It might not be raiding the box office as voraciously as hoped, but don’t be surprised if Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny steals a few Oscars including a rare 21st century one for Industrial Light & Magic in the VFX category for it’s incredible work on creating and perfecting ILM Faceswap, which allowed Harrison Ford to once again appear as he would have back in 1997 (Indy would have been 45 in 1944, Harrison is a decade older than Indy so 1942+45+10=1997*)
Lucasfilm spoke with ILM Visual Effects Supervisor Andrew Whitehurst about the process in not only de-ageing Indy but also taking him back 2000 years to the Battle of Syracuse.
As a fan of the original Indy movies, Whitehurst was well aware of their visual style. The gritty feel, stunts, the real-world quality, all augmented by ILM’s most cutting-edge effects techniques of the day. It was important to him that Dial of Destiny honor that legacy while still allowing for creative freedom. “You definitely have to be respectful. Looking at the previous films, the way [cinematographer] Douglas Slocombe shot the first three has a very certain look to it. And I don’t think that’s necessarily what Phedon and Jim were shooting for when they were coming up with a visual style for this film. But again, particularly in the opening sequence, because it does have that more historical aspect to it, we were certainly riffing on those ideas,” he says. “I think it’s more being respectful towards the ethos of the movies rather than a very particular aesthetic.”
Still, Whitehurst did take steps to ensure a certain visual continuity. “All of our cameras are grounded in reality. Even if it’s a full CG shot, I will sit down with an artist and go, ‘Well, look, if we were going to shoot this for real, it would be a camera on a stabilized head on a crane arm attached to a car. So when we’re animating the camera, we can’t do some super smooth, flying through space kind of camera move because that’s not part of this world.’ And it’s that kind of aspect of grounding things that I think was really important for us to respect. But then also, the franchise has always had this wonderful, magical, slightly fantastical element of the supernatural aspect, which happens within them. And so that gives you a little bit more license to play.”
*(Pedantic Editor)