Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: Over 100 VFX Artists Worked on De-Aging Harrison Ford

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is now playing in theaters, and it features the return of Harrison Ford as cinema’s favorite archeologist. Before the movie was released, fans knew that it would include a de-aged Ford in the opening sequence. When the trailer for the film was released, fans were pleasantly surprised by how good the de-aging looked. While there have been mixed reactions to the de-aging overall, it’s definitely an improvement on some seen in previous films. Turns out, that’s because over 100 VFX artists from Industrial Light and Magic worked on Ford’s face in the film’s opening. 

According to Variety, ILM spent three years working on the movie’s visual effects, which included “enhancing and developing their existing de-aging technology to create ILM FaceSwap.” 

“We knew we would have to use all of the tools we already had and develop some new ones,” VFX supervisor Andrew Whitehurst explained, saying that they led to the creation of ILM FaceSwap. “That involved putting Harrison through the process of recording all the facial performances and all its extremes, and the marrying of various technologies by the artists to blend between one and the other to get the final performance that you’re looking for,” Robert Weaver added. “The important aspect is that there’s not a single recipe that was cooked up that could be done for all shots.”

“We made sure we were shooting with extra cameras attached to the main unit camera so we could get as much reference as we possibly could,” Whitehurst continued. “On the ILM side there were a few hundred artists involved in the process from start to finish, working on the various shots. They were working on every nuance in every shot. But we were able to achieve that because the reliance on the performance of Harrison was of utmost importance. He was the major driving force of what we needed to do for that opening act and make a younger act of that exact performance,” Weaver shared. He added of Ford, “We were just in awe as to what he is able to deliver, how fit he is and how much we could rely on him driving every aspect of the performance.”

Harrison Ford Comments on De-Aging:

During a recent interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Ford talked abuot how they de-aged him for the film.

“That is my actual face. At that age,” Ford shared. “They have this artificial intelligence program. It can go through every foot of film Lucasfilm owns, because I did a bunch of movies for them. They have all this footage, including film that wasn’t printed … They could mine it from where the light is coming from, the expression. But that’s my actual face. I put little dots on my face and I say the words and they make it. It’s fantastic.”

“My hope is that, although it will be talked about in terms of technology, you just watch it and go, ‘Oh my God, they just found footage. This was a thing they shot 40 years ago,’” Lucasfilm’s Kathleen Kennedy previously told Empire. “We’re dropping you into an adventure, something Indy is looking for, and instantly you have that feeling, ‘I’m in an Indiana Jones movie.’” 

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is now playing in theaters.