The smoother, tauter a face gets, though, the more you really have to get the subtlety right or else it starts to fall apart.” The visual effects team also found themselves with an “ironic problem” as they were reviewing their early footage. So an older person, is actually an easier digital double to make because they have all these beautiful character wrinkles and lines and folds in their face that you can really start to understand. “The more detail that you have on a person's face, the easier it is for somebody to believe it. “Just in our very perverse way, younger is harder to do than old,” Williams explained. If he had more wear and tear on his face that might have made the visual effects artists’ job easier.
Another challenge in figuring out how to create a younger Will Smith was that the actor has aged so well. “With our approach, you capture performance, and then you map the performance onto a whole digital construct.” Director Ang Lee filmed Gemini Man in 120 frames-per-second 4K 3D, all of which would reveal the many flaws in using makeup or in other digital manipulation that 2D or a more straightforward presentation could mask. “If you use the 2D approach, you're capturing imagery and then manipulating imagery,” Weta Digital’s visual effects supervisor Guy Williams said.