Week 5
Group: Yeseul Oh, Xiao Tan, Shannon Yang
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
Describe your image
The concept
Many industries seem to be led by men, and the film industry is no exception. The image of women in movies is always full of "male gaze", they are beautiful and useless. Their role in the film is usually like a single symbol, a reward for the success and charm of the male protagonist. Since the 1970s, the number of female heroic characters in films has increased, but the numbers are still disappointing. Most of the time, it is still the male characters who take on the heavy responsibilities in the movies.
But can't women have the qualities of the main characters in the movies? Brave, powerful, treacherous or ambitious. The answer, of course, is no. When we browse the movie posters, we can see many single female image.
So we thought it might be a good idea to swap the male and female characters on the poster. Women are also shown to have power on the poster, becoming the protagonist and no longer the appendage of the male protagonist.
The process
The steps we take to process a poster are usually as follows：
1.Use Runway to remove the poster background. This step makes it easier for the AI to detect faces and makes it easier for us to modify the figure later.
2.Use runway to swap face, however, we found that unsuccessful. So we find another app which called face app. We used this app to change people's gender in poster
3. Use Runway to improve the image's resolution. Because through the second step, the image will lose some pixels.
4. Use Photoshop to edit body figures / add noise / touch ups
Runway background removal is usually successful, but sometimes it fails when the background is the same color as the clothes. But it's clear that Runway face swaps usually fail. It's usually not very clear. I think this is probably because we didn't choose two faces with the exact same angle.
However, the face app did a good job. I realized a point is we shouldn't swap the actor's face to the other people's, instead we need to change the people's gender. We should try to make subtle changes to the actors' features so that they undergo a gender change, and in fact the Face app does just that.
So next time we should try to train a model that uses photos of boys and girls fed to the AI and let it learn the differences in features and hair between the genders in general.