Disney researchers are out to transform Hollywood with a new artificial intelligence tool that could eliminate the need for special effects to alter the age of actors playing a character in a movie. Using the face re-aging network (FRAN), filmmakers can now make actors look as young as 20 or as old as 80 years old just by inputting the person's headshot into the system that then predicts parts of the face should be altered by age. It then adds effects like wrinkles or smoothed skin as a layer on the actor's face in the film or television show without requiring a skilled artist to alter frame-by-frame manually, which typically causes facial identity loss. Disney touts its AI tool as being the first solution of its kind that can automatically alter an actor's age on video despite expressions, lighting conditions and viewpoints. The system was trained on 2,000 synthetically generated images, allowing it to learn different facial expression in order to keep the altered age layer stable as the actor moves in the film.