Indiana Jones 5: title, trailer and the Ai that revolutionizes the age of the actors

In the past few hours, the first trailer has finally arrived Indiana Jones 5. Or rather, of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destinythis is the official title of the fifth chapter of the saga starring Harrison Ford and which will arrive in Italian cinemas in summer 2023 with the title of Indiana Jones and the Wheel of Destiny. The new film, written and directed by James Mangold (Logan. Ford vs. Ferrari), it will be the last time we see Ford play the mythical archaeologist-adventurer, who this time will be joined by his goddaughter played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. From the past will also return John Rhys-Davies as Sallah, the wily Egyptian excavator seen ne The Lost Ark And The Last Crusade and who now seems to want to convince Indy to embrace the adventures of the past.

From the scenes of the previous films to the revisiting of the mythical soundtrack by John Williamspassing through parodic citations of cult scenes (the final one here with the whip and the guns subverts the mythical moment in which Jones shoots a killer who was waving knives), the clip is full of nostalgia and references to the past. While it is clear that the protagonist will face new dangers and new enemies, especially those embodied by Mads Mikkelsen and Antonio Banderasthis fifth chapter will link up with Indiana Jones’ past, showing it to us in different moments in his life. This is possible thanks to refined techniques of de-agingthrough which the face of Ford, now eighty years old, it has been digitally altered to look younger.

It is no coincidence that Disney has always presented the results of its new one in these hours cutting-edge research. Researchers of him, in fact, developed Fran (Face Re-Aging Network), an artificial intelligence system that makes it easier for the actors on stage and above all to move. So far the so-called re-aging, i.e. changing a performer’s features to make him younger or older than his actual age, required time-consuming and laborious work on the part of the special effects workers. Now it seems that Fran only takes 5 seconds to modify the personal data aspect of an actor: obviously the retouching artists can intervene further to make it even the more realistic the resultbut most of the work is done by the AI, which operates instantly scene after scene.

In the past, they had done themselves to obtain a similar result experiments with neural networks or systems of machine learningbut which had the defect of working better on still images rather than on moving ones, where instead they often lost sharpness or were unable to recognize the same face for a extended time. The promise from the Disney developers, however, is that of a “practical method, fully automatic and ready to use when shooting for the re-aging of video images”. As seen in the video below, as well as the example of Indiana Jones 5the results are quite surprising, of an incomparable fluidity and verisimilitude.