Fascinating Featurette for THE IRISHMAN Focuses on the VFX Tech Used to De-Age the Actors
Netflix has released a fantastic new featurette for director Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman. It offers us a fascinating and informative behind-the-scenes look at the groundbreaking VFX technology that was used to de-age the actors in the film.
The VFX work in the film was headed up by Industrial Light & Magic visual effects master Pablo Helman, and the way the handled the effects in The Irishman was different than the way Marvel does it in their films. There was a new software developed to handle the effects in the film called Flux, and it was used in conjunction with a three-camera set-up which allowed a digital re-creation of the actor’s younger faces. They were able to pull this off with tons of references from the older movies that the actors starred in. Also, no facial markers were used.
There’s a lot of work that goes into pulling off these visual effects, and they did a pretty good job! It’s not perfect; there are some points throughout the film that don’t really look right and are distracting, but then there are also scenes where the effects are great and unnoticeable.
There are some great side-by-side comparisons in the video though, that highlight the accomplishments of the VFX team.