DVAG | Klopp

"Deep fake is a contentious meme worthy topic at the moment, a by-product of the current AI wave of creativity. In the midst of famous people freaking out about the possibility of identity theft, it was quite refreshing to use it as a pragmatic production efficiency tool.

Part of our culture at Mayda is to play with future iterations of making. Seeing how we can move beyond the spectacle of the new into the usefulness of the technology.

We honestly couldn't think of a better personality and character to work with on this than Jurgen. Jurgen's sense of humour and distinct character was a delight to capture. Part of the capture process, required us to get Jurgen chatting in various lighting setups, trying to elicit a range facial expressions alongside audio recordings of him chatting.

Essentially, Ben and I had been tasked to have a chat with Jurgen Klopp. There was a distinct moment on set when it dawned on us, we were shooting the breeze with a legend! That was a good day to be a director"

- Carl Addy, ECD, The Mayda Creative Co.

Capturing performances with body double actors, we used a custom-built Deep Fake pipeline to replace their faces with Jurgen's.

To achieve this we captured 40 minutes of Jurgen's real facial expressions and dialogue in various lighting conditions. This data-set was then used to train a Deep Fake model that generated his likeness over the footage. The results were then loving composited using more traditional techniques, resulting in a fun and thought provoking film.