Special Effects Wizardry Uses Digital Botox To Erase Years From Woman’s Face

Using special effects to “de-age” actors is nothing new. Hollywood has put this tech to use (with varying degrees of effectiveness) in movies like X-Men: The Last Stand, The Curious Case of Benjamin Buttons, Tron Legacy, and more recently in Ant-Man.

However, those movies had the help of highly capable visual effects studios (Lola VFX handled the visual cosmetics in The Last Stand and Buttons) and huge budgets to fuel their visual effects wizardry. But what happens when regular Joes take a stab at using visual cosmetics to erase decades from a person’s face in video footage? As you can see in the video below, the results are actually quite impressive.

Rousselos Aravantinos posted the above video to Vimeo, which shows his test subject, actress Michele Valley, sitting in a chair smoking a cigarette. Using NUKE and MOCHA Pro, Aravantinos was able to take decades off Valley’s face, erasing wrinkles, tightening up the skin, removing age marks on the hands/neck/arms, and even shrinking her nose (your ears and nose don’t stop growing as you age). Even more impressive is that this footage was capture using a “mere” Nikon 1 V1 mirrorless camera.

“I’ve decided not to apply any facial markers, to challenge myself (and make my life more difficult),” explains Aravantinos. “It's a 100% work in 2D space. There are a few things I would like to improve, but I felt like it was time to move on.”

Looking at the source footage on the left and the altered footage on the left, you can see a hint bit of blurring in the latter and just a touch of the “uncanny valley,” but the results are still no doubt quite amazing. Needless to say, we can’t wait to see what Aravantinos has in store for us in his next project.