Hollywood has always carefully guarded its vanity magic tricks. Diet pills, plastic surgery and Botox were Beverly Hills’ pretty little secrets before they were accepted as the norm. But the entertainment industry’s latest glamour miracle — a technique so effective that nearly every movie star has started using it — has stayed underground for more than a decade.
It’s called “beauty work.” It's a digital procedure of sorts, in which a handful of skilled artists use highly specialized software in the final stages of post-production to slim, de-age and enhance actors’ faces and bodies.
This is the version of on-screen stars that we, the audience, see. And if this comes as any surprise, it’s because the first rule of beauty work is: Don’t talk about beauty work.
Under strict non-disclosure agreements, Hollywood A-listers have been quietly slipping in and out of a few bland office buildings around town, many to sit in on days-long retouching sessions, directing the artists to make every frame suitable. At one such facility, young, fit up-and-comers disrobe for a handheld scanner that captures every pore and hair follicle, creating a template for future beauty work that, as a result, will appear all the more natural.
As Photoshop is to magazine photography, digital beauty has become to celebrities in motion: a potent blend of makeup, plastic surgery, muscle-sculpting, hair restoration, dental work and dermatology. Even the most flawless-in-real-life human specimens are going under the digital knife. Because they can. Because in this age of ultra-high definition, they have to.
In some cases, it's for pure vanity. In others it's because the film requires it: When a 24-year-old actress is tasked with playing a 17-year-old young-adult heroine, digital beauty becomes more like digital type-casting.
“Nobody looks like what you see on TV and in the movies. Everybody is altered,” says Claus Hansen, a beauty-work pioneer who plies his trade at Method Studios, one of the handful of shops in Los Angeles that specialize in video retouching.
After years of silence, Hansen agreed to speak with Mashable about his craft, saying he wants young people who idolize movie, TV and music stars to know that “what they see is smoke and mirrors.”
The path to Hansen’s openness, however, was long and littered with unanswered phone calls, stonewalling and refusals to comment for this story. Though a few insiders acknowledged it — “the stars/celebrities would be horrified” is a direct quote from one email rejection — nobody wanted to talk on the record.
But like all of Hollywood’s vanity magic tricks before it, the secret of digital beauty eventually sprung a leak.
The Clock Turners
Sitting at an outdoor table at Foxy’s Restaurant in Glendale on a blindingly bright spring day in 2012, an actor linked to a beloved movie character lamented over chopped salads and Diet Cokes that the years had all but deep-sixed a long-gestating sequel. But there was one last hope.
The actor, who agreed to speak only if he could remain anonymous, talked cautiously about a visit to Lola Visual Effects. Located in an unmarked office space above a clothing store in Santa Monica, the company was an otherwise garden-variety Hollywood VFX shop, but with a curious specialty: They’d figured out a way to turn back the clock.
The technique made its “out” debut when Lola aged Brad Pitt backwards for Benjamin Button in 2008. As it turned out, the most striking visual in David Fincher’s epic wasn’t Button the shriveled, elderly man-child. It came toward the end of the film, when Pitt emerged into the golden light of a dance studio as a naturally radiant, strapping 20-something — this, at a time when Pitt, in his mid-40s, was just beginning to age into his real-life role as the sexiest man alive.
Sometime after the Foxy’s waitress had collected the check, the actor said the technique had begun to spread throughout the film industry — you just didn’t know it, because they weren’t always using it to take 25 years off the onscreen talent. Instead, they were beginning to use it for subtle nip and tuck, the kind of stuff you’d never notice even if you were looking for it.
But it was expensive, and so hush-hush that it was reserved for the Pitt-level celebrities of the world. The only people who knew about digital beauty were those who practiced it, had it practiced on them, or were so high up the studio/agency food chain that they were agreeing not only pay for it, but to quietly hand the film’s finished scenes over for however long it took to get the work done, which was sometimes weeks. In the early goings, actors leveraged studios into paying for the work, but nowadays it's just a part of the budget.
“We were seeing hundreds of thousands spent on this, anywhere from $500 to $2,500 per shot — maybe more if there’s a lot going into the scenes,” a former top-level studio executive recently told Mashable, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.
“It would benefit both parties. You want your actor or actress to do the publicity for the movie, so you wanted to keep them happy.”
It’s called “beauty work.” It's a digital procedure of sorts, in which a handful of skilled artists use highly specialized software in the final stages of post-production to slim, de-age and enhance actors’ faces and bodies.This is the version of on-screen stars that we, the audience, see. And if this comes as any surprise, it’s because the first rule of beauty work is: Don’t talk about beauty work.
Under strict non-disclosure agreements, Hollywood A-listers have been quietly slipping in and out of a few bland office buildings around town, many to sit in on days-long retouching sessions, directing the artists to make every frame suitable. At one such facility, young, fit up-and-comers disrobe for a handheld scanner that captures every pore and hair follicle, creating a template for future beauty work that, as a result, will appear all the more natural.
As Photoshop is to magazine photography, digital beauty has become to celebrities in motion: a potent blend of makeup, plastic surgery, muscle-sculpting, hair restoration, dental work and dermatology. Even the most flawless-in-real-life human specimens are going under the digital knife. Because they can. Because in this age of ultra-high definition, they have to.
In some cases, it's for pure vanity. In others it's because the film requires it: When a 24-year-old actress is tasked with playing a 17-year-old young-adult heroine, digital beauty becomes more like digital type-casting.
“Nobody looks like what you see on TV and in the movies. Everybody is altered,” says Claus Hansen, a beauty-work pioneer who plies his trade at Method Studios, one of the handful of shops in Los Angeles that specialize in video retouching.
After years of silence, Hansen agreed to speak with Mashable about his craft, saying he wants young people who idolize movie, TV and music stars to know that “what they see is smoke and mirrors.”
The path to Hansen’s openness, however, was long and littered with unanswered phone calls, stonewalling and refusals to comment for this story. Though a few insiders acknowledged it — “the stars/celebrities would be horrified” is a direct quote from one email rejection — nobody wanted to talk on the record.
But like all of Hollywood’s vanity magic tricks before it, the secret of digital beauty eventually sprung a leak.
The Clock Turners
Sitting at an outdoor table at Foxy’s Restaurant in Glendale on a blindingly bright spring day in 2012, an actor linked to a beloved movie character lamented over chopped salads and Diet Cokes that the years had all but deep-sixed a long-gestating sequel. But there was one last hope.
The actor, who agreed to speak only if he could remain anonymous, talked cautiously about a visit to Lola Visual Effects. Located in an unmarked office space above a clothing store in Santa Monica, the company was an otherwise garden-variety Hollywood VFX shop, but with a curious specialty: They’d figured out a way to turn back the clock.
The technique made its “out” debut when Lola aged Brad Pitt backwards for Benjamin Button in 2008. As it turned out, the most striking visual in David Fincher’s epic wasn’t Button the shriveled, elderly man-child. It came toward the end of the film, when Pitt emerged into the golden light of a dance studio as a naturally radiant, strapping 20-something — this, at a time when Pitt, in his mid-40s, was just beginning to age into his real-life role as the sexiest man alive.
Sometime after the Foxy’s waitress had collected the check, the actor said the technique had begun to spread throughout the film industry — you just didn’t know it, because they weren’t always using it to take 25 years off the onscreen talent. Instead, they were beginning to use it for subtle nip and tuck, the kind of stuff you’d never notice even if you were looking for it.
But it was expensive, and so hush-hush that it was reserved for the Pitt-level celebrities of the world. The only people who knew about digital beauty were those who practiced it, had it practiced on them, or were so high up the studio/agency food chain that they were agreeing not only pay for it, but to quietly hand the film’s finished scenes over for however long it took to get the work done, which was sometimes weeks. In the early goings, actors leveraged studios into paying for the work, but nowadays it's just a part of the budget.
“We were seeing hundreds of thousands spent on this, anywhere from $500 to $2,500 per shot — maybe more if there’s a lot going into the scenes,” a former top-level studio executive recently told Mashable, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic.
“It would benefit both parties. You want your actor or actress to do the publicity for the movie, so you wanted to keep them happy.”
by Josh Dickey, Mashable | Read more:
Image: Peter Stackpole/The LIFE Picture Collection
