compared to 20 years ago, we have advanced the art so much that we can absolutely put a photo realistic breathing human in there that you will be not able to distinguish between the original. reporter: 20 years ago when lead actor brandon lee died in an on-set accident the crow was finished using a facial image of lee superimposed on a body double. two decades earlier, lee s father bruce died before the game of death was finished. a look alike filmed his remaining scenes, the best option at that time. not anymore. the holy grail of visual effects has been able to pull off a digital human. reporter: eric barba and his team at digital domain won an oscar for the curious case of benjamin button. for 52 minutes it shows an artificially aged brad pitt. here is brad where we re capturing the details of how his face moved. so the head is superimposed upon another actor s body.
look-alike, to complete his remaining scenes. 20 years later, back in 1994, his son, brandon lee, died in an on-set accident during the filming of the movie the crow. at that time they took an image of his face and digitally superimposed that over a body double to complete those remaining scenes. that s kind of the cheaper way to do it, those two options, but now the technology is really to the point where you can actually digitally re-create yeah. an entire actor. if you think about the film the curious case of benjamin button 52 minutes of that film was brad pitt, his head, all of his facial expressions, with makeup, digitally superimposed over a much smaller actor s body. that was really sort of the state of the art what can be done with this kind of technology. and then back in 2012, you may remember the coachella music festival which tupac shakur who
his wake. the oscar-winning star died last weekend as you will know by now of an apparent heroin overdose. hoffman was still in the midst of filming the conclusion of a very popular movie the hunger games series but he died before he could finish his work, his character had reportedly a very important scene left to complete. our casey wian is live from los angeles. casey, the producers think they can pull this off. they think they can save this franchise. what are they going to do? we want to stress, ashleigh, that the producer lions gate and the studio lions gate have not said how they re going to finish this film. it s a week since fill phillip seymour hoffman died, but they do have many different options available to them. you probably aren t old enough to remember this, but i am, back in the early 1970s there s a martial arts action hero named bruce lee who died before one of his movies was completed. well, they used a stand-in, a
show. but that s nothing compared to the technology of bringing tupac back to life. picture perfect, i paint the perfect picture reporter: the wall street journal reports it was a four-month project by a company named digital domain, which previously made brad pitt age decades in the curious case of benjamin button. how old are you? 7, but i look a lot older. reporter: using past footage of shakur, they made an image on a computer, which they then projected on to an angled piece of glass. reporter: it looked so real, dr. dre and snoop dogg are reportedly considering a tour with the hologram tupac. maybe elvis and john lennon are next. john berman, abc news, new york. and the jackson brothers are going on tour later this year. you can see michael jackson hologram coming up. oh, cool. wouldn t it be nice if we could do this show? think we could pull it off? man, wouldn t it be nice if we could stay in bed? now you re talking.
as i said before, there are a lot of people who are more afraid than i am. reporter: advocacy groups here in california say they hope the next step is a federal law, although they acknowledge it could take years for that to happen. barbara starr, cnn, los angeles. best known for her roles in the fallen and the curious case of benjamin button has been instrou meant tall in getting california law passed and she tells us it s important to raise awareness with consumers as well as companies. what we found was even the companies doing great work don t want to step up and talk about it because they then have to enforce this that s been in their supply chain. i also think it s really important that the consumer acknowledge how challenging it