When the Gemini Man teaser trailer dropped in April, set to a moody rendition of “Forever Young,” many assumed Smith had simply been “de-aged” in the same fashion as several performers in recent Marvel movies (most notably Samuel L. “A digital person is something that's been spoken about since I started visual effects 26 years ago,” he says. Plus, there was a gigantic dare involved. “I was confident we could push the technology the rest of the way there,” Westenhofer says. To pull it off would take a multiyear, brute-force effort. But a speaking, interacting digital human in a starring role is still a huge leap from the relatively fleeting digital human cameos of Rogue One and other films-and a far more fearsome undertaking than a 500-pound cat. It's also a cautionary tale about humans hubristically meddling with awesome tech.įor years, there have been considerable advances in the software, the hardware, and the effects industry's underlying understanding of human physiology. It's a story of a man trying to outwit himself, of weather-worn wisdom pitted against cocky youth. The film, set to be released in October, is a sci-fi action thriller directed by Ang Lee that follows a retired assassin, Henry (Will Smith), who finds himself in the sniper-scope sights of another, younger assassin (digital Will Smith), who has been forged out of Henry's own DNA. Up onscreen is a shot of the real-life, 49-year-old Will Smith as he looked on the set of Gemini Man, wearing a facial-capture headset, his face and neck specked with tracking dots. In June of this year, in a postproduction facility in Manhattan, a crew member shows off the nearly complete asset. He's also the spitting image of a 23-year-old Will Smith. They call him Junior or, sometimes, “the asset”: the most ambitious computer-generated human ever made for a movie. And he doesn't need a trailer, since he lives on a hard drive. He doesn't take breaks or require the services of hair and makeup. He's a new species of actor, with unswerving focus, superhuman strength, and total commitment to the role. It was 2018, and the crew at the New Zealand-based visual effects studio Weta Digital was hard at work manufacturing Hollywood's hottest new talent, ahead of his big-screen debut a year later.
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