New Delhi:
May you stay forever young, sang Bob Dylan back in the day. That wistful wish may just have come true for celluloid stars — not because of clever camera angles, deft makeup or even botox but cutting edge technology that ensures their youth doesn’t fade into wrinkles.
The technology, still in its relative infancy and an expensive, complex process, could keep the roles rolling in for tinsel town actors as they retain the illusion of eternal youth, at least on screen.
The beginning has been made with Hollywood greats Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, Samuel L. Jackson, Will Smith and Bollywood’s very own Shah Rukh Khan who have challenged time in their films with technology being used in various ways to ensure their ageless looks.
If master filmmaker Martin Scorsese has used de-ageing technology in his upcoming The Irishman that features Pacino and De Niro, both in their late 70s, as young men, Ang Lee has deployed performance capture’ to digitally juxtapose a young and an old Will Smith in Gemini Man .
“When I first saw it, it was freaky. It was me. I was looking at the perfect 23-year-old version of me, like somebody took all the flaws out. This is going to change how movies are made, and how movies are seen,” Smith, 50, said in a statement.
In Fan , where Shah Rukh plays a matinee idol and also a young, star obsessed fan, director Maneesh Sharma used a combination of VFX and makeup.
According to Sharma, the use of technology depends on the plot line. He used Gemini Man as an example.
“It is Will Smith’s younger self versus his current self. It was required that the same actor played two different age roles. Technology has empowered everyone but I still think directors are first choosing their narrative and then selecting the best possible way to tell their story,” he told PTI.
Owen Williams, senior compositor for Australia-based Rising Sun Pictures, who worked on creating 70-year-old Jackson’s younger Nick Fury in “Captain Marvel, believes with the evolution of software combined with artistic skill, it is now possible for an actor to appear younger, or older as per a story’s demand.
But the process is time consuming and labour intensive.
However, the tools and processes our artists use, help to create a seamless result. The ability to do this allows filmmakers the flexibility to select from a wider talent pool, and so with the assistance of visual effects, the actor can play a younger or older version of themselves, keeping the audience engaged and in the moment, Williams told PTI.
Every actor going through the de-aging process presents a unique set of challenges for the artistes.
“As a person ages, the changes that occur to the face and body are unique to each person. In the case of Jackson, we used reference material of him from earlier days to alter key facial and body features, to make him appear more youthful.
“His skin got lighter as he aged, his lips got thinner, his neck got thicker, and as expected, wrinkles appeared in his skin. All this had to be reversed to a very specific time”, Williams said.
Explaining what goes into the process of reversing the time with the help of technology, he said one has to set a guideline in the beginning otherwise it is easy to go overboard.
First we isolated the actor from the foreground and then reconstructed the areas that were not captured on film. We do this because when you alter the character, for example make them thinner, you are revealing more of the background behind them. Then working on the character, we applied a series of processes to treat the actor’s body and face to make him a younger Nick Fury.
Part of the process included using Foundry software Nuke. The VFX artist locked the character for a specific period of time in a shot, warped the skin and then added the motion back in,” he said.
“We also applied skin smoothing techniques and rebuilt areas which were not possible to remove in a procedural way, by painting and tracking in patches of new skin, he added.
Once the treatments were applied to the character, Jackson was added back over the recreated plate.
VFX supervisor Bill Westenhofer, who worked on Gemini Man , said the younger Smith in the film was the result of performance capture .
“When Junior cries, it’s Will Smith’s tears. This is not de-ageing, this is not face replacement – Junior is a completely digital creation, 100 per cent driven by Will Smith’s performance capture,” Westenhofer said in a statement.
Performance capture involves making computer generated models of humans by tracking motion data. It involves superimposing the human’ actor’s expressions on his digitally younger avatar.
Technology has the potential to be as transformational as black and white to colour, silent to talkies, say industry insiders. And it can also give ageing actors a fresh lease of life and keep them forever young — on celluloid.
