Re: The Return of Sliders?
Aahhh yes. RIP Dean Stockwell.
![]()
But with A.I., couldn't they replace Dean Stockwell's face on another actor and re-create his voice to be almost identical? We have the technology. One particular freelance Elvis impersonator on YouTube (look up Luigi Leppo) is already doing that with Elvis by creating brand-new songs that Elvis was never recorded on video performing. Done with his exact face, and his exact voice. As I said, we have the tech. We just need a TV show to implement it successfully.
There is also a mobile app that does this (the consumer-grade non-professional version) called Re-face.
I don't believe that DeepFake/ReFace can be implemented successfully for a prolonged performance, nor can Respeecher be effective for an extended scene. DeepFake tends to produce immobile faces that, even with animation, have the rigidity of photographs instead of the full versatility of human facial movement. Elvis' face in those DeepFake videos doesn't have the full emotive expressiveness of the King. It's his skin but the flesh beneath it seems as dead as the man himself.
BOOK OF BOBA FETT uses a fully DeepFaked Mark Hamill and while it's a perfect likeness of his face, the expressions convey the sense of an immobile photograph being animated; it still comes off as a still image rather than a living visage. Respeecher was also used in BOBA FETT to recreate Mark Hamill's early to mid 1980s voice. But while it sounds exactly like Hamill from that era, the simulated voice has an extremely limited range of tone that makes all of Hamill's dialogue sound neutral; he's neutral when he should be suspicious, neutral when he should be challenging, neutral when he should be heartfelt. The face and voice of Mark Hamill may be in BOBA FETT, but the acting ability is absent; there is no sense of a person giving the actual performance.
When applied to a master of the performance artform like Dean Stockwell, I can't see the technology pulling it off properly; the voice, even if there were sufficient source material for Respeecher, would never have Stockwell's charisma and humour. An impressionist would only ever be a copy. The face would only be Stockwell's reanimated likeness, it would not be his acting and his choices. DeepFake couldn't reproduce Mark Hamill's acting; it certainly can't do Stockwell.
DeepFake is great for a few individual shots. Respeecher is effective for a small number of lines. But an extended performance via DeepFake and Respeecher for a featured guest-star or a regular character? It hasn't worked so far and I think it will be a long time before it will; a CG Dean Stockwell would just be a digital mannequin of his face with a thin imitation of his voice and you'd always be aware of it.
Be careful what you wish for.