Pancho Villa by the Sea

My great grandfather was a major in Pancho Villa's army. When I was a child one of my elderly tias told me that while Pancho Villa spent most of his life in the desert, he often dreamed of the sea.

This morning for whatever reason I was thinking about this on the subway and realized, I could get Villa to beach, at least virtually.

My son, Gabriel gathered some Villa images and made a quick Villa model, but with only 9 images and poor image quality of most of the images, the model wasn't very good. To improve the model we had to find more Villa images with him isolated. Villa was a people person and there weren't many image of him alone. Most of the vintage photos are grainy and contrasty. This was the best one we found:

We trained a new model with the new images. It still has a few issues, but you can start to get a sense of the man. I decided to test a theory that in order to correct for bad data in faces that it might be possible to mix in one or two modern high resolution pictures of people with similar faces. Luckily Villa has been potrayed in many films so I found two reasonable film stills of people playing Villa. The result... workable

I'm glad Villa finally got to the sea.