--- title: Digital Necromancy: Advertising with Reanimated Celebrities | TIME description: Advertisers know that celebrities, even dead ones, are big money. With digital innovations making it possible to reanimate the deceased, be prepared to see your favorite star sell you somehting from beyond the grave. canonical: https://time.com/video/ajK7efHN/ og:title: Digital Necromancy: Advertising with Reanimated Celebrities og:description: Advertisers know that celebrities, even dead ones, are big money. With digital innovations making it possible to reanimate the deceased, be prepared to see your favorite star sell you somehting from beyond the grave. og:url: https://time.com/video/ajK7efHN/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/ajK7efHN/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Digital Necromancy: Advertising with Reanimated Celebrities twitter:description: Advertisers know that celebrities, even dead ones, are big money. With digital innovations making it possible to reanimate the deceased, be prepared to see your favorite star sell you somehting from beyond the grave. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/ajK7efHN/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # Digital Necromancy: Advertising with Reanimated Celebrities > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. A TIME subscription provides full access to that journalism in print and digital, from $20 a year, and can be cancelled at any time. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: Digital Necromancy: Advertising with Reanimated Celebrities [Watch (HLS stream): Digital Necromancy: Advertising with Reanimated Celebrities](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/ajK7efHN.m3u8) (3:19)  _Published 2013-07-31. Advertisers know that celebrities, even dead ones, are big money. With digital innovations making it possible to reanimate the deceased, be prepared to see your favorite star sell you somehting from beyond the grave._ --- Jul 27, 2023 3:40 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Sexy Advertising Doesn’t Sell, It Distracts](/video/w2n4y3Np/) ### Sexy Advertising Doesn’t Sell, It Distracts [The World's first Digital Mirror](/video/vh8IAAKd/) ### The World's first Digital Mirror [Facebook Is Rolling Out Video Advertising: Will It Work?](/video/vmE8sVlJ/) ### Facebook Is Rolling Out Video Advertising: Will It Work? --- ## Transcript >> Just because you're dead doesn't mean you're not worth the money. Celebrities like Michael Jackson, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis Presley continue to earn millions of dollars from beyond the grave. Advertisers have capitalizing on this for years using look- alikes, animations, and even old [ unk ] stars. But those mediums are flawed. To get the perfect ad, you need to bring the celebrity back to life. >> This is like a once- in- a- lifetime encounter you've had with Bruce Lee himself and he's telling you something that you ought to listen to. -[ unk ] >> In honor of the 40th Anniversary of Bruce Lee's death, Johnnie Walker commissioned a commercial from the ad agency, BBH, to digitally reanimate the martial arts master, even though he himself never drank. >> Why Bruce Lee? Bruce Lee had a philosophy of walk on, you know, which is very similar to keep walking. And what we're trying to do is to bridge these two things. >> Digital Bruce is the next step in the progression of computer reanimated celebrities, performing in ways they never did in life. Most famously, Digital Domain's hologram of Tupac rocked the stage at Coachella 2012, and while rapping was his profession, the show was not just a 3D or FAI [ unk ] performance. >> When Tupac called out to the audience ,-- >> What the-- is up Coachella? >> Coachella didn't exist during his lifetime and the idea here was it was gonna be a fresh original performance that no one's ever seen before. >> Digitally reanimating a celebrity like Tupac or Bruce Lee from scratch is hard work and eerily resembles building Frankenstein's monster. Animators start with a wireframe skeleton and add layers of muscle and flesh in order to give the body proper weight and look. To avoid Frankenstein's jerky movements, animators create thousands of expressions and expressions between expressions. But it isn't enough to make it look like a person. >> There are CG rules. They will tell you things like don't move the camera around so much, don't get extremely close, don't use dramatic lighting. What we decided was let's just-- we got all of it, as in break every single rule. And this is an attempt to force a viewer to believe that whatever we're creating in front of him is a human being. >> How do we bring-- Not just the physical likeness, how do we bring him back in a way that it feels like Tupac? And that was the big challenge. And in that regard, we really had to rely not only on clips of video, but we had to rely on friends and families. >> Using family and friends to make sure the celebrity looks and feels right isn't as important as making sure that bringing the celebrity back is legally right. Celebrity likeness laws extend after death, and without the estate's consent, reanimating celebrity is like featuring a live one without permission. >> The issue is on whether we can bring back anybody. Of course, we can. Really, the issue, I think, is should we and I think the heart of this is immoral, unethical, and even entertainment conundrum has to be solved by the families and loved ones and the estates of some of these deceased icons. >> Both BBH and Digital Domain work closely with their celebrity estates. They were happy to introduce their loved ones as they were in life to a new generation. >> If done well, this technique allows a whole new generation of people to see a part of him that we never got to see, to engage with him in a way that we never had the opportunity to. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Digital Necromancy: Advertising with Reanimated Celebrities","description":"Advertisers know that celebrities, even dead ones, are big money. 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