• In recent years we have seen millions of dollars poured into movies to make actors look younger or older via CGI. 
• A notable example of this is The Irishman, which used up a considerable amount of its budget on three actors in particular.
• Now Disney researchers have created an AI tool called FRAN (face re-aging network) that can do the same work for far less money.

Researchers at Disney, yes the company has a research division, have unveiled a new re-aging tool that leverages AI. The system is called FRAN (Face Re-Aging Network) and it is designed to help digital artists on projects where actors need to either look younger or older based on the requirement.

We have seen this kind of effect used in recent Marvel (which is owned by Disney) movies, including Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Captain America: Civil War, as well as some of the Star Wars properties like The Mandalorian and Rogue One. While it is quite the achievement, the results can often be mixed, not to mention expensive, given the time such visual effects require.

As such, it inflates budgets on projects, with the process to make Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci look younger in the Irishman taking up a sizeable chunk of the film’s budget.

FRAN then, could do a lot of the heavy lifting for artists, allowing them to focus on some of the finer details.

For those concerned about how the training process worked, the researchers used randomly generated faces in order to assist its AI in being able to age or de-age subjects. This route was taken for obvious ethical reasons, but also to ensure there was a large enough dataset to work with.

“Photorealistic digital re-aging of faces in video is becoming increasingly common in entertainment and advertising. But the predominant 2D painting workflow often requires frame-by-frame manual work that can take days to accomplish, even by skilled artists,” an abstract from the researchers’ paper explains.

“Although research on facial image re-aging has attempted to automate and solve this problem, current techniques are of little practical use as they typically suffer from facial identity loss, poor resolution, and unstable results across subsequent video frames. In this paper, we present the first practical, fully-automatic and production-ready method for re-aging faces in video images,” it adds.

When we will be able to see FRAN at work in a future Disney project remains to be seen, or indeed when it will be made available to visual artists in general. For now, you can see it at work in the video after the break.