Rogue One: Stars Don’t Have to be Alive

By Kyle Smith

Potential spoilers may follow below...

The greatest special effect in “Rogue One” isn’t a planet being wiped out or the whizzing dogfights of the rebels’ X-wing fighters. What’s really breathtaking about the new “Star Wars” movie is the way its technical wizards show they’re close to conquering the final visual effects frontier: the human face.

Casual viewers may not even notice, but one of the chief surprises in the movie is the unexpected reappearance of one of Darth Vader’s top officers, Grand Moff Tarkin, played by Peter Cushing. Cushing, who first appeared in 1977’s “Star Wars,” has lots of screen time, pages of dialogue and interactions with other actors such as Ben Mendelsohn, who plays fellow Imperial officer Orson Krennic.

Which is remarkable considering that Cushing died in 1994.

What you’re seeing is a digital performance, a visual effects (VFX) achievement that dazzles precisely because it’s seamless. This isn’t a cheesy, pasted-in effect that repurposes old footage, but a living, breathing, resurrected Cushing. The slender 6-foot-4 British actor Guy Henry (he played Pius Thicknesse in the final Harry Potter films), who does bear a resemblance to the gaunt Cushing, was hired to play the role on set, in part to avoid the dead-eye effect that plagues simulations of actors. Then the VFX team magically transformed him into Cushing.

This, it turns out, is what the entire VFX industry has been building up to for all these decades. All those explosions and space chases were just the throat-clearing before the grand statement: Today they are bringing actors back from the dead. We always knew movie stars were gods. Now they’ve become immortal.

The technology isn’t quite finished yet, but it’s close; Cushing looks a little eerie, a little uncanny. But in another five years, the VFX wizards might have figured out the last details of how to resurrect deceased actors. If they can recreate Peter Cushing, they can bring back any other dead actor.

Cushing in “Rogue One” is the culmination of work that has been developing for quite a few years.

More impressive are the VFX in 2011’s “Captain America: The First Avenger.” The strapping Chris Evans went on a digital diet: For the early scenes in which he plays the hapless pre-transformation weakling Steve Rogers, his tree-trunk arms were shrunk into twigs, his Tarzan chest reduced to the dimensions of the average sparrow. Filmmakers had to shoot the scenes three times: Once with Evans, once with a skinny stand-in and once with no one playing Steve in the shot.

The progress is clear — the actors look less and less plastic, less and less artificial.

‘It is a similar process to Photoshop that uses some similar tools,” Lola VFX supervisor Trent Claus told The Hollywood Reporter, “but unlike Photoshop, which is done on a single image, we have 24 frames per second of footage. Every feature of the face and body needed to be addressed in some fashion.” For instance, “One thing that happens to all of us is that the skin of the face gradually lowers in certain areas and needs to be ‘lifted’ back to where it was at the age in question.”

Read original post here.