‘Holy Grail’ digital effects rewinding the clock for actors
‘Holy Grail’ digital effects rewinding the
clock for actors
LONDON (AP) — With Martin Scorsese’s “The Irishman” expected to battle “Once
Upon a Time in… Hollywood” and “1917” for the best picture Oscar in February,
all eyes are on the special effects team that made the sprawling crime epic
possible.
“The Irishman” unfolds over decades, with the 76-year-old Robert
De Niro and his co-stars playing their characters from their 30s into
retirement age, a feat that’s made the film one of 2019’s most acclaimed
movies.
It’s all possible through new digital de-aging techniques that
in the past year in cinemas have shaved decades from Samuel L. Jackson’s face
and turned back the clock to the 1990s for Will Smith. When Monday’s Academy
Award nominations are announced, “Captain Marvel” and “Gemini Man” could see their
names called along with “The Irishman” in the visual effects category.
Each film has arrived at its reverse aging trick through a
different technique, leading some to call 2019 a monumental year for de-aging
in film.
To many, “The Irishman” stands out from the field, thanks to its
complete avoidance of “tracking markers” — dots painted onto actors faces which
allow computers to mathematically replicate facial movements and manipulate
them as the director sees fit.
The youthful transitions of “The Irishman” are the work of Pablo
Helman, visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, who’s an Oscar
nominee for his work on “Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones” and “War
of the Worlds.”
Helman
says the decision to forgo tracking markers came directly from Scorsese and De
Niro.
“He’s not going to wear a helmet with little cameras in there,”
says Helman. “He’s going to want to be in the moment with Joe Pesci and Al
Pacino on set, with no markers on him. So, if you’re going to capture the
performance, how are you going to do that?”
Enter the “three-headed monster,” a unique camera rig that has a
director camera in the center and two “witness” cameras on either side shooting
infrared footage. That allowed Helman to eliminate shadows created by on-set
lighting. The shadows could potentially interfere with the geometric facial
shapes constructed by de-aging software.
“You’re not interrupting the director’s thread of thinking,”
explains Helman. “You’re not changing the light on set, but the computer can
see in a different spectrum.”
While the team at Industrial Light and Magic was working on “The
Irishman,” another group of technical wizards were experimenting with de-aging
at director Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop in New Zealand, creating an entirely
digital, 23-year-old version of Smith for the action movie “Gemini Man.”
“Since I started visual FX 25 years ago it’s been the Holy
Grail,” says Bill Westenhofer, one of the film’s VFX supervisors.
“You have that many years of expertise of looking at a human
face and knowing what’s wrong. So, to try and get all the different things
together and get it to pull off right, that’s been the challenge.”
To create the character of Junior — a younger clone of Smith’s
assassin Henry Brogan — the superstar wore the traditional gray tracksuit,
complimented by a head rig with two cameras capturing his facial expressions
via tracking markers.
“We decided (on) a ground up approach to build everything from
scratch — from the skull all the way to the skin pores, all the way to the
animation and the final kind of oil in the eyes was really the best approach we
could take,” says Stu Adcock, head of facial motion at Weta.
Before filming commenced on both “Gemini Man” and “The
Irishman,” the teams at ILM and Weta drew up test footage to show the films’
directors that what they were suggesting was possible.
For “Gemini Man” it was a clip from the 1995 movie “Bad Boys”
into which they inserted two shots of their new, digital Will Smith and asked
Ang Lee to spot the “fake.”
For “The Irishman,” De Niro also returned to the 1990s,
performing the Pink Cadillac scene from “Goodfellas” before being de-aged in
post-production — convincing an initially skeptical Scorsese that he could
bring the long-gestating project to life.
Helman and his team then spent two years looking through old
movies and cataloging the targeted ages that De Niro, Pacino and Pesci would
appear in “The Irishman.” They created a program — similar to that used to
create online “deepfake” videos where one actor’s face is swapped for another’s
— which would check their work on the movie was heading in the right direction,
with the system “spewing out” hundreds of images for cross-referencing.
Creating Junior required Smith to spend time in a photogrammetry
booth where multiple cameras captured his likeness as numerous lights fired in
different sequences, giving a base scan of the actor and analyzing the
structure of his face from a skin pore level.
Ironically, considering Scorsese’s vocal criticism of Marvel
movies as “not cinema,” a similar system was used to de-age Jackson in “Captain
Marvel.” A young Nick Fury was created by comparing footage from old Jackson
movies with the work the actor did on set — again, using tracking markers.
“I looked at that face as, you know, maybe ‘The Negotiator’
face,” says Jackson, referring to his 1998 movie of the same name, “Fortunately
for them and for me, I had enough stuff from that period in my life that they
could use a bunch of different facial expressions and films to put that face
together that made sense to people who knew me from that time.”
Darren Hendler, director of the Digital Human Group at Digital
Domain and the man responsible for turning Josh Brolin into “Avengers”
supervillain Thanos, was impressed by Jackson’s appearance in the movie.
“That’s more of a 2D-image based approach where they’re taking
the actor’s performance and then they’re painting and tracking certain frames.
They’re still using some of the actor’s performance directly, but they’re
modifying it. It was very believable. It may not have been exactly what the
young Samuel Jackson looked like, but it definitely looked de-aged.”
“The de-aging of Samuel L. Jackson is absolutely fantastic,”
agrees Weta’s Guy Williams, adding, “different approaches suit different
requirements. It’s not a one-size-fits-all kind of situation.”
That’s a sentiment echoed by Helman, who believes that 2019 was
a watershed year for VFX.
“It’s not by chance that we have several movies that have motion
capture performance, facial performance, in three or four different ways. That
shows that we’re all thinking about digital humans.
“I mean, we all stand on each other’s shoulders,” Helman says.
“I can’t wait for somebody to pick this up and do something else with it, you
know?”
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