The films The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Captain America Civil War used complex special effects techniques to transform the faces of Brad Pitt and Robert Downey Jr. into old and young. The special effects company used a 3D CGI look to allow these two actors to portray characters at different ages.
Through the DeepFake technique, the process of changing the face to look younger becomes easier as seen in the Mandalorian series. But at Disney, they want to further simplify the process of producing the same special effects at a lower cost. Therefore Disney Research developed the Facial Re-Aging Network (FRAN) which is an artificial intelligence.
FRAN can age and soften individual faces in video as fast as 5 seconds per frame with more consistent images than other special effects techniques. According to the researchers, a high-resolution video that looks more like the original model's face can also be produced.
At this time FRAN is still in the research stage but it will definitely be used by Disney in their films and series to reduce production costs.
