Youthenizing Effects

Somehow youthenizing effects (German "Verjüngungs Effekt") seems to be a hot thing in the industry actually. Today I just had a little side conversation with director Holger Haase about it. A month ago I discussed it with Novafilm for an upcoming project and last fall Matthias Glasner asked me about it for his upcoming movie "This is love".

Basically it's so simple. It's best done in the direction of youthenizing people. You need to roto parts of the face very rough and softly. Take it and blur these parts softly. Keep main details of the face like eyes, mouth, nose. Check it in motion and perhaps you're done. I know, rotoscoping sounds hard for filmmakers (especially for a producer, who needs to pay the artists doing it), but what I am speaking about is really, really rough, soft and fast roto.

We did a bunch of shots for Marcus O. Rosenmüller in "Das Geheimnis des Königssees". The book had a part 30 years ago, where our cast had to be much much younger. We did it exactly as described before (without trapping into the technical issues written down here ;). Unfortunately I can't show pictures or videos here, because we have signed a clear NDA with RTL. So if you're really interested in that work, feel free to contact me or visit us at the fx.center inside the Studio Babelsberg.

Funnily even LolaFX - specialized in digital makeup and doing amazing work for "Benjamin Button" - does it this way, as I read it on Zap's Mental Ray Blog:

"What was truly interesting about the Lola de-aging process is how manual it is. Its as far from "push a button and the computer does the work" that it can possibly be. Quite the opposite, it's nearly a matter of pulling every pixel manually from one place to another, the computer just helps with doing it over multiple frames, but even that requires TLC to look nice. I applaud the work here."

So what do filmmakers need to concern about? First as said before youthenizing is easier than aging (this can be done with a physical mask far more faster and cheaper in my opinion). On the technical side it's simply a degrain of parts of the image. But in this case you adjust it more harder, so the even the wrinkles will be "degrained" (we even use standard degrain filters to achieve the effect). So, technically the whole trick will be unleashed by the grain. Before we go on, have a view on this picture:
It's a 400% Zoom and Gamma lift to 2.0 of the picture of Kate Blanchett I've used above as cover for this story. It's an original Warner Brothers picture provide on their German Benjamin Button Website. Notice: a gamma 2 very brightens the picture and at normal gamma you probably don't notice anything wrong with the picture on the big screen in cinema. So this is just for this discussion. Here's the picture with "pixel pusher eyes"... ;)So... THIS was the thing, which disturbed me so much in cinema.. ;) just kidding guys, great work on it - really! :D .

For own comparison, here's a full face version at 500% zoom and gamma of 2.0. Click on the picture to open it in full resolution.
Grain matching will be tricky for a while, especially for pictures shot digitally (e.g. Sony F35 or RED One). Because film grain is an analog phenomena. It's even "between" the pixels. So, to make it more easy: film knows no pixels or raster. Film grain doesn't care about pixels.

Digital noise is different. Digital film cameras are working with checker raster like patterns (even if it's HD, 2K, 4K, bayer pattern or not - it remains a pixel raster). Lifting the gain produces noise. This is basically happens, if you drive the sensitivity of your chip up. The difference is, it hits exactly each pixel, without "swapping" to the surrounding ones.

So why is it important for filmmakers? Going digital means a new characteristic for the grain / noise. In postproduction there are no presets for it yet (no one I know). This makes digital noise matching a tricky task, simply because it's new and there are no standard tools or presets. But it should be no big deal with a proven grain extraction workflow. We are using a very simple but effective and production proven one at exozet actually. We basically use standard grey cards as a reference. So if you're not sure, having shot grey cards are always a welcome at postproduction.