Makhna

The Edit

Makhna is a satirical edit — a video meme — celebrating the prowess and valour of Indian soldiers and the Indian state in countering China's advances. It is a funny video, and it is meant to be.

The Subject

2020 was the year the India-China frontier turned violent for the first time in
decades. The standoff across eastern Ladakh through that summer, and the clash
in the Galwan Valley on 15 June in which twenty Indian soldiers were killed,
produced a wave of public feeling that ran well beyond the usual defence
commentary — and a great deal of it arrived as internet humour rather than as
argument. Satire was the register the moment reached for.

The technical context matters as much as the political one. Face swapping in
2020 was not a service you called; it was a model you trained. The
autoencoder-based tools then available — DeepFaceLab and its relatives — needed
a large set of images of each face, days of computation on consumer graphics
cards, and per-subject retraining for every new pairing. There was no prompt, no
API, and nothing off the shelf that would take a face and put it convincingly on
a moving body.

The generative video tools that make this trivial today were still years away.
Anyone attempting motion transfer at that point was training their own model on
their own hardware.

How We Made It

The piece runs on motion transfer: faces mapped onto performers closely enough for the joke to land. We trained our own face-swapping model on our own GPUs to do it.