The fountain of youth is a spring that is said to restore the youth of anyone who drinks or bathes in its waters. This idea has been mentioned in many different cultures throughout history, often as a symbol of eternal youth and rejuvenation. In some stories, the fountain is guarded by a powerful being, such as a nymph or a fairy, and must be sought out by brave adventurers. Despite many people searching for the fountain throughout history, it has never been found and is generally considered to be a mythical concept.

Until now.

Disney Research has created production-ready face re-aging for visual effects.

Andrew Liszewski writing on Gizmodo explains their approach:

“To make an age-altering AI tool that was ready for the demands of Hollywood and flexible enough to work on moving footage or shots where an actor isn’t always looking directly at the camera, Disney’s researchers, as detailed in a recently published paper, first created a database of thousands of randomly generated synthetic faces. Existing machine learning aging tools were then used to age and de-age these thousands of non-existent test subjects, and those results were then used to train a new neural network called FRAN (face re-aging network). When FRAN is fed an input headshot, instead of generating an altered headshot, it predicts what parts of the face would be altered by age, such as the addition or removal of wrinkles, and those results are then layered over the original face as an extra channel of added visual information. This approach accurately preserves the performer’s appearance and identity, even when their head is moving, when their face is looking around, or when the lighting conditions in a shot change over time. It also allows the AI generated changes to be adjusted and tweaked by an artist, which is an important part of VFX work: making the alterations perfectly blend back into a shot so the changes are invisible to an audience.”

At five seconds per frame, FRAN can age or de-age one minute of footage in two hours.

That’s got to be cheaper than Hollywood VFX.

My take: Imagine if they had this technology for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button!