Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I have an absolutely bizarre desire to download all of these, and then rip them apart, scene by scene, and then estimate pose, facial pose, gender, etc. Do facial recognition, so I know where the same actor is in all of the scenes...

And then to take a movie like The Matrix, or Star Wars, and then recreate it, shot for shot, as closely as I can, using clips from Public Domain movies.

Especially if I can pick, like, "this actor in this public domain movie, or movies, would be a good Neo, or Luke." And it turns out that he's in enough shots, and poses, that I'm able to remake all of that character's scenes, from Public Domain footage of this other actor.





I feel like you should check out https://youtu.be/5GFW-eEWXlc?si=w3KTUkIprSeBYH3f

Enjoy.



Is this helpful?

Qwen3-VL can scan two-hour videos and pinpoint nearly every detail - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46094606 - December 2025


This feels just a few steps removed from bringing the technology from the 1990 film "Total Recall" to life. Clients are able to purchase completely custom memories, choosing the exact characters that will appear in their "vacations", their ages, and appearances.

I'm also kind of reminded of A Scanner Darkly. That would be another interesting movie to reconstruct this way.

I'm also reminded of those posters in the mall, where from a distance, it's an actor's face. But when you walk up close, it's actually made of hundreds of stills from their films.


This would be cool, but if you think that you're somehow getting around copyright law, I'm pretty sure the result would still be a derivative work of the film you're recreating.

Right, but what if I just shared a script?

You start with a digital copy of the movie I'm starting from...

I extract the audio...

And then my script downloads the Public Domain movies...

...and I've got a hard-coded list of cuts to take from each of the Public Domain movies...

...and combine it with the movie audio?

My script is just a few hundred KB.

As long as the movie you start from is pretty well in audio synch with the version I start from...

Heck, I could probably even compensate for that, too... A little bit of analysis to listen for the first words spoken...


I don't know, isn't your script now a derivative work of the original movie?

Just insist it's a parody

That would be really interesting if you have enough ML knowledge to do it !

Well, with things like this, I feel like someone could get interesting results pretty quickly:

https://lintangwisesa.github.io/MediaPipe-in-JavaScript/inde...

https://github.com/cosyneco/MediaPipe.NET

https://ai.google.dev/edge/mediapipe/solutions/guide

I'd think you'd start with a tool to automatically cut video into scenes, and kind of go from there...


Please do, and let us know when it is finished so that we can all watch it.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: