Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1192296
20 cgw w i n t e r 2 0 1 9 light and shadow to fool the audience into thinking you've changed the person's face, and you're animating the so tissue movement. "It's relatively easy to age or de-age in one frame," he continues. "But as soon as the actor moves, we see all the changes that come with that. The skin flexes, a blink pulls some wrinkles away, a head turn obscures part of the face. It's very complex to get all those changes to stick in the right spot and not look like they're taped on. It needs to look like it's part of them, like it's their skin. But it's all 2D tricks." And, a lot of artistry. When asked if the artists automate this work somewhat by using scripts, Claus answers, "Oh, if only we could. That would be great!" The artists do, however, have some general guidelines for how to go about the work. "We don't have templates," Claus says. "That would be too rigid. But we do have general guidelines for the sequencing of things – this first, then this, then that." Also, supervising artists generally choose hero shots in a sequence, dial in the look, and then assign artists to the sequences based on their strengths. "We want consistency amongst the artists," Claus says. "We try to keep them confined to similar shots. We don't want every shot they do to have the character at a different angle. They'd have to learn what to do all over again. If they have consistency in their shots, we get a higher quality in the end." A high-quality effect that, at its best, is invisible to the audience and that began with a nearly invisible presence by the crew on set. No head cams. No volume. No witness cameras. "With our method, what you see 100 percent of the time is the actor who was on set," Claus says. "It's always them. Every nuance is there for the audience to see. We just manipulate their appearance as they perform. It's hard to re-create a person digitally, and it's even more difficult for that digital re-creation to maintain the tiny micro-expressions and subtle movement that an actor does on set to embody their character." The feedback they receive from actors is positive. "What we're doing is an intimate and delicate thing," Claus contends. "We're affecting their appearance – and their livelihood, actually. We got glowing reviews from Sam Jackson. At one point, he tweeted about how excited he was about the film. He said, 'They've got this Lola thing now.' And, on Jimmy Kimmel, he said how much he liked the Lola process." "It was reassuring," Claus adds. "We saved that clip." And More… In addition to the feature films in which a youthenized character appears through- out the entire film, two other projects this year were significant. For Terminator: Dark Fate, artists at ILM, led by Visual Effects Supervisor Jeff White, created a young Sara Connor (Linda Hamilton), John Connor (Aaron Kunitz), and the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) for a sequence in the opening of the film. "There was a lot of stunt work in the sequence, which necessitated using body doubles," White explains. "We weren't always able to have the actors on the show. So, our approach was to replace the heads." And, remarkably, for the episodic television series Righteous Gemstones, the studio Gradient Effects created a younger version of the character played by John Goodman for flashback sequences. The studio used technology developed by its sister technology company Secret Lab to extract facial muscle movement without tracking markers. "We did 180 shots in six weeks," says Olcun Tan, Gradient Effects and Secret Lab president. More information on the processes used to de-age these characters can be found on www.cgw.com. One consistent theme runs through all these projects: The assignment the studios had was not to create a digital human, or a younger actor. It was to create a younger version of the character the actor plays. In creating those digital fountains of youth, VFX artists gave actors the flexibility to play any age they want, and gave direc- tors new, unencumbered choices. Visual effects at its best. n Barbara Robertson (BarbaraRR@comcast.net) is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for CGW. GRADIENT EFFECTS DE-AGED JOHN GOODMAN'S CHARACTER IN RIGHTEOUS GEMSTONES USING THE TOOL SHAPESHIFTER. AI Synthesized Faces So-called "deepfakes" use neural net- works that "learn" how to superimpose one face in a video – look and movement – onto another. With soware like Fake- App readily available, deepfake swaps of eyebrows to chin have become ubiqui- tous on the Internet. Although mostly applied to embarrass celebrities and poli- ticians so far, insidious possibilities have caused a scramble to create deepfake detectors. Could deepfake help change actors' faces for feature films? "We've been experimenting with deep-learning AI," says Trent Claus, visual effects supervisor at Lola. "There are a lot of things it can do well, but at the size of a movie screen, imperfections become clear quickly. We've been curious to see whether it might be useful for intermedi- ary steps. I find it very promising." Image ©2019 HBO.