Lucasfilm Hires Deepfake YouTuber Who Tweaked Luke Skywalker's Appearance In The Mandalorian

Popular deepfake YouTuber Shamook is now an official part of Lucasfilm's special effects branch Industrial Light and Magic. Originally announced in the comments section of one of his videos earlier this month and later confirmed by IndieWire, Shamook landed a job with the company thanks to his deepfake video that improved on The Mandalorian's cameo of Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker.

"Industrial Light and Magic is always on the lookout for talented artists and have in fact hired the artist that goes by the online persona 'Shamook,'" a Lucasfilm representative said in a statement. "Over the past several years ILM has been investing in both machine learning and A.I. as a means to produce compelling visual effects work and it's been terrific to see momentum building in this space as the technology advances."

Shamook's Mandalorian video was released in December 2020 and took him four days to produce. Taking the scene that was criticized by Star Wars fans, Shamook's video quickly gained attention for adding more nuanced and subtle features to the young Skywalker. At the time of writing, the video has over 2.1 million views.

De-aging technology has come a long way since it was first used in X-Men: The Last Stand and was further developed in films such as Tron: Legacy, Captain Marvel, and Gemini Man. One of the more ambitious applications of the visual effects technology was used in Martin Scorsese's The Irishman to dial back the clock on Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci by a few decades, which Shamook also tweaked with deepfake technology.

While a new Star Wars film won't be seen for quite a while, the franchise has stayed active with a number of projects on smaller screens. Filming on The Mandalorian season 3 began last year, The Book of Boba Fett will see the return of Temuera Morrison's fan-favorite bounty hunter, and Star Wars Visions is a 10-episode anthology series that features work by leading Japanese anime studios.

If you're after some Star Wars content right now, you can also check out the CG-animated series The Bad Batch, which stars the infamous squad of defective Jango Fett clones that were introduced in of Star Wars: The Clone Wars.