying to use or license IP and some are not and then people say \u2018why should I pay for it?\u2019\u201d Beyzaee says. \u00a0\u201cTo us, it\u2019s this is about making sure that we\u2019re providing this service, providing this technology, in a way that respects the laws and the protections and the rights that people have.\u201d The company\u2019s principals, Beyzaee says, will turn down jobs if they\u2019re not satisfied with the level of footage-permissions that the studio or production company has received.<\/p>\n In that idea, perhaps lies the tantalizing contradiction at the heart of Deep Voodoo: the most subversive creators out there are trying to be the good guys of AI.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\t When the company de-aged (and then re-aged) Billy Joel<\/a> in 2024 for the video to his comeback single \u201cTurn The Lights Back On\u201d<\/a> \u2014 viewers re-lived the many stages of Billy as the lyrics took their own rueful look back \u2014 the cross-cuts between the decades were seamless because the video\u2019s producers had something designed just for them, not plucked from Google and jammed into their workflow.<\/p>\n \u201cOur goal is to make beautiful, cinematic film and television that that never pulls the viewer out because the effect doesn\u2019t look right,\u201d Howell says, attributing the mission to how \u201cwe were started by artists who are incredibly picky.\u201d<\/p>\n The Deep Voodoo crew is aware of how much skepticism many actors and writers harbor about AI but believe that much of that ire should be directed at prompt-based materials, which often aim to conjure up content without an artist at the center or even the controls. Their own work, reality-bending as it is, stands apart, they say, because human actors are usually performing under what amounts to a facial mask.\u00a0Stone notes how different the company\u2019s M.O. is from \u00a0the Tilly Norwood-style synthetic approach that has rattled so much of the creative community. \u201cWe\u2019re not doing anything like that. We\u2019re not typing in a prompt. It\u2019s all capturing actors doing what they do,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n \n\tHe adds, \u201cI mean, the magical part of the production is the puppeteer, right? The puppet is one thing \u2014 and the tools can create a great puppet. But the magic is the performer. Without that is just becomes wallpaper.\u201d<\/p>\n ***<\/p>\n Even with all those official permissions, Stone believes AI can be used for purposes we\u2019ve only begun to imagine.<\/p>\n \u201cSomebody\u2019s going to make a scary fucking horror movie using this technology. Somebody\u2019s going to make a really fucking funny comedy using this. Like really funny shit that couldn\u2019t be made \u2014 that\u2019s native,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat\u2019s going to happen soon \u2014 what we\u2019re capable of \u2014 is someone\u2019s going to do a political show. Something\u00a0very current, and they\u2019ll use deepfakes not to look exactly like the person, although that\u2019s possible, but to make some sort of grotesque mashup \u2014 to capture a bit of them in this phantasmagoric kind of thing. You\u2019ll be able to do it as a weekly or bi-weekly show on an\u00a0SNL-type schedule.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tDe-aging has been a major use case for Deep Voodoo, and Stone says he sees it continuing. But he and Howell also point to a whole new realm, called \u201cperformance transfer,\u201d that allows an actor to play their role in street clothes\u00a0on a stage with only minimal shooting on location; the performance is then \u201ctransferred\u201d so that it appears the actor was with the cast running through the streets of Paris or engaging in an intense showdown in Beijing, a kind of three-dimensional ADR.\u00a0<\/p>\n That has the chance to speed up, and dollar-down, authentic-seeming production in ways previously unfathomable; the idea of shipping a bunch of stars and large crews to Europe or Asia to shoot an action movie may soon seem as antiquated as drawing an entire animated feature with your hand. \u201cI really do feel like it\u2019s going to touch on a lot of aspects of how things get produced,\u201d Stone says.<\/p>\n That kind of advance won\u2019t make physical crews or the places trying to lure them very happy, a point Stone concedes. And the deepfake usages, while clearly labeled as satire when Deep Voodoo does it, can still contribute to a culture of mistrust online.<\/p>\n But those downsides will come with an overwhelming number of benefits, Stone believes. And in any case, he says, while guardrails should be constructed, barriers can\u2019t be. \u201cThis stuff is happening. We\u2019ve already all watched stuff on TV that has utilized machine learning. It\u2019s happening, and it is going to change the industry.\u201d<\/p>\n And the big unspoken question \u2014 using it in South Park? Stone believes he and Parker will, and it could change the results on-screen.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re doing [the show] every two weeks now. That has\u00a0more to do with our age than technology, but the tech means that maybe we go home earlier, maybe we\u2019ve got more options,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd it means maybe the show\u2019s better.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tThis story appears in\u00a0The Hollywood Reporter\u2019s\u00a0upcoming AI Issue, out in April.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In a professionally lighted brick-walled space in Venice, not different from many other professionally lighted brick-walled spaces all…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367819,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[345,174632,9653,458,177192,44655,54,146,85,46,2072,27514,177193,29542,27513],"class_list":{"0":"post-367818","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-ai-digital-issue","10":"tag-billy-joel","11":"tag-celebrities","12":"tag-deep-voodoo","13":"tag-deepfakes","14":"tag-donald-trump","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-il","17":"tag-israel","18":"tag-kendrick-lamar","19":"tag-matt-stone","20":"tag-parody","21":"tag-south-park","22":"tag-trey-parker"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367818\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Deep Voodoo wasn\u2019t even supposed to be a company.<\/p>\n
Instead of scraping the Web for images (or relying on a model that has done it), Deep Voodoo takes those licensed images either in its brick-walled space or those provided by a production company. The capture at the spaces involves nine cameras and a series of simple questions to elicit a range of facial reactions. It then then uses all the material to build a bespoke model for a particular production. This is a laborious process, especially for a one-off usage \u2014 a scale-minded Silicon Valley firm would have no truck with it \u2014 and can take up to a month and involve some 300,000 images. Still, what results is both something legal and suited to the case at hand.\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s important that this isn\u2019t us just going and scouring the Internet for materials and building it into our models,\u201d Beyzaee says.<\/p>\n