The Simpsons may have famously predicted Donald Trump’s presidency, but voice acting legend and muso Harry Shearer isn’t having any part of it.
Shearer, who you’ll know as the voice of Mr Burns, Ned Flanders and stacks more, has announced he’ll be releasing an entire album about the US President this October, with its lead single, Son In Law, and accompanying music video dropping today.
The Many Moods Of Donald Trump is slated for release on October 30 and has been described as “a cycle of satirical songs inspired by the last four years of US politics and in particular the often mercurial behaviour of the current occupant of The White House”.
The clip for Son In Law came to life through a collaboration with Sydney-based filmmaker Matt Hermans.
“Using Unreal Engine and motion capture technology to record the body, hands and face we turned Harry into an all singing, all dancing virtual Donald Trump,” Hermans said.
“The performance capture was done remotely during the international lockdown and required a custom pipeline to link Sydney and Los Angeles with a low latency connection. This capture data was combined and used to drive an avatar who appears in a virtual Oval Office – accurately modelled to reflect the Trump Administration’s current decoration scheme.
“Deep Fake technology was used to create the photo realistic face. A world’s first accomplishment to have a CGI face be replaced by a machine-learning, AI face trained for weeks on footage of Trump speeches.
“This algorithm learns the subtle movements of Trump’s face and recalls these details based on the motion capture input and was the key to getting the performance translated from Harry to Trump!”
Shearer was last in Australia for Port Fairy Folk Festival back in early March, during which he stopped by The Green Room with Neil Griffiths podcast to chat The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live, his music and more.
Check out the full The Green Room episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts (below) or wherever you listen to your favourite podcasts.
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