Is Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Deep Voodoo the rare company that gets AI right?

In a professionally lit brick-walled space in Venice, not unlike many professionally lit brick-walled spaces around Los Angeles, actors routinely come in for their photos and videos.

The process is quick and unnoticed to anyone familiar with the city’s studio photography culture, where backdrops change but traditions remain the same.

All of this would be interesting even if Deep Voodoo’s founders weren’t South Park Instigators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But among all the taboo breaking, Book of Mormon It appears that the couple are also pioneers of artificial intelligence. For the past several years, they’ve been quietly deploying their company to help production companies achieve their effects goals, making house calls as deepfake doctors.

“I find that a lot of discussions about AI get boring,” Stone, 54, says in a rare interview about Deep Voodoo. “You know, ‘Do your taxes, they can do them.’ “And it’s like saying, ‘Cool, but a human can do your taxes.’” What we are trying to do is something that no number of humans can do.

Something like, well, more than half a dozen viral projects that Deep Voodoo was behind that you probably didn’t know they were behind. If you’ve seen the Kendrick Lamar music video from a few years ago in which the rapper’s face surrealistically morphs into OJ Simpson, Will Smith and Jussie Smollett, you’ve already seen his handiwork; Bill Clinton’s anti-food revolution also broke out Ted Earlier this month, Affleck & Co.’s revisionism. The ’90s take on Dunkin’ Donuts at the Super Bowl last month, or Donald Trump’s stunning full-frontal deepfake in Season 27 South Park Editorial last summer.

But with generative AI about to become a mainstay in Hollywood, Deep Voodoo videos could be coming our way more often. If a studio or production house needed something to change the look or change the face, they would probably call Parker & Stone. It is possible that something strange, and perhaps even more surprising, will happen when it comes to artificial intelligence, perhaps ethical.

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Deep Voodoo wasn’t even supposed to be a company.

It only exists because of Donald Trump.

Late in Trump’s first administration, Parker and Stone were developing a deepfake of Donald Trump. Their plan: graft his face onto another actor’s body and gradually make him lose his marbles, and eventually his clothes. But the duo couldn’t get a studio that matched the quality of technology they needed. “Some of the effects houses in L.A. gave us a bit of an evasion,” says Stone. “This has happened before in our career, where we go, ‘Okay, well, we have to figure it out on our own.’ So they went online, gathered some AI experts and formed a group to do it themselves.”

Another result: complete company. By late 2022, Deep Voodoo was so well-established that it had raised $20 million, partly from a CAA-related venture, before many people were thinking much about artificial intelligence in Hollywood.

The company seems designed to keep interest low. Its two executives are equal to the utmost. An animation veteran named Jennifer Howell, who once produced South Park AHe worked at half the city’s studios and is the chief content officer, while their CEO, Afshin Bezaei, is an unflashy lawyer who arrived at the job after working for years as a senior consultant at Parker and Stone’s Park County production company.

Neither is likely to impress (or infuriate) you with the grandeur of Silicon Valley; They tend to say extreme things like, “It’s extremely inappropriate to take someone’s likeness and profit from it without their permission,” as Bezaei did in an interview. Let’s blow up the internet with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting this ain’t it.

But such ballroom-watching sentiment is what Parker and Stone love. If you’re going to use generative technology that actually makes everyone sensitive, you better be the Mr. Mackey of the startup world.

Deep Voodoo is particularly proud of its licensing. The company won’t work with any studio that didn’t get permission from the actors or properties (it didn’t have permission from the White House for this deepfake of Donald Trump last summer, but executives say they relied on fair use images of the president throughout).

“There is a situation where some people pay to use or license intellectual property, while others don’t, and then people say: Why should I pay for that?” says Bezaei. “For us, it’s about making sure we’re providing this service, providing this technology, in a way that respects the laws and the protections and the rights that people have.” Beyzaee says company executives will turn down jobs if they are not satisfied with the level of shot permissions obtained by the studio or production company.

In this idea, perhaps, lies the puzzling contradiction at the heart of Deep Voodoo: the most disruptive creators are trying to be the good guys in AI.

Instead of searching for images on the web (or relying on a model that has done so), Deep Voodoo takes those licensed images either in its bricked-up space or those provided by the production company. Capturing Spaces involves nine cameras and a series of simple questions to elicit a range of facial reactions. He then uses all the materials to build a custom model for a specific production. This is a laborious process, especially for a single use — a large-scale Silicon Valley company wouldn’t have a truck with it — and can take up to a month and involve about 300,000 images. However, the findings are considered legal and appropriate to the case at hand. “It’s important to not just search the Internet for materials and include them in our models,” Bezaei says.

When the company de-aged (and then re-aged) Billy Joel in 2024 for the video for his single “Turn The Lights Back On” — viewers re-living Billy’s many phases as the lyrics took on a wistful look back — the crossovers between decades were seamless because the video producers had something designed just for them, not plucked from Google and shoehorned into their workflow.

“Our goal is to make a beautiful film and television film that never engages the viewer because the effect doesn’t look right,” Howell says, attributing the mission to how “we started with incredibly eclectic artists.”

The Deep Voodoo crew is aware of the skepticism that many actors and writers have about artificial intelligence, but they believe A Much of this anger has to be directed at fast material, which is often meant to conjure content without an artist at the center or even the controls. They say that their own work, despite its distortion of reality, differs from others, because human actors often perform their work under what amounts to a face mask. Stone points out how different the company’s MO style is from Tilly Norwood’s artificial approach that shook up much of the creative community. “We don’t do anything like that. We don’t write a prompt. It’s all about filming the actors doing what they do,” he says.

“I mean, the magic part of the production is the puppeteer, right? The puppet is one thing — and the props can make a great puppet. But the magic is the performer. Without that, it’s just wallpaper,” he adds.

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Even with all these official permissions, Stone believes that AI can be used for purposes that we are only beginning to imagine.

“Someone is going to make a scary horror movie using this technology. Someone is going to make a really funny comedy using this technology. Like really funny movies can’t be made — that’s original,” he says. “What’s going to happen soon – what we’re capable of – is someone will do a political show. Something very modern, and they’ll use deepfakes not to look exactly like the person, although that’s possible, but to do a kind of weird mash-up – to capture a part of them in this fictitious kind of thing. You’ll be able to do that as a weekly or bi-weekly show on the website SNL-Schedule type.

De-aging has been a major use case for Deep Voodoo, and Stone says he sees it continuing. But he and Howell also point to a whole new world, called “performance transfer,” which allows an actor to play their part in street clothes on stage with minimal on-location filming; The performance is then “transferred” so that it appears that the actor was with the actors running through the streets of Paris or participating in an intense confrontation in Beijing, a kind of three-dimensional ADR.

This holds the opportunity to accelerate production that appears authentic, and to devalue the dollar, in ways that were previously unfathomable; The idea of ​​sending a host of stars and large crews to Europe or Asia to shoot an action movie may soon seem as archaic as drawing an entire animated feature by hand. “I really feel like this book is going to touch on a lot of aspects of how things are produced,” Stone says.

That kind of progress won’t make the physical crews or the venues trying to entice them very happy, a point Stone acknowledges. Although deepfakes are described as satire when carried out by Deep Voodoo, they still contribute to a culture of distrust online.

But Stone believes that these downsides will come with a huge number of benefits. However, he says, while guardrails should be built, barriers cannot be built. “These things are happening. We’ve all already seen things on TV that use machine learning. They’re happening, and they’re going to change the industry.”

The big unspoken question is whether it will be used in South Park? Stone believes he and Parker will, and it could change the results on screen.

“We do [the show] Every two weeks now. “This has more to do with our age than technology, but technology means we might go home earlier, we might have more choices. That means maybe the offer is better,” he says.

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