The strange story of Benjamin Button: the special effects decrypted in video

How did Digital Domain managed to age and rejuvenate Brad Pitt? Here are the details.

The strange story of Benjamin Button We are again told, this evening on France 5.

And twelve years after its cinema release, David Fincher’s film is still as impressive visually. Eric Roth and Robin Swicord’s scenario is freely inspired by a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald in which a man (played by Brad Pitt), lives upside down: he is born old and rejuvenates over time. His romance with Daisy (Cate Blanchett) will be turned upside down by the course of this life for the time.

To succeed in this poignant love story, the director was able to take advantage of extraordinary special effects, concocted by Eric Barba and Steve Preeg, of Digital Domain, the special effects company of James Cameron. How did they manage to age Brad Pitt for almost an hour of film, before rejuvenating it? The official site of the specialized box specialized in digital special effects shares a making-of presenting the different stages of creation, and detail some anecdotes in passing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnlj3_sult4

The strange story of Benjamin Button: Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett love each other against time

We learn that in all that, Brad Pitt’s face had to be modified digitally for 52 minutes from the film.

“Finche launched a hell of a challenge to succeed what is today considered to be the Grail of special effects: successfully creating a digitally credible human”specifies the article in introduction of the video.

To design Benjamin Button from 87 to 63 years old, the team in charge of VFX was therefore inspired by the expressions of the actor, of which all the facial movements were recorded in a special room, filled with cameras that spinned around him in order to have it from all angles. Once its performance has been recorded, the scenes were played by other actors on the set: three “Body liners” responsible for representing him at different stages of his life. Brad’s face was then transposed on those of the liners, then the images still required a lot of work from the technical teams:

“There have been 325 plans to retouch during which he interacts with close -up actors, is shown naked or in situations requiring a lot of modifications: it was necessary to rework his hair, his eyes, his skin, the animation of the whole, the light according to his movements …”

This enormous work paid: in addition to the critical and public success of Benjamin Button, the film received 3 Oscars: Best Artistic direction, Best Makeup and Best Visual Effects.

Some time later, the teams of Captain America reused the same process to create the young and meager Steve Rogers, and today, this type of digital rejuvenation/aging has become common in Hollywood. If the technique is expensive, its rendering is more and more successful, the creators of special effects now succeeding in avoiding the effect of“Uncanny Valley”this unpleasant feeling that you feel in the face of something that imitates humans but is not quite (a robot, for example).

To find out more, here are other articles that talk about this type of visual effects:

Forever Young: How did Marvel rejuvenate Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Downey Jr, Michelle Pfeiffer, Michael Douglas … The Irishman, Captain Marvel, Gemini Man: How does the digital rejuvenation of actors work?