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To some, it will be heartening news: Brad Pitt was one really ugly baby.
Or so it appears in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Pitt's latest film, in which he plays a man who was born an octogenarian and then looks younger as he gets older. And this isn't some genetics-gone-mad sci-fi tale but an adaptation by David Fincher - who directed Pitt in Se7en and Fight Club - of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1922 short story.
The film, which is already being talked up as an Oscar contender, uses
the latest generation of computer generated performance-capture
technology to take Pitt from wrinkly infant through geezer-teen to his handsome dotage.
For Pitt the little old toddler, his computer-aged face was stuck on the body on of a pint-sized actor. A few years ago that might have risked making him look a little odd and disconnected - a bit like early performance-capture efforts which left animated-actors looking wooden and dead-eyed.
But like Beowulf, which had Brangelina's better half rendered as a curvy Scanadavian snakewoman, Benjamin Button uses "Contour" developed by pioneering Silicon Valley company Rearden.
Instead of the stick-on dots as seen in the days of Andy Serkis doing Gollum, Contour has the actor's face covered in glow-in-the-dark
makeup which is then digitally filmed by multiple cameras while lit by strobes, capturing facial data in fine detail.
The footage is then melded together into a single composite before the
computer-animated boffins get to work on taking Brad back to his future - and narrowing the increasingly fine line between acting in front of the camera and animating behind it.
What: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Tilda Swinton
When: Opens Boxing Day
