Mr Scorsese needed something special. Not referring to his filming style, but to a digital technique that allows him to de-age his fellow stars in The Irishman in a different way. The movie The Irishman demonstrates a milestone in technological development and exceptional film acting while meditating the technological constraints.
The Irishman is an epic crime film that is directed by Martin Scorsese and released in 2019. In the film, Scorsese wanted to use de-aging technology, allowing his main characters to play in several decades throughout the film. In conventional practices, actors are expected to wear helmet cameras, face tracking spots on their faces. They are also required to wear black jumpsuits, facilitating motion capture movement. Pablo Helman, visual effects supervisor for the film, however, introduced a new set of practices that might transform the filmmaking process and influence his fellow practitioners. He created a new camera set–a director’s camera in the centre and on each side two infrared cameras. The two cameras help to receive information that is usually picked up by face tracking dots.
The ‘performance’ of the digital technique in The Irishman was exceptional and has influenced future filmmaking processes. As Andreas Broeckmann argues, the idea of performance suggests the quality of a technical apparatus. Performance can be understood as the presentation of the execution of its results (Broeckmann, 2007). The use of an unprecedented de-aging technique demonstrates the ability to mediate constraints created by technologies. In the film, on one hand, Scorsese managed to shoot his film as though making a dramatic performance. On the other hand, the main characters were not restricted by the digital apparatus as headgear, face tracking dots were not used during the filming process. This provided efficiency and effectiveness when it comes to the creation of computational images.
As mentioned, filmmakers have been accustomed to the use of markers, helmet cameras to engineer a way to receive the most amount of data of faces and of course, the movements. Alongside the motion capture stages created on set, the combination of these features contribute to the creation of computational images. But for The Irishman, this set of usual practices was changed. Two infrared cameras were used in synchronisation with the director’s camera, with a ring on each infrared camera and thus no infrared light would be brought onto the actors. Apart from this, the software was created specifically for the film. In this sense, the information and the images can be combined to create masks on each actor’s face. The de-aging techniques have therefore transformed the filmmaking process.
Reference list:
Broeckmann, A. (2007) Image, Process, Performance, Machine: Aspect of an Aesthetics of the Machine. In O. Grau (Ed.), Media Art Histories (pp. 193-205). London, UK: MIT
Scorsese, M., De Niro, R., Rosenthal, J., Tillinger Koskoff, E., Winkler, I., Chamales, G., Pavlovich, G., Emmett, R., & Israilovici, G., [Producers]. & Scorsese, M. [Director]. (2019). The Irishman [Motion Picture]. United States: Tribeca Productions
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