Governor Tarkin: Image Blending & Generative Fill
These are my own creative experiments of creating a synthetic Governor Tarkin using imagery from the movie Rogue One as a blending prompt in MidJourney. I am also experimenting here with Adobe Photoshop’s beta generative fill tools to expand the image’s canvas. What I’m finding here is that Tarkin as a character begins to deviate greatly in terms of appearance, despite the prompt including an actual image of Peter Cushing. We get the ‘idea’ of Tarkin, but not the accuracy we see elsewhere with Deep Fakes. It’s a simulation of Tarkin, more than it is a representation. It lives in the space between what we remember of Cushing’s performance, and the ominous spirit of the character themselves. In that sense, it is an accurate ‘memory’ of the original 1977 performance, which draws an artificial intelligence line through the 2016 virtual performance, but with widely available digital tools from 2023.
MidJourney + Photoshop Generative Fill (Beta)
/imagine: Dramatic Portrait of Governor Tarkin in Star Wars Rogue One, Imperial Death Star Destroyer background, ominous deep shadows cinematic lighting, 8k, --v 5.1 --ar 16:9
The prompt is being directed towards the 2016 Guy Henry performance more than the 1977 Peter Cushing performance here, but also rendering the sinister backgrounds of an Imperial spaceship fairly accurately. There’s a degree of ‘uncanny valley’ believability to it, but it still doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny. We are getting individual pieces of Tarkin’s appearance, without a photographic likeness.
/imagine: <https://s.mj.run/-l9aDHSKvKI> Dramatic Portrait of 1977 Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars A New Hope, Imperial Death Star Destroyer background, ominous deep shadows cinematic lighting, 8k, --v 5.1 --ar 16:9
These are the examples using specific image prompts (stills from both the 1977 and 2016 movies) to attempt something closer to the depiction of Tarkin. I don’t feel these are as successful, despite including inputs which are ‘closer’ to the source material.
