I think through this journey, we've learned so much about the human face and how eyes need to be represented.
Gemini man movie#
How does this movie advance de-aging tech? As soon as we started fooling people internally, we realized this is possible. We had a lot of fun with that we were hiding some of the subjects within the footage and letting people look at it, not realizing that what they're looking at was completely digital. We turned that over to Ang quite early on in the production. We set ourselves a challenge, which was to re-create a couple of shots from Bad Boys to try to create a digital version of Will. We looked at a lot of scientific research of how faces age over time, and we got some really young images of Will from when he was 8 years old and some of the really young Fresh Prince to try to model the appearance of his face from that period.ĭid you have to create a proof of concept of the de-aging technology? But there was a phase in the project where it did prove useful, when we were trying to land on a good base shape for the proportion of Will's face. We had very little reference from Fresh Prince, actually.
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This wasn't about just creating an authentic human, it was about creating the memories we have of Will.ĭirector Ang Lee and Will Smith on the set of Gemini Man.ĭid you draw on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, which aired from 1990 to 1996 and featured a clean-shaven Smith? That really became part of the challenge of the whole project.
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That meant we had to work harder in all the other aspects of Junior to make sure there was a likeness of Will without the goatee. One of the challenges is that throughout all of these, Will had a goatee beard, and Ang wanted to make sure Junior was clean shaven to help differentiate the two characters. Independence Day was another one that we looked at. The era we were focusing on was around the Bad Boys period.
![gemini man gemini man](https://halifaxbloggers.ca/flawintheiris/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2019/10/Gemini-Poster.jpg)
Gemini man tv#
So we could 100% re-create synthetically a fully digital 23-year-old version of Will Smith.ĭid you use any older Will Smith films and TV shows as reference? Then in post-production, we used performance capture to really understand the performance he gave. We put a head-capture rig on him with two small cameras looking at his face to capture his performance. There was really nowhere to hide behind smoke-and-mirrors visual effects.Īnd then we would flip the equation, and this time, Will played Junior. We'd have Will playing Henry and wrestling with a stand-in and so forth. We leaned on performance capture for that, so we would have Will playing an A-B scenario. How is Gemini Man different?Īdcock: We had Will playing against himself. With Gemini Man about to land in theaters, I spoke to Stuart Adcock, Weta's head of facial motion, about how the company set up the battle between 51-year-old Smith and his 23-year-old CG self.ĭigital de-aging is everywhere thanks to movies like Captain Marvel and The Irishman.
Gemini man series#
Beyond Middle-earth, Weta conjured effects for Avatar, Game of Thrones, Ad Astra, the Planet of the Apes series and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The younger Smith was created with the VFX - or visual effects - wizardry of Weta Digital, a company co-founded by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson. The thriller, directed by Ang Lee, is in theaters now.
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Smith plays an assassin coming face to face with himself - a younger version who's out to kill his older self and take his place. The new action movie Gemini Man gives us a Will Smith double-whammy.