Youtube BabyZone has created something incredibly unique, a deep fake of 2018’s Spider-Man video game in which the characters are replaced with the actors from the 2002 Spider-Man film adaptation. It’s a five-minute video with complete facial replacement, resulting in an incredibly eerie piece of art that’s well worth watching.
Despite the broad range of Spider-Man related media available, the 2002 Sam Raimi adaptation starring Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, and Willem Dafoe stands out when it comes to obsessive fanbases. The popular Raimi Memes subreddit is just one of many examples of the Spider-Man film’s longevity. It was only a matter of time before that fandom crossed over with 2018’s Marvel’s Spider-Man video game, though few would ever have predicted it would turn out like this.
Only four of the Spider-Man film’s actors are actually inserted into the gameplay footage, those being Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man, Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane, Willem Dafoe as Norman Osbourn, and Alfred Molina as Doctor Octopus. Miles Morales is featured prominently in the footage, but Miles wasn’t a character in the 2002 movie, so there’s no actor’s face to use as a replacement. Just those four actors’ faces being replaced is more than enough for the purposes of the video, of course.
As for the quality of the deep fake, it’s astonishingly well-done. One would think that deep fake video editing AI may not be suitable for video game graphics, since it seems to be used largely for real-life recordings, but that apparently isn’t the case. Maguire, Dunst, and Dafoe’s faces aren’t just digitized to replace the in-game Spider-Man characters, but also adopt the game’s CG stylization in the process. They very much look like they’ve been modeled by a professional gaming artist.
That said, they’re certainly not perfect. The deep fake works very well when the Spider-Man characters are facing the camera, but if they’re turned to the side then it doesn’t work well at all. Mary Jane specifically appears to revert entirely to her original facial design when seen from the side. Deep fake AI is an evolving technology, of course, so perfect conversions aren’t to be expected.
To be fair, the creator of this video, BabyZone, put an incredible amount of work into the deep fake. In the Youtube video’s description, they explain how they created a “faceset” for each actor as well as “heavily editing” the footage they produced. They likely only kept the footage that looked the best. Nevertheless, they did this all using DeepFaceLab 2.0 software on their own. It’s exciting to think about what other kinds of fun gaming deep fakes could be made, too.
Spider-Man is available now on PS4.
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