Flashback with a twist: Team ‘Weapon’ employs AI to de-age Sathyaraj

Director Guhan Senniappan explains the process of creating an AI-generated Sathyaraj for his upcoming Tamil film ‘Weapon’

What would you, as a filmmaker, do if you’re doing a film with veteran actor Sathyaraj and there’s a flashback portion showcasing the character’s younger days? The usual route would be to use make-up (like in Kanaa and Kadaikutty Singam’s yesteryear portions) or use another younger actor in his place. They could employ de-ageing techniques that are used in Hollywood and were engaged recently in Acharyafor Chiranjeevi and deleted scenes in Kamal Haasan’s Vikram. But the makers of the upcoming film Weapon go a step forward and use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to ‘create’ a younger version of Sathyaraj.

Filmmaker Guhan Senniappan, known for helming Sawaari(2016) and Prime Video’s first Tamil original seriesVella Raja, is directing Weapon, a sci-fi thriller featuring Sathyaraj as a superhuman alongside Vasanth Ravi; the film has a two-minute AI sequence that was created with software developed by the team. “Both Sathyaraj sir and Vasanth appear in the AI sequences. We fed photos of them to the software and generated the sequences. We just have to feed the ambience, background and characters and it will give us an array of options from which we can choose what we want,” says Guhan, adding that saving time is the most significant benefit of using this technology. “We usually create a storyboard, convert it to digital, and then work from it, which usually takes months. Here, the time taken is considerably low and we have control over how we want it to be. The space to indulge in trial and error is high here.”

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Assurance that AI won’t take their place as screenwriters in the future is one of the demands by the Writers Guild of America’s 11,500 members who are currently on strike. Guhan says that he supports the cause and his use of technology results from limitations. “A creator’s job is to create something new and deliver it to the audience. But when a machine does it, the value of the end product is lost. I feel AI is a technology that has to be restricted after a certain point,” says Guhan. “Even Chat GPT is used to generate scripts these days. AI requires us to manually input what we want but as the technology progresses, even the need for that would eventually disappear. It destroys the value of the human touch. We have employed this to wrap up production early but, in the long run, it’s a threat to filmmaking as we know it.”

Guhan says that he’s excited to know how the audience will receive the AI sequences. “This is the first time something like this is being tried in Tamil cinema. The sequence will be animated and since the film itself happens past the realms of reality, it fits in with the theme. Even fire glows with a golden tint, and tonally, we’ve opted for a dark one as we’ve treated it akin to pages from comics,” concludes Guhan. Weapon, also starring Rajiv Menon and Tanya Hope, is eyeing a September release.