‘Indiana Jones 5’: It Took 100+ VFX Industrial Light and Magic Artists to De-Age Harrison Ford

variety.com:

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor Before “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” even opened, the Disney adventure tentpole sparked intrigue with a de-aged Harrison Ford, who, in his fifth film playing the whip-cracking archaeologist, is now 80 years old.

The shots of a young Ford look impressive, and it’s thanks to the team of over 100 artists at Industrial Light and Magic, who spent three years on the film’s visual effects, which also included enhancing and developing their existing de-aging technology to create ILM FaceSwap.

Photorealism de-aging was nothing new to the team. After all, technology such as Flux existed and had been used on films such as “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “The Irishman.” But when Whitehurst and Robert Weaver, VFX supervisor at ILM, first took on the James Mangold-helmed “Dial of Destiny,” they knew this was going to be the biggest project they had undertaken. “We knew we would have to use all of the tools we already had and develop some new ones,” Whitehurst says.

So they developed ILM FaceSwap. This new set of tools allowed the team to blend a full computer-generated 3D head, combine elements that had been extracted from on-set photography and, as Whitehurst explains, use “machine learning-based reference material from previous ‘Indiana Jones’ films.” Once the artists had that reference material, including a raw clay model in the shape of Ford’s Indy, they went to work making the actor look like a younger version of himself on a shot-by-shot basis.