Many think X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) was the first to use digital de-ageing. However, it was merely the first to publicly disclose it. Terminator 3 (2003) is one film that predates it
An article from 2006 interviews VFX artist Greg Strause, who worked at VFX studio Lola on X-Men, and also at a company called Hydraulx talks about "vanity visual effects work".
After years of vanity visual effects work that included films such as Terminator 3, MI 3, and many others, yet in most cases this work was both invisible and not publicly discussed. With X-Men 3, the work is no longer designed to be invisible, and the team took the process further than they – or anyone else has done before.
Terminator 3's de-ageing VFX by Hydraulx are so good and so pervasive that almost nobody noticed them. The common misconception/cover story is that Arnie hit the gym and got into better shape than 1991's Terminator 2. But this isn't true. While Arnold Schwarzenegger was pretty athletic in 2003, he wasn't anywhere near as lean, mean, and swole as he appeared in the movie.
The truth is revealed by a single frame in Terminator 3 where pretty much all the VFX, including colour correction, are missing. It is present in the DVD version, and was seemingly fixed for the Blu Ray.
You can see a comparison here: http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/DZL7WNNX
The changes are subtle but effective. Wrinkles are smoothed out. A slightly sagging jaw is resculpted. Arnie goes from looking a bit "tired" to looking "tight". And he's like this in every shot of the movie. He looks really, really good -- like he stepped out of a time portal from 1991. But he only looks that good thanks to cutting edge VFX work that was being used to mask an actor's natural ageing process, thus it was preferable from a PR perspective to pretend this was how he actually looked. Airbrushing wrinkles has been a thing in photography for decades, but altering an entire movie in this way is a relatively new technology. (They used to just smear Vaseline on the lens to make actors look younger in flashbacks.)
We think of de-ageing VFX being used to make visibly old actors look like 20-somethings. But I suspect it's in far wider use than people realize in order to provide that flawless skin, those chiseled jaws that people expect from male action heroes. And one can only speculate as to what is done to the actresses in post.
Credit goes to /u/K-263-54 for first pointing this out and posting screenshots over on the /r/terminator subreddit:
On a less cheerful note, multiple people attest to the Strause brothers as being "abusive coke heads who berate you in dailies". So the people who worked really hard on these amazing effects endured years of shitty treatment and eventually got laid off while the owners stayed cushy. De-aging one of the lead actors in a movie in 2003 must have been an immense (and thankless, since it was never gonna get talked about in the special features) challenge. VFX work is just so terribly underappreciated and exploitative of its talent.
Submitted February 22, 2020 at 03:32PM by ContributorX_PJ64 https://ift.tt/37M7Sfh
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