Late in the first Trump administration, Parker and Stone were developing a Donald Trump deepfake movie. Their plan: to graft his face onto another actor’s body and have him progressively lose his marbles, and then eventually his clothing. But the duo couldn’t get a studio to match the quality of the tech they needed. “A couple of effects houses in LA just kind of gave us the runaround. This has happened before in our career, where we go, ‘okay, well, we’ve got to go figure it out ourselves,'” Stone says.

So nobody could make convincing enough deep fakes of the 80 year old president, so we said fuck it and made our own!

/S

But no, really, that's what fucking happened lol

The images and video are converted into data bits

I immediately distrust this writer's opinion of anything technical.

[Stone] and Howell also point to a whole new realm, called “performance transfer,” that allows an actor to play their role in street clothes on a stage with only minimal shooting on location; the performance is then “transferred” so that it appears the actor was with the cast running through the streets of Paris or engaging in an intense showdown in Beijing, a kind of three-dimensional ADR.

Oh thank god someone's using this sensibly. The model works better when you're changing stuff then when it has to make everything up. A couple actors and some half-assed props can become any interactions that a shot requires. Same deal with voice acting - typing in dialog will probably always suck, but now any actor can Billy West a whole cast.