This is The Insane De-Aging Tech Used in Tom Hanks’ Movie ‘Here’
Here starring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright was hailed as a groundbreaking piece of cinema thanks to its AI-powered de-aging technology and for its unusual camera work.
Despite the film receiving mixed reviews, Here represents a leap forward in de-aging technology; a controversial topic in Hollywood. De-aging famous faces have cropped up in movies like Indiana Jones 5 and The Irishman.
In a recent Vox video, the production visual effects supervisor on Here, Kevin Baillie, explains how the crew relied on a company called Metaphysic for real-time de-aging and up-aging to pull the film off.
“It’s a very, very hard effect to pull because we look at human faces all day, every day,” says Baillie. “It’s the thing that we recognize the most.”
Vox notes that the first movie to de-age actors was X-Men The Last Stand (2006) and it wasn’t very good. And until very recently, the process of de-aging was painstakingly long, labor intensive, and expensive.
However, for Robert Zemeckis’ Here, that method would never work because of the quantity of de-aging shots involved. So, the producers turned to Metaphyic which uses AI to alter people’s appearance such as in Alien: Romulus when a late Alien actor Ian Holm was brought back to life with the technology.
Baille explains that the team gathered photos of Hanks from different stages of his career and fed them into a machine learning algorithm. He likens it to giving someone a book of Tom Hanks images, asking them to study it constantly, and then asking them to imagine “Tom Hanks singing Happy Birthday to you in the moonlight.”
This argument — that AI is just the same as artists using other artists’ work as inspiration — is often deployed by proponents of the technology. However, it’s not completely clear and there have been instances where AI image generators have spat out pictures identical to ones in the training data. And some photographers say AI can recreate eerily similar copies of their work.
Revolutionary Technology On-Set
The Metaphysic technology was able to produce live face swaps on-set, meaning the actors were able to check their performances and tweak things as they see fit.
“It really brought the actor into the conversation and allowed them to use it as a tool,” adds Baille. “It was incredible walking away from the set with every shot that was going to be a face swap shot, there was already a very rudimentary version but pretty convincing version of it already done.”
It’s clear that de-aging technology powered by AI is still in its infancy. But it’s a trend that’s not going away; expect to see more artificially young Hollywood stars in the future.
