After the beloved co-star of the Fast and the Furious films died in a car crash in 2013, Caleb and Cody Walker submitted to high-definition face scans at the University of Southern California (USC), creating enough data to superimpose a seamless digital mask onto a lookalike actor in hundreds of finished shots.
“It looked amazing. You really couldn’t tell the difference,” says Kathleen Haase, special projects manager at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies who is credited as a producer on Maleficent, Logan and 2015’s Point Break remake.
Partly funded by the US military, her lab has drawn Hollywood stars from Will Smith through Hugh Jackman to Angelina Jolie to mint their digital doubles. Post-Covid, though, inquiries from studios have spiked.
Continue reading in The Telegraph.