Right now, reaging techniques are all the rage in Hollywood. In the past five years alone, actors including Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Chris Evans, Keanu Reeves, Mark Hamill and Ewan McGregor have been Various forms of age-altering digital magic have been experienced in a series of big-budget film and television series.
For the most part, these attempts to trick audiences into thinking movie stars are significantly younger or older than those off-screen are less convincing at best and downright embarrassing at worst (Looking at you, The Mandalorian people), but there is evidence that progress is being made.
Harrison Ford’s upcoming role as a 30-something Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones 5, at least looks like it will represent a watershed moment in the development of regenerative technology — specifically, Disney appears to be leading the way in improving the quality of content that changes with age .
Whether by accident or by design, the good folks at Disney’s visual effects department announced a major breakthrough in digital re-aging technology the day before Lucasfilm canceled its first Indiana Jones 5 trailer.
in a new research paper (opens in a new tab)the entertainment giant touted its proprietary Facial Regeneration Network (FRAN) as “the first practical, fully-automated, production-ready method for facial regeneration” — and here’s what we’ve seen of the technology so far: Looks very impressive.
By using a program called StyleGAN2 to generate thousands of artificial faces to more accurately predict changes in faces over time, FRAN eliminated the need for expensive and time-consuming manual collection of data on these changes.
In other words, Disney’s visual effects division has developed an algorithm that can virtually track the aging process in order to more effectively apply realistic physical changes to real-life objects.
See FRAN in action with the demonstration video below, which was shared on November 30 on Disney’s DisneyResearchHub YouTube channel.
It’s amazing, right? Disney’s report says that FRAN “provides artists with localization control and creative freedom to direct and fine-tune re-aging effects,” and the House of Mouse apparently believes the technology is good enough for mainstream film and TV productions.
At least in our opinion, FRAN’s results are an improvement over pretty much every de-aging effect we’ve seen on film in the past few years — and the software behind it probably costs a lot less, as well.
This should be great news for filmmakers, studios and fans. For example, Scorsese used anti-aging effects in his 2019 gangster epic The Irishman, It is said (opens in a new tab) Eat up a significant portion of the film’s $159 million budget — a move that, in most people’s minds, was a waste of money, given how unreal the effects shown on screen were.
But if studios can adopt the kind of re-aging technology that FRAN makes possible—as Lucasfilm did with Indiana Jones 5—then we could see more and more Many Hollywood heroes travel back in time, well, back in time.
Of course, nothing lasts forever – but who wouldn’t want to see Arnold Schwarzenegger return as a primetime Terminator for one final hurrah?