Making actors look older or younger has been a perennial challenge for film studios. In the past, this was achieved using rather burdensome and not always convincing prosthetics and make-up effects. It has since been 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 influencing the creative fields, Disney has been working on a studio-grade AI model that can age (and shrink) actors in a way that looks so realistic it’s scary (read more about using AI in other creative fields , see how to use DALL-E 2).
Making actors look older or younger is nothing new. The make-up artist has done some incredible work, such as David Bowie’s work in The Hunger (1983) and Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), the latter of which had 56 people working on hair and make-up. More recently, VFX has stepped up the game, and in Captain Marvel (2019), we saw Samuel L. Jackson age by about 25 years.
Traditional VFX can be very time consuming as editors manually paint each frame by frame. But Disney Research Studios just revealed a solution it’s been working on that looks like it can achieve a realistic effect in real time. It describes the Facial Renewal Network (FRAN) as a “practical, fully automatic and production-ready” tool that can automatically restore and remove facial aging.
The concept is not new. The tools use a neural network technique, unlike deep falsification software, but until now the technology has been too unreliable for use in movies because details or some facial features are lost as the subject moves. Disney’s model, according to its research (opens in a new tab)adapts to moving images with a stunning degree of accuracy, even when the subject is not looking at the camera.
To train FRAN, the research team collected thousands of AI-generated faces and studied how machine learning technologies could handle them. Instead of creating new images, FRAN recognizes the parts of the face that are likely to be affected by age, such as smile lines and wrinkles around the eyes. It layers these features over the subject’s face, creating a stable and terrifyingly 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 some characteristics that tend to give them away, the most obvious being their weakness in displaying an object in a profile. We’ll be looking forward to seeing how Disney uses this technology. Its latest animated release, Strange World, has been a bit of a flop (many blame Disney’s own lack of marketing), but Disenchanted has been going down a storm on Disney+.
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