[13:25 Tue,10.December 2019 by Thomas Richter] |
Martin Scorsese&s latest film, the 3 1/2 hour epic "The Irishman" is a full success - the film produced for Netflix, but also shown in cinemas, puts a kind of end to Scorsese&s series of mafia films and covers a wide temporal range. In order to be able to present this multi-decade plot in a credible way with the old actor legends like Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci and Al Pacino, Scorsese for the first time relied on the digital rejuvenation of the actors in the many scenes that took place a long time ago. The so-called De-Aging was implemented with great technical effort.
Digital De-Aging was used for the first time on this large scale - several actors of different ages in almost the entire (over-)film length - and enabled the digital rejuvenation of the actors, which until then had only been possible imperfectly through makeup: a story spanning several decades in which the actors age with time. ;) Film scene with several three-camera rigs The prerequisite for the rejuvenation was, of course, exact digital models of the actors& faces during the respective scenes. Scorsese&s specifications were strict and made the whole thing even more difficult: no motion capturing, no markers on the face and no recordings in a motion capturing studio - the technology necessary for de-aging should be as unobtrusive as possible - preferably invisible - when shooting. Or in the words of Robert De Niro: "If we do that, I can&t have markings on my face, I don&t want to wear a helmet with a camera, I don&t want to wear grey pyjamas. I want to be on the set with the natural lighting of the scene. I don&t want to shoot anything on a mocap stage later without my acting partners in the scene." Therefore the ILM team worked for two years on a program (FLux), which transforms objects (in this case the faces of the actors) in front of the camera together with their texture into 3D models without having to rely on special lighting or markers. The hardware solution consisted of a special three-camera rig, consisting of a RED helium as main camera and two ARRI Alexa Minis (beautifully seen on the picture from the set), modified for the infrared image, each attached to the left and right of it, together with ring-shaped infrared lights all around the lens, in order to avoid any casting of shadows. The images from these three cameras were fed into ILM&s Flux software, which generated digital face models of the actors, which were then mapped to the previously created 3-D models of the respective actors. Using these digital models, the recorded faces were then replaced by more recent versions. Scorsese himself was heavily involved in the results of the digital rejuvenation to ensure that the results met his needs, including slight changes in texture, age or facial expression. Thus, the digitally rejuvenated versions should often not be adapted to the actors at a young age, but rather to the (real) characters portrayed and to their appearance at a younger age. The acting itself, the movements and the facial expressions were not changed. The youthful versions of the faces generated by DeepLearning from old scenes of the actors were only used for comparison with the results of the De-Aging procedure used. ;) Robert De Niro in the original and rejuvenated In the linked article the responsible person, Industrial Light & Magic&s Pablo Helman, explains the used technology more exactly. It will probably be used more often in the future, because now, after extensive development (especially of the software), it enables the digitalization of faces and their easy subsequent manipulation on the set during the recording with less effort than before. Actors profit from the fact that they can play in the actual scene in the real environment with their partners without markers in the face and can put themselves into their characters. Although the faces look quite realistically rejuvenated, for many viewers there is a discord in perception . when the young characters move like the old men they are in reality. So in the future it would be  more infos at bei www.studiodaily.comdeutsche Version dieser Seite: De-Aging: Wie Robert De Niro und Al Pacino in "The Irishman" digital verjüngt wurden |
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