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  • The Briefing

Charli XCX's new video uses deepfake technology because of course it does

  • October 12, 2018
  • Popjustice
Pic: Atlantic

The Verge report that as well as being a jamboree of nostalgia-baiting obvi­ous­ness, there's something not quite so hit-you-round-the-head going on in the video for Charli XCX's Troye Sivan col­lab­or­a­tion 1999.

Namely: the shot of Charli as all five Spice Girls isn't your standard CGI creation — rather than being a composite of five separate Charlis dressed as each of the five Spice Girls, the shot's actually based on Charli and four dancers, and deepfake tech­no­logy has been used to graft Charli's face on to the others.

It seems like using deepfake's AI-powered jiggery-pokery rather than more tra­di­tional CGI is partly to do with prac­tic­al­ity and partly (large, we'd guess) to do with showing off. As the video's director Ryan Staake tells The Verge:

“When you start to think about the com­plex­ity of getting them in and out of wardrobe and makeup for each of those char­ac­ters, it would take five times longer. So in a way, it was a pragmatic solution. But then, we also started playing off the bizar­re­ness and aes­thet­ics of it. It’s one of those things where part of the excite­ment is just trying to see if it works. Like, can we use this weird fake celeb porn tool in a legit music video?”

As you'll see from the Charli video the results are often a bit wonky looking, but that's an aesthetic that fits in quite well with where Charli's at sonically on a lot of her more recent mixtape work: sounds a bit wrong but wow tech­no­logy, etc etc.

  • charli xcx
  • troye sivan
  • wow the future
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Greatest hits
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  • Nicola Roberts interview: "I feel like I discovered the singing again"
Further reading
  • 1
    New Music Friday: Julia Michaels has purchased, or hired, a chainsaw
  • 2
    New Music Monday: Griff's Black Hole is super, and massive
  • 3
    New Music Friday: Let's kick off 2021 with some KLF
  • 4
    The Top 45 Singles Of 2020
  • 5
    New Music Friday: Mae Muller doesn't want to be dependent
  • 6
    New Music Friday: There's a big one from Royal & The Serpent
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