It Took 100 VFX Artists and 3 Years to De-Age Harrison Ford in INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY
One of the more impressive and cool aspects of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny was seeing a younger version of Harrison Ford’s character in action! The First 20 minutes of the film is an Indiana Jones adventure set during World War II.
The shots of a young Ford were impressive, and to pull that off it took 100 VFX artists at Industrial Light and Magic, and they spent three years on the film’s visual effects to make it look as good as it did. Some of that time took enhancing and developing their existing de-aging technology to create ILM FaceSwap.
This was the biggest de-aging project that ILM had taken on and they wanted to make sure it looked good! We’ve sure come a long way in de-aging tech since Tron: Legacy.
When talking about the technology, the VFX supervisor at ILM, Andrew Whitehurst, said: “We knew we would have to use all of the tools we already had and develop some new ones,” so they developed ILM FaceSwap. It’s explained that the “new set of tools allowed the team to blend a full computer-generated 3D head, combine elements that had been extracted from on-set photography and, as Whitehurst explains, use ‘machine learning-based reference material from previous ‘Indiana Jones’ films.’”
Robert Weaver who is also a VFX supervisor explained some of the additional work that needed to be done saying they also needed to 3D CG asset of Ford’s expressions: “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. The important aspect is that there’s not a single recipe that was cooked up that could be done for all shots.”
Once they completed that process the team “began building the 1944 CG head and used other elements from the Lucasfilm archives to help build that out.” Some of those other elements included lighting references “for every single setup so they could replicate it in the CG process.”
Weaver added: “On the ILM side there were a few hundred artists involved in the process from start to finish, working on the various shots. They were working on every nuance in every shot. But we were able to achieve that because the reliance on the performance of Harrison was of utmost importance. He was the major driving force of what we needed to do for that opening act and make a younger act of that exact performance.”
When it comes to Ford and his performance, Weaver says, “We were just in awe as to what he is able to deliver, how fit he is and how much we could rely on him driving every aspect of the performance.”
They sure did do a great job, and the fruits of their labor paid off.