Harrison Ford rejuvenates as Indiana Jones in Lucasfilm’s “Indiana Jones and the Wheel of Fortune” (Photo: ©2022 Lucasfilm Ltd. & TM. All rights reserved.)
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny He had a big challenge ahead of him, and not just in honoring the character’s legacy Harrison Ford It is about the final adventure of the most famous archaeologist in film history. In its idea of offering a story about time travel, about a lost device with the supposed ability to find space-time gaps, this fifth installment of the franchise has chosen to go through different phases of the character, including a prologue at the height of Nazism, where we are in the 1940sshortly after the time Raiders of the Lost Ark or The Last Crusade was set.
When Harrison Ford turned 80, this approach seemed crazy because there are no layers of makeup that can make an actor look like he did 40 years ago. Happily, Technological advances and the development of artificial intelligence techniques have made it possible to use digital effects for this task.something we’ve already seen in series like The Mandalorian, where thanks to a deepfake, Mark Hamill’s face from the original Star Wars trilogy has been recreated on another actor’s body, or in The Irishman, where Martin Scorsese chose to convert Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino or Joe Pesci in a younger version of themselves.
As Ford explained in an interview with Stephen Colbert on The Late Show: Lucasfilm used artificial intelligence to analyze all of the decades-old footage the studio has of him.l, including never used footage. From here, all he had to do was perform the scenes with different dots painted on his face, automatically transferring his old look to his current face using this technology.
“They have this artificial intelligence program that can analyze every foot of film that Lucasfilm owns,” Ford said. “Because I’ve made a lot of films for them, they have all this footage, including stuff that’s never been printed so they can extract expression or texture. I don’t know how they do it, but this is my real face. I just put little dots on my face, say the words and they do it. It’s awesome”.
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displaying the results in small clips or images, It is really impressive what tiny resemblance can be achieved with this technique, with Ford looking the same as he did in the early episodes of Indiana Jones and barely recognizable in the digital replica. However, when we see the effect moving throughout the film, in long dialogues or action scenes where the actor plays with his facial expression and vocal range, The result changes radically.
During the prologue in which this technique was used, it’s hard to overlook the artificial result that mars the entire sequence. The perfect texture of Ford’s rejuvenated face excessively clashes with the grain of the rest of the image, which makes it clear that this is a post-production effect that doesn’t match the rest of the elements on screen. When speaking or moving on set, it becomes more apparent, strange movements can be seen as if it were an animated character. In fact, it gives the impression that the face is moving several frames above the rest of the image, contributing to a sense of hyper-realism that evokes resentment.
In my case, I saw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny from the front rows of the cinema, appreciated these discrepancies very closely, I felt many of the action sequences at the beginning as a video game from years ago, from those of the first game Station, the 3D -Mixed animated characters with pre-rendered video sequences in the background. And it feels like an animation doll in real scenes. Also, coupled with the obviously digital landscapes that play out throughout the sequence, the feel isn’t too dissimilar to an unfinished animated film.
And be careful, not only Ford’s face is affected, because Mads Mikkelsen, who plays the adventure’s villain, was also rejuvenated at the start of The Dial of Fate to make a difference after the time warp to the ’60s, where the film’s main plot takes place. And the effect looks the same.
Personally, I don’t think it’s one detail that detracts from the fun of this fifth Indiana Jones adventure, as the prologue is so lively and full of well-executed action that you turn a blind eye at the end. Nevertheless, Upon initial impact, it’s hard to feel a slight sense of dread at how immature the AI-generated rejuvenation effect is. Although, to be honest, given Harrison Ford’s age, there was no better option to start with the final part of Archaeologist than to wait more years for the technology to be perfected or to bet on another story without getting into that Traveling past when it appeared works so well that it’s an even less appealing idea.
This article was written exclusively for Yahoo en Español by Cine54.
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