Ice Princess

1 comment on Hacker News

1. NeutralbsenftnerSep 22, 2022

   Back in '02-'04 I was a former games/graphics programmer working as a digital artist in feature film VFX. One area I specialized in was stunt double actor replacements. Working on Disney's "Ice Princess" I fixed a stunt double replacement shot and realized a method of making the entire process generic, at feature film quality.

   By '06 I had an MBA with a Masters Thesis on the creation of a new Advertising format where the viewer, their family and friends are inserted into brand advertising for online advertising. By '08 I had global patents and an operating demonstration VFX pipeline specific for actor replacements at scale. However, it was the financial crisis of '08 and nobody in the general public had ever conceived of automated actor replacements. This was 5-7 years before the term deep fake became known. VCs simply disbelieved the technology was possible, even when demonstrated before their eyes.

   Going the angel investor route, 3 different times I formed an investor pool only to have at some point them realize what the technology could do with pornography, and then the investors insist the company pursue porn. However, we had Academy Award winning people in the company, why would they do porn? We refused and that was the end of those investors. With an agency for full motion video actor replacement advertising not getting financing, the award winning VFX people left and the company pivoted to the games industry - making realistic 3D avatars of game players. That effort was fully built out by '10, but the global patents were expensive to maintain and the games industry producers and studios I met simply wanted the service for free. Struggled for a few years. We closed, sold the patents, and I went into facial recognition.

   https://patents.justia.com/inventor/blake-senftner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lELORWgaudU

   I was bitter about this all for a long time.