To cleanse the palate. The first time I watched this, I was sure it was a hoax. Find a few seconds of video of famous people making unusual facial expressions, have an actor mimic them, lay them side by side with clips of the same famous people looking normal, and voila. It looks like you’re manipulating the “normal” image in real-time to generate the odd expressions.

But no, it appears to be real. All we need now in order to utterly destroy public confidence in the reliability of news video is for someone to write a program that does something similar with audio. “Capture” Obama’s voice, run it through the app, sync it up with the Face2Face software here, and you can have the most powerful man in the world say anything you like and have it be utterly believable — to anyone who’s unfamiliar with this technology, that is. Hopefully the app will have become sufficiently mainstream by the time Trump takes office that his advisors can “clean up” his answers to policy questions in real time.

Incidentally, how many years away are we now from “resurrecting” long-dead movie stars and putting them back onscreen in new roles? Can’t be much more than 10.