![]() ![]() It was a little wobbly, but it convinced them they were on the right track. The team unsentimentally scrutinized old childhood photographs and even sourced a relatively crude facial cast of the actor that came from Independence Day.Īround mid-2018, the team tried an experiment they called the Pepsi Challenge, dropping the Junior-in-progress into the middle of a scene from Bad Boys, which was made in 1995, and animating it manually. ![]() Bad Boys, Six Degrees of Separation, and, of course, later episodes of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air were pored over like sacred texts. The next task: reverse-engineer by hand that digital 49-year-old into the shape and form of a 23-year-old.įor visual reference, the team amassed stills and clips of early- to mid-'90s Will Smith. In the primordial nothingness of Weta's hard drives, Junior was born. A model of Smith's body was fitted with a core digital skeleton and muscle system, the biomechanical chassis Weta uses for nearly all of its computer-generated humanoids, creating a basic digital replica-or clone, if you will-of modern-day Will Smith. Instead, Junior would have to be pure data, manufactured from the ground up, driven by the real Will Smith through motion capture.īack in early 2018, Weta scanned Smith with an array of high-resolution cameras while he performed a predetermined set of facial calisthenics, compiling a vast database of the full expressive repertoire of Smith's face. ![]() At that crispness of image, even an actor's stubble can be distracting onscreen a digitally dermabrased Junior would have looked as if he were wearing kabuki makeup. Those radically rejuvenated visages were achieved through after-the-fact photographic manipulation-extreme airbrushing of the actors as they appeared on set.īut Lee shot Gemini Man at ultrahigh resolution and an ultrahigh frame rate, part of his mission to create cinema that looks and feels more like reality. When the Gemini Man teaser trailer dropped in April, set to a moody rendition of “Forever Young,” many assumed Smith had simply been “de-aged” in the same fashion as several performers in recent Marvel movies (most notably Samuel L. “A digital person is something that's been spoken about since I started visual effects 26 years ago,” he says. Plus, there was a gigantic dare involved. “I was confident we could push the technology the rest of the way there,” Westenhofer says. To pull it off would take a multiyear, brute-force effort. But a speaking, interacting digital human in a starring role is still a huge leap from the relatively fleeting digital human cameos of Rogue One and other films-and a far more fearsome undertaking than a 500-pound cat. It's also a cautionary tale about humans hubristically meddling with awesome tech.įor years, there have been considerable advances in the software, the hardware, and the effects industry's underlying understanding of human physiology. It's a story of a man trying to outwit himself, of weather-worn wisdom pitted against cocky youth. The film, set to be released in October, is a sci-fi action thriller directed by Ang Lee that follows a retired assassin, Henry (Will Smith), who finds himself in the sniper-scope sights of another, younger assassin (digital Will Smith), who has been forged out of Henry's own DNA. Up onscreen is a shot of the real-life, 49-year-old Will Smith as he looked on the set of Gemini Man, wearing a facial-capture headset, his face and neck specked with tracking dots. In June of this year, in a postproduction facility in Manhattan, a crew member shows off the nearly complete asset. He's also the spitting image of a 23-year-old Will Smith. They call him Junior or, sometimes, “the asset”: the most ambitious computer-generated human ever made for a movie. And he doesn't need a trailer, since he lives on a hard drive. He doesn't take breaks or require the services of hair and makeup. He's a new species of actor, with unswerving focus, superhuman strength, and total commitment to the role. It was 2018, and the crew at the New Zealand-based visual effects studio Weta Digital was hard at work manufacturing Hollywood's hottest new talent, ahead of his big-screen debut a year later. ![]()
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