The entertainment industry, crippled by the COVID-19 pandemic, continues to push on with many producers fighting through and moving forward with projects. A familiar duo is set to make a brand new series in the near future. Samuel L. Jackson and his producer daughter Zoe Jackson plan on making a docuseries about marginalized communities and gang culture.
What We Know:
- The well-known Hollywood star and his daughter, who has had her hands on series such as Project Runway and Top Chef as a producer, is partnering with Los Angeles-headquartered Ample Entertainment, producer of Facebook Watch series 9 Months with Courteney Cox, on Life on the Edge.
- According to Deadline, the production team for the series will use Deepfake technology, an increasingly popular synthetic media where an editor can take a person or object in any existing photograph or video and replace it with someone else’s likeness. This technique of manipulating media has seen an uptick of use in the past two years, considering it’s greater accessability and experimentation. You can currently see Deepfake in action in memes, pornography, fake news, other hoaxes, and even financial fraud.
- The controversial use of Deepfake has even gotten the attention of the government and seeks to restrict the use of this technology. In the wrong hands, one could end up creating false media portraying a figure in a negative or positive light.
- “At the most basic level, Deepfakes are lies disguised to look like truth,” states Andrea Hickerson, Director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of South Carolina. “If we take them as truth or evidence, we can easily make false conclusions with potentially disastrous consequences.”
- As far as the series is concerned, Deepfake will be used to capture the daily routine of people that have had the misfortune of living in the shadow of some of the most notoriously violent groups in the world. It will focus on the struggles of those people and how they live their life anyway despite what is around them.
“No one has ever looked at these groups from a fresh perspective – from the inside out. These are young people trying to find a place in a chaotic world up against extraordinary odds. I can’t think of stories more worthy of telling,” said Samuel and Zoe Jackson.
- One of Jackson’s last projects, which was also a docuseries, was when he hosted and executive produced Enslaved for Epix. Enslaved looked at the history of roughly four centuries of human trafficking. As of late, there are no other details about the Life on the Edge project such as when production started or a release date.
“We could not be more excited for this partnership and the chance to skip the stereotypes and get real,” added Ample co-founder Ari Mark. The docuseries is expected to be short given the current trend of docuseries the past few years. Another detail that’s unclear at this time is whether this series will star on a network or streaming platform.
