Reubens gets a boost from a digital facelift
Special effects retouching methods long embraced by Hollywood
Pee-wee Herman hasn’t changed a bit. It’s been three decades since his heyday, when he hammed it up in a snug grey suit for TV watchers every Saturday morning. But take a look at his new Netflix movie, Peewee’s Big Holiday, and prepare to be stunned. Has actor Paul Reubens — who first played the bowtied character in 1979 — found the fountain of youth? Sort of. The Peter Pan-ish Pee-wee was never meant to age, so tech wizardry intervened. In post-production, artists digitally retouched his face to turn back the clock. It’s called beauty work, and it’s been around for more than a decade. But it remains a hidden craft, practised by artists who make every frame look sublime by toiling for long hours — and remaining invisible.
“In a perfect world, you will never see our work,” says one expert, Howard Shur, who started Los Angeles-based digital effects company Flawless FX three years ago. “It will just look natural and normal.”
In the early days, the effects niche was reserved for music videos, to make pop stars pop. But over the years, business boomed, as commercials, movies and TV got on board. Now, plenty of actors have beauty work written into their contracts. Maybe you can guess which ones, but you won’t get confirmation from the people who fix A-list flaws. Non-disclosure agreements are the norm. Unless it’s a conspicuous part of the story, like Brad Pitt aging in reverse in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button or the flashback in Ant-Man that shaved 30 years off Michael Douglas’s face.
Or if an actor like Reubens admits it, as he did in a New York Times profile, exposing this littleknown — and pricey — process. “I could have had a facelift and we would have saved $2 million,” he said in the interview.
Commercials and music videos tend to get more treatment than movies and television, according to Culley Bunker, who runs Skulley Effects in Los Angeles.
In the former case, “they’re selling you an image, they’re selling you a product,” he says. “Movies are more artistic.”
One of Flawless FX’s specialties is fixing continuity errors — minor adjustments that result from fast shooting schedules or tight set budgets. Let’s say an actor has a cold sore for two days of his 10 on set. Because movies are generally shot out of order, viewers might be distracted if the blister vanished then reappeared. Of course, it’s not always about continuity. According to multiple artists, a popular job is to take care of those pesky eye bags. Artists can also add muscle definition, zap blemishes, fix teeth and tame rogue strands of hair.
It’s not easy, nor is it quick. Each frame is digitally hand-painted. New York City-based visual-effects artist Nathaniel Westveer, who works mainly on music videos, estimates that it takes him an hour to work on 24 frames — one second of footage.
The company that worked on Pee-wee’s Big Holiday was Vitality Visual Effects, based in Vancouver and Los Angeles, and co-founder Guy Botham estimates it took a team of 10 people five months to finish the project. That’s no more time-consuming than most. He credits visual effects artist Loeng Wong-Savun—who also worked on Benjamin Button — with de-aging Reubens so persuasively.
One of the secrets: Age reduction isn’t just about erasing furrow lines and crow’s feet, although some artists may try to go that route.
“If you just remove wrinkles, you’re going to make people look strange,” Botham says.
So Wong-Savun takes a different approach. For Benjamin Button, he talked to a plastic surgeon about what exactly makes people look older. It turns out, as we age, the face thins around the temples, and everything below that essentially slides south to create the dreaded jowls. De-aging is about getting rid of that jawline baggage.
“Really it’s like performing a facelift,” Botham says.
For now, moviegoers don’t seem to be all that savvy about postproduction trickery, especially compared with readers of beauty magazines, who know how an actress ended up looking so pristine in a photo spread.
“If you sort of think about it, it should be (common knowledge) in a way,” says Shur, of Flawless FX. “It’s not really any different than having a makeup artist or hair person or really good lighting or colour correction.” So why all the secrecy? “If you had somebody retouch something, you wouldn’t want the ‘before’ published probably,” Shur says. Fair point.
Of course, just like Photo shopped makeup ads, beauty work prompts the question: Are moviegoers being peddled an unhealthy and unattainable type of beauty? Yes and no. Looking at an actor’s normal face on a 40-foot screen isn’t exactly natural. Frown lines are a lot more distracting when they’re 10 feet long.
“If Matt Damon’s playing an astronaut, he’s not really an astronaut; he’s not really on Mars,” Westveer says. “… It’s a performance that they’re giving and, digitally, we’re helping tell that story.”