Martin Scorsese’s 2019 film “The Irishman” required Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci to play their characters across several decades, including as much younger men. To do it without prosthetics or the on-set helmets and dotted faces of traditional performance capture, Industrial Light and Magic spent years building a new system. De Niro had been explicit, as VFX supervisor Pablo Helman recalled: “I don’t want to wear a helmet or anything like that. And I want to be onset with the correct lighting, working with other actors.”
ILM’s answer was a markerless pipeline. A roughly 64-pound three-camera rig paired the director’s main camera with two offset infrared “witness” cameras and light rings, capturing each actor’s performance from multiple angles under invisible infrared light that did not disturb the cinematography. The data fed software ILM called FLUX (from “face” and “lux,” Latin for light), which extracted the performance from lighting and texture and translated it into renderable younger faces, deforming geometry directly instead of relying on traditional keyframe animation. Helman noted Scorsese insisted on preserving every original detail, down to the actors’ blinks. The 209-minute film carried around 1,750 visual-effects shots.
Why business readers should care: The Irishman showed that convincing digital age-alteration of real, recognizable actors was production-ready, intensifying the very questions about consent and digital likeness that would soon become a central demand in the Hollywood labor negotiations.