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Disney’s new neural network can change an actor’s age with ease
- jfengel 4y agoI've been incredibly impressed with the de-aging work on Firefly Lane. It's a sci-fi effects extravaganza; it's your basic soap opera. The two 40-something stars also play their 20-something selves, and it looks seamless. (This isn't Disney's tech, but clearly this isn't something Disney has a monopoly on.) The weird part is that aside from the two stars, they use conventional makeup for aging up other characters, and it looks really bad. Not even close to prosthetic state of the art. The "mom" character (who has to play three different age ranges) looks as if she's been aged by throwing some eyebrow pencil on her forehead -- the way I do it in community theater. It'll be nifty to see what kind of storytelling this enables. Firefly Lane is an interesting project -- in part because of the fine acting job done by the teenagers playing the youngest versions of the characters, who have to both play the part and mimic the beats of the older versions, which they nail. Telling that kind of decade-spanning drama has always been tricky. Audiences usually grant wide leeway between "bad aging/de-aging makeup" and "clearly a different actor but close enough if the story is good".