DIGITAL DE-AGING
We tackle the tech behind digital de-aging, a VFX process which freezes actors in time
WORDS KATIE KASPERSON
I n Robert Zemeckis’ Here , we watch as teenage Tom Hanks and Robin Wright grow old. In James Mangold’s Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny , Harrison Ford appears as his younger self. This time-travelling technique isn’t unique to film; in Netflix’s Stranger Things , Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) revisits her childhood, while in Apple TV+’s Lady in the Lake , Natalie Portman looks a lot like Padmé in the Star Wars prequel trilogy. It isn’t an illusion or exceptional prosthetics; it’s a process known as digital de-aging. Often employed for flashback sequences, like in both Dial of Destiny and Stranger Things , digital de-aging uses proprietary technology to make actors appear younger – often much
younger – on screen than they actually are. The technique debuted about two decades ago, with early uses in Click , The Departed , X-Men: The Last Stand and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button . In the last 20 years, it’s gained both momentum and scrutiny. The main counter-argument is that this eliminates jobs for additional actors who could otherwise play youthful versions of the leads, ‘by favouring more established but older names that can be de-aged to fit roles’, according to James Pollock, creative technologist at Lux Aeterna. Above all, digital de-aging exists to serve stories. For instance, Disney released Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny , the franchise’s fifth and
final instalment, in 2023, 42 years after Raiders of the Lost Ark first hit cinemas. Despite now being in his 80s, for roughly 25 minutes Harrison Ford appears as a young Indy – the same version as in the original eighties films. If it hadn’t been Ford, the scene would have lost some of its impact. Thanks to Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), this wasn’t the case. To film Dial of Destiny , Ford acted out his flashback scenes wearing black dots on his face to capture positional data. During production, ILM placed two infrared cameras on either side of the main one to collect even more information about his movements. To achieve the final cut, ILM drew from previous footage and added the data captured during filming, creating a mask they could place over Ford’s face (and adjust according to the lighting). It’s not always enough to de-age an actor’s face; sometimes their body needs to look younger too. In Stranger Things , Eleven relives memories from when she was a small child. In this case, the creators cast a body double (Martie Blair) as young Eleven, but the face we see is still a digitally de-aged Brown.
STRANGE MAGIC Here (left) and Stranger Things (right) both utilise digital de-aging techniques
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