In 2008, while working with Will Smith on the set of a film that never ended up getting made, Remington Scott had an epiphany. The visual effects director was watching Smith stand in a photogrammetry booth, with dozens of cameras capturing the actor’s facial features from every possible angle. “Every single major star on that level, they go in and they get scans,” Scott said. Visual effects artists then translate those 2D images into 3D computer-generated models that can later be manipulated for the purposes of the film. Watching Will Smith go through this process led Scott to wonder, “Why doesn’t he own his own scans?” ...
Scott—who has worked with directors including Peter Jackson, Zack Snyder and Robert Zemeckis and has scanned the likes of James Franco, Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins—launched his own “digital human” company, Hyperreal, in 2020. The idea was to give performers an opportunity to create and own the rights to their own digital identities, called Hypermodels, which they could then license to productions themselves for a fee. (Hyperreal takes a cut of that fee as the management platform for those assets.) ...
See the full story here: https://www.theinformation.com/articles/dont-put-your-head-in-the-sand-stars-are-quietly-inking-deals-to-license-their-ai-doubles