Synthespians had planned to do 60 shots to help sell the idea that the people in the film are robots, until Stetson asked this studio and others to do a digital makeup test. The test was to make Willis look younger when he plays his surrogate during the first half of the film. Synthespians passed, and then picked up another 200 shots that involved de-aging Willis and polishing some of the other actors.

“They realized that if Greer is going to have a robot version in the real world living his life, he’s not going to create a 60-year-old,” says Jeff Kleiser, Synthespians founder and visual effects supervisor. “The surrogates can look however the people want. So, we made Greer’s surrogate look like a younger guy, like Willis looked in [the TV show] Moonlighting. And, we made him look consistently young in all different types of lighting environments.”

The studio started with a cyberscan of Willis’s face to create a 3D version in Autodesk’s Maya that the modelers modified by lifting skin in his chin area, smoothing wrinkles around his eyes, and shortening his ear lobes. Yannix, a studio in Thailand, tracked the camera motion and the motion of Willis’s head in each frame so the artists at Synthespians could fit the CG head onto the actor’s body. To texture the model, Synthespians’ artists projected the filmed footage of Willis onto geometry that matched his performance. Artists working in Apple’s Shake manipulated the textures as needed and then cleaned up the wrinkles and other imperfections enough to make the robotic substitute look younger but not plastic.

Interesting article. Willis is not quite a senior citizen, is he? I don’t imagine the way he carries his body has changed significantly in the past twenty or thirty years. I do suspect Ian Holm moves differently now than a man aged fifty or younger would move, though. Alas, those changes seem to accelerate once we hit sixty-five or seventy.