Captain Marvel VFX supervisors on de-aging the ageless Samuel L. Jackson

Samuel L. Jackson is 70 years old, and the dude looks damn good for his age, but even Jackson wasn't safe from one of Marvel's distinctive digital makeovers. As the recent CAPTAIN MARVEL takes place in 1995, it was necessary for the actor to look 25 years younger than the Nick Fury we've come to know. Marvel Studios is certainly no stranger to the de-aging process, as they've applied the technique to Michael Douglas in ANT-MAN, Robert Downey Jr. in CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR, and Kurt Russell in GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2, but as CAPTAIN MARVEL required de-aging Jackson for the entire film, it was on a completely different level.

While speaking with The Wrap, CAPTAIN MARVEL visual effects supervisor Christopher Townsend commented on how the process has evolved over the years. Typically, de-aging an actor has required filming a body double that visual effects artists can use as a reference, but Lola Visual Effects came up with a way to do it without a double, something which Townsend said cut down their shooting time by half.

That process works if you’ve got five, eight, maybe 10 shots. But in a movie like this where we’ve got about 500 shots, there was no way from a production point of view we could do that. One of the big gains was Lola coming back to us and saying, ‘we don’t need the body double.’ That was huge for us because it cut down our shooting time by at least half.

Dubbed "youthening" by the VFX team at Marvel, the process is incredibly intensive, involving a large team tackling every scene a frame at a time. "The real challenge is making it so that there’s continuity from one frame to the next so that it feels smooth, and it never feels like the face is jiggling around or moving," Townsend said. "It really comes down to the artistry of the person sitting there and trying to maintain as much of the original performance as possible." Lola Visual Effects supervisor Trent Claus added, "You want every shot throughout the whole movie to look like Sam, and specifically to look like Sam at that age. So when you’re working with hundreds of shots and dozens of artists, it would be really easy for each of these shots to go off in their own direction and every shot looking like a different person. So you have to be very strict with consistency and internal reviews and things like that to maintain that continuity." The team looked to Samuel L. Jackson's past movies such as THE NEGOTIATOR and DIE HARD: WITH A VENGEANCE, but Claus admitted that working with someone who has aged as well as Jackson has is a "double-edged sword."

If we simply just wipe off the wrinkles from someone, that can immediately take 10, 15 years off them. But if you’re working with someone like Sam, who really doesn’t have a whole lot of wrinkles, you really have to rely on physiological changes, changes in structure of musculature, textures of skin, the way the weight hangs on your neck and your jaw, things over time like that we’ve studied for so many years now.

Those who have seen CAPTAIN MARVEL know that the effect is pretty astounding. CAPTAIN MARVEL is now playing in theaters, so check out reviews from our own JimmyO and Kalyn Corrigan and be sure to let us know what YOU thought of the film as well!