The artificial intelligence (AI) program that was developed by Disney researchers has the capability to make a person in films seem either younger or older than they really are.
According to Engadget's report, the AI tool will do most of the work, but the artists will still be able to make fine-tuned modifications to ensure a photorealistic final product.
Re-aging Tech
A single frame's worth of aging effects, based on the AI, takes no more than five seconds.
Without a more sophisticated tool, re-aging an actor's face is time-consuming and costly. It must be adjusted manually, frame by frame.
Some have tried to simplify the process by automating it using machine learning and neural networks.
Disney's researchers observe that competing algorithms may perform well with still photos.
However, they often suffer from face identity loss, low quality, and unpredictable outcomes over succeeding video frames.
On the other hand, they claim that their technology is "the first practical, fully-automatic and production-ready method for re-aging faces in video images."
FRAN
A paper published by the team stated that training the FRAN (face re-aging network) neural network on a dataset of actual individuals was unfeasible.
In order to do so, they would need paired photos of the same person taken at two distinct ages with the same attitude, position, lighting, and backdrop.
Therefore, they rather opted to produce thousands of faces at random and used them as a data source.
They input the findings of this re-aging process into FRAN utilizing pre-existing machine-learning aging techniques for synthetic faces.
The neural network can examine a portrait of a person's head and determine which features will be most impacted by the advancement of time. It then adds aging effects such as wrinkles or skin smoothing as a separate layer on top of the original face.
According to Gizmodo, the researchers say that their method enables FRAN to re-age the actor while maintaining their identity and expression, even if their head or face is moving around or the lighting shifts throughout the shot.
FRAN reportedly does not need a separate face alignment process like some other approaches.
Impact on Film Industry
Disney has plenty of motivation to create this kind of technology.
One benefit is that it may reduce the amount of labor required by visual effects artists, allowing them to finish their projects more quickly.
It may assist low-budget films in artificially aging their performers and perhaps rein in increasing production costs.
With a reported budget of up to $200 million, most of the money went into making Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci seem younger in the film, The Irishman.
Disney has de-aged actors in their own productions, most notably Mark Hamill in Star Wars.
When Harrison Ford repeats his role as Indiana Jones next summer, he will have a younger appearance than in earlier movies, at least in the prologue.
The new re-aging technique developed by Disney should speed up the process by which effects artists remove years off the faces of such actors in the future.
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