Disney's new AI tool makes it easy to age faces in videos

Disney Research Studios explains that it trained FRAN on a database of hundreds of computer-generated synthetic faces. This allowed them to generate thousands of images of people with the same angle, facial expression and lighting conditions; a herculean task if it had to be done with real images. "Our new face re-ageing network (FRAN) incorporates simple and intuitive mechanisms that provide artists with localized control and creative freedom to direct and fine-tune the re-aging effect, a feature that is largely important in real production pipelines and often overlooked in related research work," said Disney Research Studios in a statement. In video examples provided by Disney, the neural network does a good job at ageing the faces of characters in a video, albeit with some artefacts. While it may seem like this algorithm could potentially replace many VFX jobs in the future, it is not likely that it will do so anytime soon.