President Richard Nixon had the honor of welcoming Earthlings to the moon, but speechwriter William Safire had prepared an alternative for use in the event of a moon-landing disaster. A team at MIT deepfaked the dead president into this alternative timeline.
In Event of Moon Disaster will premiere at IDFA DocLab on November 22, 2019 in the form of a physical installation designed to re-create a 1960s era American living room.
This project is a production of the MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality.
I've been trying to make this exact artifact for months, without success! Making people do things they didn't is much, much harder than the usual generative fare: the voice, the consistency, the emotions, the context... all conspire to subvert the "easy" part of making someone's chops move. The achieved result, though, is magical and disquieting -- look how they make Nixon choke up. And a warning. It's the same warning as blares every day, yes, but now you see why.
