Movies

Disney has built an AI that can easily make actors look younger or older

December 1, 2022

Disney researchers have developed an artificial intelligence system that apparently makes it much easier to make an actor look younger or older in a scene. While artists will still be able to make manual adjustments to ensure the effect is as realistic as possible, the AI tool could handle most heavy lifting. It is said that it only takes five seconds for the AI to apply the aging effects to a single image.

Re-aging an actor is usually an expensive and laborious process that requires artists to step through a scene frame by frame to manually alter the character’s appearance. Attempts have been made in the past to automate the process with neural networks and machine learning. Disney researchers note that while they may work well for stills, other systems “typically suffer from loss of face ID, poor resolution, and choppy results on subsequent video frames.” . They claim that their solution offers “the first practical, fully automatic and production-ready method for aging faces in video images”.

The team wrote in a paper that it would be impossible to train the face re-aging network (FRAN) neural network on a dataset of real people. This would require pairs of images showing a subject with the same facial expression, pose, lighting, and background at two different, known ages. Instead, the researchers created a database of several thousand randomly generated faces. They re-aged these synthetic faces using existing machine learning aging tools, then fed the results of this process into FRAN.

The neural network can analyze a photo of the head and predict which parts of a face would be affected by aging, then it applies effects such as wrinkles or skin smoothing as a layer over the original face . As Gizmodo notes, the researchers claim that this approach allows FRAN to re-age the performer with their identity and appearance intact, even when their head or face moves or the lighting changes in a shot. Unlike other methods, FRAN also does not require an additional face alignment step.

There are many good reasons why Disney would want to develop such a tool. This could reduce the workload for visual effects artists and speed up the process, for one thing. In addition to helping productions without successful budgets age their actors up or down, it could help control bloated budgets. A significant part of The IrishmanThe budget of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci looks younger.

Disney has aged performers in its own projects, most notably with Mark Hamill in Star Wars. When Harrison Ford returns as Indiana Jones next summer, he’ll also look a bit younger than you’re used to seeing him, at least for the opening sequence. Disney’s new aging tool should allow effects artists to take years off the faces of these artists more quickly in the future.

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