by Making actors look older or younger has been a perennial challenge for film studios. In the past, this was achieved through rather cumbersome and not always convincing prosthetics and make-up effects. That was then largely replaced by time-consuming digital VFX techniques, but it looks like Disney has come up with a game changer.
While publicly available AI image generators are having an impact on the creative realms, Disney has been working on a studio-quality AI model that can age (and age) actors in a way that looks so realistic it’s scary (read more im using AI in other creative fields, see Using DALL-E 2).
Making actors look older or younger isn’t new. Makeup artists have done some incredible jobs with the likes of David Bowie in The Hunger (1983) and Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) – the latter had 56 people working on hair and makeup. More recently, VFX has enhanced the game, and in Captain Marvel (2019) we saw Samuel L. Jackson aged about 25 years.
Traditional VFX can take a long time as editors manually paint frame by frame. But Disney Research Studios just revealed a solution they’re working on that looks like it can create a realistic effect in real time. It describes its Face Re-Aging Network (FRAN) as a “handy, fully automated, and production-ready” tool that can auto-age and age faces.
The concept is not new. The tool uses a neural network technique similar to deepfake software, but until now the technology has been too unreliable for use in movies due to the loss of detail or some facial features when the subject moves. Disney’s model, according to his research (opens in new tab)adjusts to moving images with amazing accuracy, even when the subject is not facing the camera.
To train FRAN, the research team collected thousands of AI-generated faces and studied how machine learning would handle them. Instead of creating new headshots, FRAN recognizes the parts of the face that are likely to be affected by age – such as laugh lines and wrinkles around the eyes. It layers these features over the subject’s face, creating a stable and shockingly realistic effect that preserves the original facial features in different lighting conditions and from different angles.
The results are amazing, but also a little scary. Deepfakes still have a few telltale signs that tend to give them away, the most obvious being their weakness for showing a subject in profile. We’ll be keeping an eye out to see how Disney is using the technology. The latest animated release, Strange World, was a bit of a flop (many people blame Disney’s own lack of marketing, but on Disney+, Disenchanted has taken a storm.
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