In Venice’s beautifully illuminated brick-and-mortar space, not unlike many other illuminated brick-and-mortar spaces throughout Los Angeles, actors come regularly to have their photos and videos taken.
The process is quick and unsurprising to anyone familiar with the urban studio-shoot culture, where the backdrops change but the meetings stay the same.
However, it’s like a typical Hollywood picture ends after the camera turns off in the offices of this retail firm known as Deep Voodoo. Images and video are converted into pieces of data and sent to AI modeling experts hired around the world. One in Eastern Europe, one in Argentina, the third in Vancouver. They work their machine learning magic, relying on a computer from a data center in an unknown location. In the end all those details become something desirable: an actor who is old or serious or another artificial image that can be used for different types of entertainment.
All of this would be interesting even if the founders of Deep Voodoo weren’t South Park promoters Trey Parker and Matt Stone. But in the midst of all their taboo-busting, the The Book of Mormon pair, it turns out, are also rising pioneers of AI. And in the past few years they have been quietly sending their company to help production labels achieve their goals, making housecalls as deepfakes doctors.
“I find that a lot of discussions about AI are boring. You know ‘set your tax and you can do it,'” says Stone, 54, in a rare interview on Deep Voodoo. And it’s like, ‘cool, but somebody can pay you taxes.’ What we are trying to do is something no one else can do. ”
Something like, well, more than half a dozen Deep Voodoo viral projects were in the background so you might not even know they were in the background. If you’ve ever watched that Kendrick Lamar music video from a few years ago where the rapper’s face morphs into OJ Simpson, Will Smith and Jussie Smollett, you’ve seen his handiwork; like the eruption of Bill Clinton Ted earlier this month, or Affleck & Co. ’90’s-revisionism for Dunkin’ Donuts at the Super Bowl last month, or Donald Trump’s full-blown surprise in front of Season 27. South Park opened last summer.
But with Generative AI poised to become mainstream in Hollywood, Deep Voodoo videos may be coming our way more often. If a studio or production house needs a makeover or facelift, chances are they’ll call on Parker & Stone. And the possibilities are amazing — and, perhaps even more amazing when it comes to AI, potentially ethical — that it will end.
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Deep Voodoo was never supposed to be a company.
It only exists because of Donald Trump.
At the end of the first Trump administration, Parker and Stone were producing a documentary about Donald Trump. Their plan: to insert his face into the body of another actor and make him gradually lose his marbles, and finally his clothes. But the two couldn’t find a studio that matched the quality of technology they needed. “Several effects the houses in LA gave us an opportunity. This happened earlier in our career, where we go, ‘okay, we have to go check it out,'” Stone says. So they went online, collected AI whiskeys and created a suit of their own.
The film may not have worked – it was canceled by covid – but the team persevered. One product: Sassy JusticeA web series featuring celebrities. The 14-minute episode featuring Trump went viral. While the sights and sounds seem like a mess from the 2026 scene, they were riotous five years ago — so much so that Parker and Stone even used some of them for July. South Park opening time.
Another result: a full company. By late 2022, Deep Voodoo was so established that it had raised $20 million, partly from a deal related to CAA, before many people thought much of AI in Hollywood.
The factory seems designed to keep a low profile. Two of its directors have been arrested in the extreme. Animator Jennifer Howell, who has produced South Park aI’ve worked in half of the city’s studios, I’m its chief information officer, while its CEO, Afshin Beyzaee, is a no-nonsense lawyer who came to the job after working for many years as a senior consultant at Parker and Stone’s Park County production company.
It’s also unlikely to impress (or annoy) you with the goodies of Silicon Valley; they tend to say difficult things like “it is wrong to take and use someone else’s image without their permission,” as Beyzaee did in an interview with him. Let’s not explode the Internet with Tom Cruise-Brad Pitt fights.
But those hall-of-fame vibes are just the way Parker and Stone like it. If you’re going to use a productivity technology that already has everyone involved, you better be the Mr. Mackey of the startup world.
Deep Voodoo prides itself on licensing. The company will not work with any studio that has not received permission from the actors or locations (it did not have permission from the White House for the deep web of Donald Trump last summer, but analysts say they relied on fair use images of the ubiquitous president).
“You have a situation where some pay to use or license IP and some don’t, and then people say ‘why should I pay for it?'” Beyzaee says. “For us, it’s about making sure that we provide this service, we provide this technology, in a way that respects the laws and the security and the rights that people have.” Company executives, Beyzaee says, will refuse jobs if they are not satisfied with the level of image approval that the studio or production company has received.
In that sense, perhaps there’s a strange contradiction at the heart of Deep Voodoo: the best conspirators are trying to be the AI good guys.
Instead of scouring the Web for images (or relying on a model you’ve created), Deep Voodoo takes licensed images either on its own bricked site or provided by the production company. Filming on location involves nine cameras and a series of simple questions to elicit different facial expressions. It then uses all the resources to build a bespoke model for a specific production. This is a difficult process, especially for immediate use – a Silicon Valley firm with a big brain won’t have a truck with it – and it can take up to a month and involve about 300,000 images. However, the result is legal and appropriate to the case at hand. Beyzaee says: “It is important that this is not just us going to look for materials on the Internet to find materials and build them
When the company aged (and aged again) Billy Joel in 2024 for the video of his latest song “Turn The Lights Back On” – viewers relived many of Billy’s stages when their voices went back – the differences between the decades were not burdensome because the video producers had something for them made from Google, not from Google.
“Our goal is to make great, cinematic film and television that will never pull in an audience because the result doesn’t look right,” Howell says, and our goal is “to be launched by incredibly selective artists.”
The Deep Voodoo crew knows how many actors and writers have doubts about AI but they believe that most of that anger should be directed towards tools based on speed, which are often aimed at combining content without an artist in the middle or even systems. They say, their work, which distorts the truth, is different, because human actors often play under a face mask. Stone notes how the company’s MO differs from Tilly Norwood’s synthetic approach that has frustrated many creatives. He says: “We don’t do anything like that. We don’t type immediately. It’s about capturing actors doing what they do.
He adds, “I mean, the magic part of production is the puppeteer, isn’t it? The puppet is one thing – and the tools can make a great puppet. But the magic is the creator.
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Despite all those official approvals, Stone believes AI can be used for purposes we’ve only begun to imagine.
“Someone is going to make a scary horror movie using this technology.” Someone will make a funny joke using this. Like funny things that can’t be done – they’re natural. “What is going to happen soon – what we can do – is that someone will make a political show.” The very latest thing, and they will use deepfakes not to be exactly like that person, even if it is possible, but to make some kind of strange mashup – to capture their part with this kind of strange thing. You will be able to show it weekly or bi-weekly. SNL– schedule type. “
Aging has been a big issue with Deep Voodoo’s use, and Stone says he sees it continuing. But he and Howell also point to a completely new area, called “performance transfer,” which allows the actor to play their part in street clothes on stage with only a few shots on location; At that time the action is “transferred” so that it appears the actor had the characters running through the streets of Paris or making a powerful show in Beijing, a kind of three-dimensional ADR.
That has the potential to accelerate, and dollar-down, production that seems real in ways that were previously unfathomable; The idea of sending a star team and a large crew to Europe or Asia to shoot an action movie may soon seem as old as hand-drawing an entire cartoon. “I feel like it’s going to affect a lot of aspects of how things are produced,” Stone says.
Such progress will not please the physical workers or the places that try to attract them, a point that Stone acknowledges. And serious uses, even if they are clearly written as satire as Deep Voodoo does, can still contribute to a culture of mistrust online.
But these challenges will come with a large number of benefits, Stone believes. And in any case, he says, although guardrails should be built, barriers will not exist. “These things are happening. We’ve all seen things on TV that have used machine learning. It’s happening, and it’s going to change the industry.”
And the big unspoken question – to use it in South Park? Stone believes he and Parker will, and it could change the results on screen.
“We are doing it [the show] every two weeks now. That has more to do with our age than technology, but technology means we’re probably going home earlier, maybe we have more options.
This story appears in Hollywood Reporter The next issue of AI, will be out in April.
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