the "anti age treatments on films" thread

[spoRv]

I started to hear something about this lately, that most wanted actors/actresses had received a digital "anti age" treatment on film, to let them seem younger, and let their career last longer (and the studio earn more!)

Don't know exacly who is involved, nor which films are "polished", until I discovered myself this:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/130552
(note: BD image is untouched; top white "garbage" was still there!)
OK, blu-ray.com screenshots in in JPG, but that doesn't remove so much details, and think that the trailer has a meagre 9mbps bitrate, and a more active image (1920x912 vs 1920x800) compared to BD... (also, the trailer JPG size is four times less than the BD one!); take a look at the eyes, and other parts of the face, where the details are the some; but there are clearly a manual blur under the eyes and somewhere else; these kind of things would pass unnoticed in motion, of course.

By the way, I LOVE Milla - I'd marry her, if only I was a millionaire movie director!

What do you think?

[deleted user]

Neat trick. Looks ridiculous as a still (my eyes hurt!) but it may work nicely in motion. Though I think it's less of an anti-aging thing here and more of a "more focus on the eyes" thing.

Differences between trailers and final movies in general are rather fascinating, which I have noticed in a couple of projects I worked on now, for example Armageddon and Book of Eli. Trailers often use shots with missing VFX, missing final/different color grading, missing/different matte paintings, non-retouched special effects hardware (like cables pulling up exploding cars) etc. Really fascinating to see how much unfinished the trailer shots often are!

In fact, I have found one shot in the Book of Eli trailer where there is a frontal shot of an exploding car. That very same exploding car (pretty much a pixel by pixel match, but different grading) is also on the Blu Ray - but in a different shot from a different angle! Just goes to show how much the eye can be tricked without noticing a problem.

Check it out, it's hysterical: http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/130554

[PDB]

Sadly, Milla has done that before. Resident Evil: Extinction is notorious for that with her face looking fine in long shots but like blur set to 10 in the close ups.

[zoidberg]

I remember some heavy DNR makeup on Mila Kunis in Jupiter Ascending. I think it's a thing now and sometimes it even gets written into contracts.

[ilovewaterslides]

It's also the case on Spider-Man 3. Especially visible on this 4K screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/Qgxraka.jpg

Just look at MJ's face and compare the left and right sides... They could at least re-apply a grain plate on the portion where the blur is so the trick is less visible.

[Tylerdurden389]

I hear they also use CGI on the ladies in the anti-aging cream commercials. Oh, the irony (no pun intended).

[Valeyard]

these kind of things would pass unnoticed in motion, of course.

No way! The effect looks TERRIBLE in motion:



Sean Young in Blade Runner 2049 didn't look as bad, but that's partly because the effect company worked for 1 year on just one shot that lasts a little over 1 minute, and also partly because they insisted on ridiculously elaborate set lighting for that single shot instead of trying to insert her into a normally lit scene. And it still looked off, even Sean Young herself wasn't overly impressed with the result. Plus it was a throwaway scene just to break the fourth wall with Deckard's "her eyes were green":



There are issues with it as well, for example her left ear isn't lit properly in the CGI and has a wax-like appearance.

[spoRv]

Well, apart the result, which is great IMHO, this is another story... I mean, this is a recreation of a character which can't be portrayed by the same actress more than 30 years after - unless she made a pact with the devil, but this is even another story, so...

If only they made the same with Tarkin and Leia on Rogue one - they seems so fake in comparison!

[Valeyard]

It's the same technology: replace the actor's face with a CGI face. Doesn't matter if you're using it to de-age an actor or using a separate stand-in actor. They could have had Sean Young do the on-screen performance and you would call it de-aging, but they used a different actor for other reasons (i.e. so they could use the other actor's body and just replace the head).

Don't get me started on CGI Tarkin, that was horrible!

[deleted user]

Tarkin and Leia were terrible. I thought I was the only one who felt that way back then; glad to be among equal-minded. They made so much advertising about what a great job they did, but it was really not very impressive. Seeing Leia at the end made me almost wanna throw up (Uncanny Valley sickness?).