I enjoyed Rogue One, they took a unexplored slice of the story after the legends thing and created this self contained, well written journey of a group that is only mentioned in the 4th episode.

Takin may have felt a bit off (uncanny valley), but I think it was a good choice to have him included in the story nonetheless. I like the cold, unhinged personality of this character; I've grown used to Peter Cushing's acting and facial features.

I feel like, there should be more exploration of Star Wars in the aspect of "mundane" life, like it's done in Andor. There's a big universe already established. Andor really helped me understand 2 things of SW universe: the oppression which built up the motivation for Cassian to join the Rebels, and, effectiveness of the Empire, specifically the ISB. God, the exchange between Daedra Meero and Blevin, with an added mediation of the cunning Major Partagaz was excellent. Reminded me of the discussion in Jurassic Park about ethics.

In my opinion, the failing of Tarkin was one of animation, not so much rendering. If you watch some of the deepfake videos where they swap the original actors face over the CGI version (e.g. [0]), to me, it looks better but the movement is still unnatural. The lips curl, the head bobs, etc. all have a "linear interpolated" look that makes it seem like it was hand animated rather than motion captured by any actor.

It looks like in the article either the system they had in place captured facial expressions or an animator tried to recreate them, so I'm unclear why the facial movement looks so awful. Maybe they captured waypoints and then interpolated and we're seeing the aftereffect of the interpolated system? I don't know.

I remember Logan coming out at around the same time and being blown away by the younger Hugh Jackman. This was a year later than Rogue One and the younger version didn't really speak, so maybe it's not a fair comparison but I don't think there was a good excuse to have such a bad model.

Certainly later, with Luke Skywalker in the Mandalorian or Carrie Fisher in the later Star Wars series, there was no excuse to have had it be so bad.

[0] youtube.com/watch?v=_CXMb_MO3aw

> We had in our possession a life casting of Peter Cushing’s face. It was made not long after New Hope, so it was very accurate in terms of Cushing’s age, etc.

Not mentioned is that the cast he is talking about was made for the movie Top Secret!, where Peter Cushing plays a bookshop proprietor with a distorted face around a magnifying glass.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuYTVl0iOkk

I enjoyed Rouge One a lot despite of all that. It was my favorite of all the recent Star Wars movies.

I recently watched George Millers _Furiosa_ and they used machine learning and cgi to manipulate the face of the pre-teen actress to more closely resemble the adult actress. With the amount of data available constantly being captured of todays actors I’m sure this will become more common - and the brief article I read about it in this case made a point of saying that they had worked with the actors Guilds to establish appropriate Compensation (in this case). But it was subtle and I wouldn’t have known without looking into the trivia.

I saw and enjoyed _The Instigators_ last night and was thinking about how strong a physical impression some of the actors made on screen - Alfred Molina, Ving Rhames, and Ron Perlman in particular.

I remember when watching in the theater, the audience reacted with awe. At the time is was a novel technique. Then it was followed up with Carrie Fisher at the end. And the audience loved it.

I found Tarkin in Rogue One well done, after all Peter Cushing was really that gaunt and cadaveric in his later years. Leia, on the other hand, was a complete mess.

I can't wait for a re-release of this particular film with the latest deepfake tech integration. It looks quite terrible in the original release -- enough to pull me out of the immersion of the film -- and the fan edits of those scenes are fantastic.

The movie is certainly one of the highlights of the modern SW universe and deserves a bit of additional love to bring it to the modern standards for virtual actors.

Not to say it wasn't an achievement at the time, but it's too far in the uncanny valley as it stands.

To me one of the most interesting things about Rogue One was how differently the Tarkin and Leia recreations were received, at least in person. Of course we know that online everybody is a critic and hates both of them, but that wasn't what it was like in the theater. I went with a large group and half of the group didn't even realize Tarkin wasn't real, while the entire group and and a good chunk of the theater audibly groaned when they saw Leia.

Enjoyed RO but having the datacenter at the tropical beach planet made no sense. Think of all the taxpayer money that could have been saved locating it on Hoth. ;-)

It was not very impressive to say the least. It looked fake the second it appeared on screen.

I wonder how this would have played out using deep fake technology

They could've used Guy Henry's likeness as-is. He already looks a lot like Peter Cushing. And his accent was impeccable

None of these fake faces look that good out of the chute, and even the best looking ones look terrible a year later.

This is fun to read and also a valuable contribution to preserving the historical details of how it was achieved. I especially appreciate his tone in approaching what had become a somewhat contentious subject:

> Hi, I was the animation supervisor on Rogue One, and as such I was intimately involved with the creation of Tarkin.

> I’ve decided to chime in for one purpose only, to clarify the process we used. I have no interest in trying to convince anyone to like the results more than they do, or to argue with anyone about how “real” our work looked in the film.

I'm one of those who enjoyed RO but also immediately noticed the CGI Tarkin being "off", despite the fact I'd not heard about it and didn't go in looking for it (I had heard something about CGI Leia though). It's helpful that the OP mentioned in the intro that many people never noticed it. Although CGI Tarkin clearly stood out to me, I'm a pretty serious SW fan (having seen the original when I was 12 and the entire opening trilogy many times since). So I'm unusually familiar with Peter Cushing's appearance and mannerisms on-screen in the SW universe.

Perhaps more significantly, I've also had a multi-decade career deeply involved in the creation and evolution of digital production tools and CGI as well as being a sometime professional (and, more often, hobbyist) film-maker. To be fair, once you start counting NAB and Siggraph trade shows you've attended by the dozen, it's reasonable to assume you probably can't see films or CGI the way most people do - and so I concede it's entirely possible CGI Tarkin was adequately executed for the majority of the intended audience.

However, I think that may miss the more important point that, whether CGI Tarkin in RO was "good enough" or not, doesn't much matter in the long run. We've always known creating perfectly photo-realistic CGI humans is extremely difficult, especially substituting CGI for a particular well-known human in a well-known live action context. It's pretty much the hardest CGI thing there is. Like most things in CGI, I'm pretty sure we'll eventually master it but at the time CGI Tarkin was done - it was wildly ambitious and, IMHO, very likely to fail. So the fact CGI Tarkin didn't abjectly fail and was, at worst, mildly distracting to critical eyes, is something the team that did it should be proud of and those of us with those critical eyes should, at the least, be tolerant of and, preferably, celebrate as a worthy historical milestone on the long path toward perfection.