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Here's how a video artist made this actress look 30 years younger

Photoshop has long been used to make our photos look better, but more advanced programs can now make us look younger in videos, too.

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Los Angeles-based digital artist Rousselos Aravantinos posted a short 30-second video on Vimeo that shows just how far age-reducing software like Nuke and Mocha Pro has come, first spotted on Reddit.

First, Aravantinos took an original video of actress Michele Valley, asking her to blink, move her head, and smoke so that the film would be a challenge to edit.

“Promoting smoking wasn’t my intention — I detest smoking personally — but I had to make it more tricky,” he explained to Tech Insider.

He then spent a few weeks working on the video, retouching and editing each frame to reduce the wrinkles, age spots, and gray hairs that Valley had in the original shot.

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The end result makes the actress look 20-30 years younger. This was the final version:

To achieve this effect, Aravantinos mainly worked with the digital editing software NUKE as well as Mocha Pro. He didn't use any photos of a younger Valley as his guide, and he had to be delicate and detail-oriented.

“The video is actually a Nuke-Paint work consisting of thousands of precise paint strokes, which I had to animate and blend together,” he told TI. “There are no one-click magic tricks here.”

He decided not to add facial markers, the digital placeholders that help everything from selfie-editing apps to complex film-editing software function, as a personal challenge to himself. This was a difficult feat, considering his model was moving throughout the video.

Aravantinos told TI that he had been interested in manipulating photography since he was a film school student, but became transfixed by age-reduction software after seeing it used in the 2006 movie “X-Men: The Last Stand," which made both Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen look younger.

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“I came across an online article about the ‘X-Men’ movie, and all the magic work of Lola Visual Effects studio in LA,” he told TI. “Those guys are pioneers and are constantly raising the level of quality in their work.”

It’s not Aravantinos’ first foray into age reduction. He did a previous video back in 2011 using After Effects and Mocha, but said the Nuke technology was more advanced.

With the rise in technology and software programs, Aravantinos believes programs like Nuke could be the future of film making.

“VFX software is becoming more intelligent and everything about technology is becoming more accessible, more affordable, and a lot more automated,” he said.

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As for his own work, Aravantinos said he will only continue to get better. You can watch the full video below.

Age reduction VFX | De-aging | Digital Cosmetics from rousselos Aravantinos on Vimeo.

Digital Culture Innovation
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