AI de-ages Tom Hanks in Zemeckis’ latest film

Groundbreaking AI technology reshapes film production: Robert Zemeckis’ latest $50 million film “Here” utilizes cutting-edge generative AI to de-age Tom Hanks and Robin Wright across a 60-year span, marking a significant leap in visual effects capabilities for the film industry.

The film’s premise and technological innovation: “Here” adapts a 2014 graphic novel set in a New Jersey living room across multiple time periods, leveraging Metaphysic’s real-time face swapping and aging effects to portray its stars at various ages.

• Metaphysic, a visual effects company, developed the system by training custom machine-learning models on frames from Hanks’ and Wright’s previous films.
• Unlike traditional aging effects that rely on frame-by-frame manipulation, Metaphysic’s approach generates transformations instantly, eliminating months of manual post-production work.
• During filming, the crew monitored two screens simultaneously: one displaying the actors’ actual appearances and another showing them at the required age for each scene.

Director’s perspective and industry implications: Zemeckis asserts that this movie’s production would have been impossible just three years ago, highlighting the rapid advancement of AI in filmmaking.

• The film’s release coincides with studios exploring other AI applications in filmmaking, such as text-to-video generation and script analysis tools.
• This technological breakthrough opens up new possibilities for storytelling, allowing filmmakers to depict characters across extended time periods with unprecedented realism and efficiency.

Broader context of AI in Hollywood: The use of AI in “Here” reflects a growing trend in the film industry, sparking both excitement and concern among industry professionals.

• Ongoing debates in Hollywood center around AI’s role in filmmaking, with unions recently securing limitations on AI use in contracts.
• Metaphysic’s technology has already been employed in other 2024 releases, including “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” and “Alien: Romulus,” indicating a wider adoption of AI-driven visual effects.
• Some actors, like Robert Downey Jr., have expressed opposition to being digitally recreated after death using AI, highlighting ethical concerns surrounding the technology’s potential applications.

Technical accessibility: To understand the significance of this AI application, it’s important to note that traditional de-aging techniques often involve painstaking frame-by-frame digital manipulation, akin to digitally “painting” each frame of film. Metaphysic’s AI approach, however, can be likened to a sophisticated real-time filter that instantly applies the desired age transformation, similar to how social media apps can add filters to live video, but at a much more advanced and realistic level.

Analyzing deeper: The double-edged sword of AI in cinema: While the AI technology used in “Here” represents a remarkable advancement in filmmaking capabilities, it also raises important questions about the future of the industry.

• The ability to portray actors at any age could potentially extend careers and open up new narrative possibilities, but it may also lead to concerns about job displacement for makeup artists and other visual effects professionals.
• As AI technology continues to evolve, the film industry will need to grapple with balancing innovation and creativity with ethical considerations and the preservation of the human element in filmmaking.
• The success and reception of “Here” could serve as a bellwether for the future integration of AI in mainstream cinema, potentially influencing how other filmmakers and studios approach similar technologies in their productions.