Stars are rewriting their wills to include CGI do’s and don’ts
Hollywood stars can now be digitally recreated so convincingly, that actors are reportedly specifying in their wills what they’ll permit their images to do — long after their death.
“We can recreate dead actors,” Mike McGee, co-founder of the special effects company Framestore, told The Daily Telegraph.
“Actors alive now are already selling their image rights for films which will be made when they’re dead,” McGee says. “In their will, they have decided what constraints they want.”
Framestore recently set up a commercial for a chocolate bar using a digital recreation of Audrey Hepburn, after her sons approved it.
But some actors don’t want to leave their post-mortem script decisions to chance or their families.
The technology is advancing at breakneck speed, McGee says. New developments might pair digital representations of dead actors with artificial intelligence, he says.
“If you add it all together, they [dead people] can begin to have new consciousness,” he says. “It’s only a small step to interactive conversations with holographic versions of dead celebrities or historical figures.”