Amazing Hollywood VFX Technology That Will Make You Freak Out!

Born under unusual circumstances, Benjamin Button (played by Brad Pitt) is a character who actually ages in reverse, starting of as an old man who ages...well, who 'youngers', is that a word? Well anyway, he basically gets younger as the movie progresses.
Now, usually to achieve a drastically younger or older version of the lead character, movie makes simply cast a similar looking older or younger actor to play those parts. But what's so special about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is that it was Brad Pitt the whole way through! Well, kind of. Here's how they did it.

In order to make the character Benjamin Button, special effects experts needed to put an aged-looking Brad Pitt's face on a child sized body.

But contrary to common belief (and some published reports) that this was accomplished by simply superimposing Brad Pitt's head on top of other actors bodies, the face of Benjamin Button was actually completely CGI! At least for about the first hour of the movie.

They used a technology called "Contour" that involved applying phosphorescent powder to Pitt's face and placing him in front of a network of rapidly flashing fluorescent lights. Synced up with those flashing lights were dozens of both gray-scale and color digital cameras. This techneque was used to create a 3D digital image of Pitt's face that was thousands of times more detailed than conventional motion-capture methods, at the time.

They then went about capturing Pitt's face in a multitude of poses, in order to create a database of expressions that could be combined to create every conceivable facial expression that Pitt's face is capable of.

Pitt was then filmed performing all of the scenes from the first third of the movie for the animators to use as a reference when mimicking his movements on the digital head.

They also had to age him from age 44 to 87. So they made a life cast of Pitt and several busts of him as “Benjamin Button” at 60, 70 and 80, scanned them into the computer at a high resolution and transferred the animation data onto the new faces.

The whole process took 155 people over 2 years to complete. But the results really did pay off in this amazing movie.


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