I wrote and globally patented Automated Actor Replacement in Filmed Media, a fully automated visual effects based actor replacement and automated digital double

I wrote and globally patented Automated Actor Replacement in Filmed Media, a fully automated visual effects based actor replacement and automated digital double creation pipeline. I started working on the idea in 2002, had it globally patented by 2008, with a startup team of Academy Award Oscar winners for VFX, the VFX Supervisor and VFX Producer from the talking animal film "Babe", with a custom built server cluster capable of 125K new, unique 3D digital doubles of real people per hour, and a rendering pipeline capable of 12x real time for video clips less than 1 minute in length. However, I launched during the 2008 financial meltdown. The only serious investors I could gather would eventually realize the tech could be used to create Deep Fake Porn, which I refused to pursue. VCs thought the tech was science fiction and suspected fraud. (Remember, this was '08 - the term deepfake has 7 years before going mainstream.) Every film studio and music label I contacted, all already familiar with VFX technology, wanted to use the tech for promoting media products, but none wanted to invest to create a production scale studio (because they were familiar with the lack of VFX studio success stories). I got letters of intent from every studio & label to use the production system once a public scaled system was in place, but anyone willing to finance the studio insisted in also producing porn. Once again, I refused. By 2015 I was personally bankrupt; I tried to pivot to making game characters of real people, so gamers could realistically be themselves or look like celebrities if they wanted. Previously, I'd been on the OS team of the first PlayStation. I know a lot of people in senior places in the game biz. Every game studio and publisher I met, except one, simply wanted the tech for free and refused negotiation. Managed a few clients, continually adding features, but never breaking even. My income was primarily from doing other startups financials, business plans, and software contracts. Towards the end of 2015 I sold the patents to escape bankruptcy, and took a job writing facial recognition software. I'd been principal engineer for that company through three generations of their enterprise FR system until last spring when I quit to return to school and deep dive on machine learning. The twitter feed is all that is left for the public: https://twitter.com/3DAvatarStore/media https://twitter.com/3DAvatarStore/media I still have all the tech, and I'm working with a new startup to bring all this back to life.