How CGI Is Bringing Back Amy Winehouse

Upgraded special effects are helping artists live forever

everyone dies — but thanks to CGI, a select few can come back to life. While the technology is not new (it was used after Brandon Lee died in 1993 while filming The Crow), it has been dramatically refined in recent years. For the 2016 Star Wars prequel, Rogue One, Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, reprised his 1977 role of Grand Moff Tarkin. Visual effects (VFX) artists studied motion-capture video of a stand-in reading Tarkin’s lines to inform their painstaking re-creation of Cushing’s likeness in CGI. “There are so many elements that make a face look real, from how light bounces off skin to micro eye-darts and blood-flow coloration under the skin,” says Darren Hendler of Digital Domain, a VFX studio that turned Josh Brolin into Thanos for Avengers: Infinity War and worked on the Tupac hologram that took the Coachella stage in 2012. The latest benefactor: Amy Winehouse, who’ll be touring in hologram form in 2019. The company behind the effort, BASE Hologram, will take a similar approach to its re-creation of Winehouse, but rather than reflecting the hologram onto a stage mirror, executive producer and CEO Marty Tudor says the company will rely on powerful Epson projectors with “military-grade lasers.” The effect is a hologram that appears less translucent than any you’ve seen in the past. What’s next? While digital artists are pushing toward greater attention to detail, the future of CGI may lie with artificial intelligence. Computers can be trained to replicate how a human face moves by referencing countless hours of footage. Prepare for the rise of the machines.

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