Harrison Ford in his 80s and Indiana Jones in his 40s…
American actor Harrison Ford, who is in his 80s, will play Dr. Jones in his 40s and 60s in the new film “Indiana Jones,” which will be released next year. The British film magazine Empire reported on the 24th that “Ford appears in the same way as when he starred in the first part of the series in the fifth Indiana Jones movie.” Ford was 40 years old when the first Indiana Jones movie was released in 1982. It is thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) that 80-year-old Ford can act like he was 40 years ago. The AI software of “ILM,” a special effects company set up by director George Lucas, who directed the movie Star Wars, created Ford’s youthful face.
The busiest thing in the film industry these days is AI, not director or actor. AI is active in many ways, including learning actors’ faces and voices to return to their youth, analyzing audience tendencies to predict box office success, writing scenarios, and casting actors.
An actor in his 80s looks like he’s in his 40s
The effect or technique of returning to a younger age is called de-aging. In the past, the actor’s wrinkles were erased as if they were photoshopped and the skin tone was brightened. This method was too time-consuming and expensive to use in many scenes. AI was used in earnest for de-aging when ILM developed a software called “Face Finder.”
The software became popular when it was used in Martin Scorsese’s “Irishman” at the end of 2019. Irishman had actors in their 70s, such as Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, act directly into the character’s youth. The filming team combined two infrared cameras with a digital camera to film the actor in 3D video and AI learned about the two-year-old movie in which the actors appeared in their youth. Based on this, it embodies the actor’s youth in each scene in consideration of age, expression, camera angle, and lighting.
Face Swap, a software developed by domestic special effects company Viv Studio, is also using AI. It is used to change the face of a band such as a stuntman into the face of an actor, and AI also learns the face of an actor in advance and produces a natural effect.
AI also creates voices. When actor Val Kilmer, who starred in “Top Gun: Maverick” released this year, was unable to speak due to throat cancer surgery, AI learned the voice of the past and created the voice at its current age. As James Earl Jones, who played the voice of the main character Darth Vader for 40 years in the Star Wars series, changed his voice as he got older, AI learned his voice when he was young and voiced Darth Vader.
Hollywood has established the AI Institute for Film
AI is also used to increase the probability of movie box office success and reduce production costs. It predicts the movie genre, budget level, and box office level according to actor selection, and determines the optimal combination. Movieio, an American film marketing company, predicts the audience of movies with AI and presents distribution and marketing strategies. The AI called Pves, which Disney uses, analyzes the faces of the audience in the first few minutes of the movie and predicts the possibility of a movie’s success in advance. IBM’s artificial intelligence Watson also makes movie trailers. After analyzing the scenes of the science fiction movie “Morgan” with various emotions such as fear, tranquility, sadness, and happiness, I chose the 10 most suitable scenes for inserting the trailer.
This is not all. Major Hollywood filmmakers such as Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, and Universal have created AI labs at the University of Southern California (USC). The institute, called the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), is using AI to study how TV and movie users make rumors and when to release movies.
Domestic special effects companies that once opened offices in China to save labor costs are also using AI. New ID, an in-house venture of the movie company New, recently used SK Telecom’s AI solution to restore the image quality of the animation “Looking for Mom Samman-ri” in the 70s, and erased subtitles from the French subtitles of the classic movie “Flower Girl” in the 70s, where the original. Park Joon-kyung, CEO of New ID, said, “The time and manpower have been greatly reduced by using AI what people have done manually.”