Harrison Ford is 80 years old and he is still sporting a brown Fedora-style hat and cracking a whip as Indiana Jones. The trailer for the upcoming Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny has taken the man back to the glory days of Indy.
Consider Tom Hanks and Robin Wright in the upcoming Robert Zemeckis film Here. Miramax has reportedly asked AI technology developer Metaphysic to help its production company create younger versions of key characters featured in the film, which is adapted from Richard McGuire’s graphic novel.
All the magic is happening, thanks to artificial intelligence. Ford has put forward an explanation on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: “They have this artificial intelligence (AI) programme. It can go through every foot of film that Lucasfilm owns because I did a bunch of movies for them and they have all this footage including a film that wasn’t printed: stock. They could mine it from where the light is coming from, the expression. But that’s my actual face. Then I put little dots on my face and I say the words and they make it. It’s fantastic.”
For Here, Metaphysic can create “highresolution photorealistic faceswaps and de-ageing effects on top of actors’ performances live and in real-time without the need for further compositing or VFX work.” The company’s website mentions: “We are world leaders in creating AI-generated content that looks real” and adds: “Use AI to create your own hyperreal avatar”. Metaphysic is known for creating hyperrealistic avatars of actor Tom Cruise and Simon Cowell on the stage of America’s Got Talent and the company raised $7.5 million last year to help expand its content creation tools.
Zemeckis, the director of Here, has told The Hollywood Reporter that the technology will allow the film to “do things” that were “previously impossible”, that is, allowing Hanks and Wright play their characters throughout the film’s time periods. We will have to wait some more time to compare the technology that’s being deployed here with the de-ageing tech already seen in The Irishman (Martin Scorsese knocked decades off Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci) or in 2019’s Captain Marvel in which Samuel L. Jackson shed about 25 years.
Keanu Reeves is finding all of this “scary”. “If you go into deepfake land, it has none of your points of view. That’s scary. It’s going to be interesting to see how humans deal with these technologies. They’re having such cultural, sociological impacts, and the species is being studied. There’s so much ‘data’ on behaviours now. Technologies are finding places in our education, in our medicine, in our entertainment, in our politics, and how we war and how we work,” he told Wired.