The Irishman – 2019
Ok, I’ll say it right off the bat. The visual effects in this movie were nothing more than a one-trick pony, though the trick was, I’ll admit, a masterful one. The only real effect in this film that was noteworthy was the de-aging of the main actors. The film was in the style of an epic that took place over a long period of time. The three main actors, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci were shown at various ages over the course of 50 years. In the past, this was generally done with either makeup and prosthetics, or finding other actors that resembled the stars that we all know and love, but here it is done with CGI. And, unfortunately, that was it. That was its one claim to greatness in its visual effects.
So lets explore that one effect a little. The film’s director, Martin Scorsese didn’t want the actors to have to wear dots, or golf balls, as he put it in interviews, on their faces. He needed his actors to be able to interact with each other without the normally required facial prosthetics getting in their way. A visual effects designer named Pablo Helman, along with the people at ILM, developed a new technology.
A new kind of camera was created that was equipped with a row of three lenses. This gave digital artists and renderers the same image from three slightly different angles. In addition to that, the outer two lenses captured infra-red images. Then they went through the archives of the three actors’ films so they could intensely study what they looked like when they were younger. They also had the actors sit in front of a camera and go through an extensive range of facial expressions, giving the digital artists even more data on how their individual faces moved.
Finally, they analyzed the newly-filmed performances, and allowed their computers to recreate the actors, using all the images collected from the three-lensed camera, the archival images, and the data from the moving facial expression sessions. Special software was then used to analyze the lighting from the filmed footage, and recreate it on the digitally created images. In the end, they didn’t try to create younger versions of the actors, but rather, younger versions of the characters they were playing. The result was pretty remarkable, though I will say that there were one or two shots that looked just a tiny bit wonky. I couldn’t put my finger on what was off, but my brain perceived something that was not quite right.
The only other prominent visual effects in the films were in the form of exploding cars, people getting shot, with the appropriate splashes of blood, of course, and a car that got riddled with bullets. Also, the really old-age makeup was pretty incredible, though that would fall under the category of Best Makeup. I can see why The Irishman was nominated for Best Visual Effects, but I agree with the academy’s decision not to award it an Oscar win.