ILM Needed Over 100 VFX Artists to De-Age Harrison Ford For ‘Dial of Destiny’
Much of the buzz surrounding Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny revolved around the impressive feat of de-aging Harrison Ford.
The legendary actor is now 80 years old, but from Dial of Destiny, Lucasfilm needed to rewind the clock in order to tell the story that they wanted.
Image: Disney
To accomplish this feat, Industrial Light and Magic used a team of over 100 VFX artists who spent over three years working on the film’s visual effects. These included enhancing and developing their existing de-aging technology to create ILM FaceSwap.
In fact, when VFX supervisors Andrew Whitehurst and Robert Weaver looked at Dial of Destiny, they knew it would be the biggest project they had undertaken.
Image: Disney
Developing ILM FaceSwap
“We knew we would have to use all of the tools we already had and develop some new ones,” Whitehurst says. So they developed ILM FaceSwap.
The new set of tools blended a full computer-generated 3D head and on-set photography. Whitehurst explained that the team used “machine learning-based reference materiel from previous ‘Indiana Jones’ films”.
Image: Also Disney
Once artists had that reference material, they went to work making the actor look like a younger version of himself on a shot-by-shot basis.
The process was not done yet. Next, Weaver and his team had to create a full 3D CG asset.
“That involved putting Harrison through the process of recording all the facial performances and all its extremes, and the marrying of various technologies by the artists to blend between one and the other to get the final performance that you’re looking for,” Weaver explains. “The important aspect is that there’s not a single recipe that was cooked up that could be done for all shots.”
Image: AlsoDisney
When it came to filming, Whitehurst says, “We made sure we were shooting with extra cameras attached to the main unit camera so we could get as much reference as we possibly could.”
Amazing Results
In the end the results not only impressed audiences, but Ford himself.
“It is 40-year-old Harrison Ford, and that’s why it looks so good,” he said. “I’ve been working for LucasFilm most of my adult life. Every frame of the film[s] … that we’ve made together … could be mined with, here we go again, artificial intelligence. And they could find the right angle, the right light, so that it’s my mouth, my eyes, my face, married. It’s not photoshopped or anything. It doesn’t look that way. It’s real.”
Photo: Also Lucasfilm
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