Hollywood stars can now be recreated so perfectly through technology that actors are drawing up wills to control how their digital selves perform long after their death, the Oscar-winning British special effects team behind the film Gravity has said.
The revelation comes after another British company, CereProc, helped to produce an audio recording of John F Kennedy “delivering” the speech he was due to give on the day in 1963 that he was assassinated.
According to the special effects company Framestore, however, technology now allows for much more. Sir William Sargent, Framestore’s chief executive, says special effects have broken the equivalent of the four-minute mile, which is to make a digital human that convinces viewers it is real.
Framestore was responsible for a chocolate bar commercial that featured a digital recreation of Audrey Hepburn, after approval from her sons. “It was a high-risk venture as they could have stopped it at any time,” said Sir William.
The Framestore team, talking exclusively to The Daily Telegraph ahead of our series on British technology, running all next week, revealed that such developments might include the use of artificial intelligence alongside digital representations of dead actors.
The commercial and philosophical ramifications are immense. A full examination of the extraordinary part British companies are playing in the creation of virtual, computer-generated alternative worlds will form part of next week’s Telegraph series Hunting the UK’s First Trillion Dollar Company.
For now, Framestore is marrying excitement about new technological possibilities with a degree of trepidation.
“I would be deeply unhappy if I was creating things that were emotially or physically damaging,” said Sir William.