The Curious Case of Benjamin Button visual effects

Once mention about Benjamin Button, the fantastic visual come to audience mind. This film is one of famous film director David Fincher's works. The film is about a man named Benjamin who was born with weird disease, that is grow backwards. During the period of his growth, he endure frustrations and discrimination, however, he fall in love with a girl at first sight. The problem they should face to is Benjamin growing younger, he becomes a baby years later.

This is a fantasy story that throughout Benjamin’s whole life. How to shoot different phases of Benjamin’s life is the difficult thing. The post-production company Digital Domain firstly catches 120 facial expressions of Brad Pitt (Benjamin). Then, put this information into different 3D modules to create thousands of Brad’s facial modules, and composite them to different actors’ faces as the pictures below.

Besides, to make the modules moving, Digital Domain creates the CG modules frame by frame, and connects them to real actors. Therefore, before the youth age, Benjamin is not acted by Brad, only the face that is post-production composite.

From researching the post-production of this film, I found that post-production can make things reality, which is a way to ‘blind’ audiences’ eyes. Then, post-production should be the heavy workload when making a film, because Benjamin Button’s crew mentioned that the most difficult thing is recruit people does the post-production work. Nobody is interested in such a complicated post-production, even this is an excellent film.