The Mary Sue: First, I’m going to be honest: I’m very excited for The Irishman. Second: I absolutely hate the idea of using de-aging technology and not just casting actors to play different ages. Before we dive into the film that pulled legend Joe Pesci out of retirement, let’s watch the trailer for Martin Scorsese’s latest for Netflix.
10 comments:
I think that this is potentially problematic for reasons the article didn’t even bring up. We already have a huge issue with shows and movies casting 25+ year old women to play high-schoolers and this can only make it worse. For now, this just happens without editing. But what happens when a grown woman is cast as a 15-year-old and can have the face of a teen, but the body of a thirty-year-old? This creates such unrealistic expectations for young girls. Not just unrealistic, but impossible. There’s no way high-school aged girls can have the bodies that are portrayed on TV for them. This de-aging technology can only make that worse. Though this seems like it can be cool for shows like this where they want one actor through the ages, but it seems like it will do more harm than good. This may seem far-fetched, but it’s pretty realistic. This already happens all the time, so why wouldn’t shows take advantage of this technology to do it even better. The actress who played Lane on Gilmore Girls was closer to Lorelai’s age than she was to Rory’s. Charisma Carpenter was 27 when she began playing 17-year-old Cordelia on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This also happened with Rachel McAdams in Mean Girls in 2005, so it hasn’t been going away and it’s nothing new. This really worries me with this new technology.
This a hard one for me. On the one hand, yeah, just higher another actor, get the two actors to work closely together, get an excellent HMU team with your costume department, and make some actual silver screen magic. I know I’ve seen movies where I’ve narrowed my eyes and gone “wait, that’s…is that the same person? It’s the same, right? Right. Right. No. Shit.” for big age leaps, that was done successfully and wonderfully. But on the other hand—this is very clearly a Robert De Niro movie. Not just any movie with a story where we can HMU a younger dude to pretend he’s Robert De Niro for a few flashbacks. It’s Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci, and it’s a movie that’s meant to travel over major time gaps. It’s not going to be easy to find young actors who can pull off De Niro, Pacino, and Pesci the way that De Niro, Pacino, and Pesci pull themselves off. So…it’s an interesting way of extending a career. However, there is something distinctly uncomfortable about the idea of us doing this while the actors are alive—and then just continuing to use their digital images long after they are gone. You don’t get new De Niros, Pacinos, and Pescis by just using technology to keep your favorites around. Fresh blood is often a good thing,
This is sort of cool in the sense of how far technology has come. However, it also makes me slightly uncomfortable for the same reasons that Elena brought up. Teens in media are already portrayed by older actors. Especially for women, this creates a sense of disconnect in how their bodies should look.
I feel that it should just be easier and better to have actors who look similar enough to play the same characters throughout the timeline of the story. Netflix is doing it with its series The Crown. The first two seasons, the Queen is being played by Claire Foy and in the next season, Olivia Colman is taking over following. We know that this works, so why bother with this technology that, well, currently, does not look too good. I think that the audience should be trusted to go along for the ride when you have different actors portraying the same character throughout time. Give them a little more credit, maybe?
I don’t find the de-ageing technology as problematic as the author. I actually loved the moment in the Rogue One where Carrie Fisher appeared looking as she did in the original Star Wars movies. I thought it tied was an amazing tie in to the franchise. There is also something to be said for letting one actor portray the arc of the character. Though another actor could bring a new perspective, having continuity is a sensible story telling technique. That being said, I understand why people object. De-ageing is not perfect, as it can be eerie feeling, and it takes away jobs for young actor. However, The Irishman is a Robert De Niro movie; he is the star and that’s part of why people are going to see the movie. De Niro is bring people to the theater. While I agree that de-aging can take away jobs from younger actors, I also believe it is a strong selling point for certain movies.
I’m going to disagree with the article author on this one, I think that the effect is a pretty impressive one. I think there is also something to be said about the artistic integrity of having one actor being able to play one character throughout their lives. It brings a consistency to the role that I think would enable the actor to look at a characters life, choices, arcs in a way that wouldn’t be able to be achieved when dividing up the role between different people. I think playing a character at so many stages in their life is also an enormous challenge but something that makes a lot of sense for an extremely knowledgeable and talented actor like Joe Pesci. In addition to any weirdness that is occurring with the de-aging technology it is only going to be enhanced as they use the technology more and more. I wasn’t aware that this technology was even being used and it sounds like this movie has it as an enormous feature of the film itself. I like the idea that this could really open up new avenues of creativity and utilize some very talented actors who previously may have been considered “too old”.
The whole idea of CGI manipulating actual real life actors is very bizarre. In Martin Scorsese's upcoming movie, The Irishman, many of the characters performed with the knowledge knowing they would be "de-aged" by using computer software. With an all star cast of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, and more. Just in the trailer, you can barely see the CGI done to de-age their facial features but you know it's different. There are four different time places where you can see Robert De Niro's character, one as a young man, another as a adult, the next as he's older, and the final one when he is very old. It is so bizarre how they all look like him and how slight the changes are, but they really do a lot of change. Work like this really makes me think if we would need actors in the future. Maybe, since they have De Niro's facial structure into the computer, they can just create movies without paying actors as it can all be computer generated. It's a crazy thought but I don't think we are that far away from it.
The concept of de-aging technology is one that I have found very interesting over the course of the years as this technology has been a more significant role in many big-budget film. The idea of having another actor play themselves in different ages is definitely an opportunity to have a truer and more consistent representation of a character since it is one performance instead of multiple. If done properly, it doesn’t beg the audience to suspend their disbelief as they follow an actor who is clearly not the same person as the main actor who plays the character. However, it also may be limiting if the actor is at an age where acting younger is not something that they can easily do. Sometimes, it can be done very well. One’s that come to mind include the various uses of this technology in the Marvel films. The issue I have with this particular de-aging is that is is very clearly under baked. It is not awful by any means, in fact, it looks very good when viewed in thumbnail form, but when viewing it at a much larger scale, it carries the tell-tale characteristics of this effect. Issues like too much skin sheen or subsurface scattering that isn’t quite up to snuff is very apparent in the promotional images. While these issues are minor, they contribute to an uncanny valley effect that can be very off putting for an audience member. Making the decision to have your actor play a character and use this effect is a large risk, because resolving any issues due to an unconvincing digital effect would require extensive reshoots. Decisions like these that concern the immersion of an audience member are really important ones to thoroughly consider when developing any creative project.
I totally agree with this article, but more in a mild way comparing to opposing any kind of de-aging digital technology. Before this whole industry of CGI prospered, we had all the good movies that are capable of casting children, teenagers and younger adults to represent the whole life span of a person, even a group of people, such as "Never Let Me Go". In a certain way I feel that through delicate casting and character shaping the story is more flavored. Different actors create a assemble of a personality that composed by multiple layers, allowing more dramatic flow of time in the story. This is not suggesting that having one actor to do the whole timeline is a bad idea, but the fact that finding and establishing connections between two stages of life for the same person by not only having the similar face but also other hints is much more satisfying from a audience perspective. I can not illustrate every detail of the skill to do that, but we all know how good it is too see two actors putting a life of a person together perfectly.
I think there’s a big misnomer in these kinds of articles when they talk about “de-aging technology” as if there’s some kind of new piece of tech or software that has people to press a button and make an actor or actress look younger or older on screen.While this may be true on a macro scale -the level of technology, processing power and complexity of software has definitely increased steadily - the work being done in these instances is hard work by hundreds, possibly even thousands of digital artists, animators and special effects technicians, depending on how many companies were contracted to do the work. I think it’s a disservice to the hard work done by a lot of these highly skilled artists and technicians to be reduced to just “ de-aging technology”.
I’d like to respond to this article’s general sentiment as well, which is they should have just hired more actors to play Robert deniro’s character, and to that I respond with why are actors’ jobs more important special effects? I know the question is provocative, and more than a little rhetorical, but the point still stands that we somehow place more inherent value on the hiring of more actors than we do technicians, because they are in the spotlight. I do think we should reserve judgment about this so-called de-aging tech until the movie is actually theatrically released
I must agree with the article (particularly with the one tweet that mentions that the only acceptable de-aging technology use is Young Robert Downey Jr. in Captain America: Civil War - that was wonderful). Similar to what Kevin told us early in the year, if you can manage to do practical effects, why bother to try and fake it. In respect to this predicament: if you can easily find a stand-in actor to play a young version of a character, why not do so rather than creating a playdough mash-up of various photographs of an actor to play various ages? I’m sure it’s cheaper to digitally alter the original actor, but at the same time, it makes for an unsettling effect in films, where the scene just seems fake. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story for example: Princess Leia looked as though she were a different actor wearing a scarily-realistic mask of Carrie Fisher. It was cool to demo the advancements in technology, but at the same time it still looked fake. Granted, some producers of such content are doing phenomenal work (Ctrl Shift Face on Youtube, for instance), but for some reason, these examples of work are the ones that don’t show up in theaters. Ultimately, the issue consists where the artificial effects never look as realistic or believable as practical effects, efficiently off-putting the viewing of any film or media in which the effect is featured. Those responsible are left with two choices: get better or stopppppppppp.
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