Disney Research Studios developed FRAN (Face Re-Aging Network), an AI tool that automatically makes actors look older or younger in video footage, replacing a process that previously required weeks of frame-by-frame manual work by visual effects artists.

FRAN is a neural network trained on a large database of synthetic face pairs at different ages. Rather than generating an entirely new face, it predicts which regions of an actor's face would be altered by aging (e.g., adding or removing wrinkles) and overlays those changes as an additional visual layer on the original footage. This preserves the actor's identity across changing expressions, viewpoints, and lighting conditions. Disney Research Studios described FRAN as 'the first practical, fully-automatic and production-ready method for re-aging faces in video.' A human artist still reviews and fine-tunes the result before it is incorporated into a final production. Disney has separately used high-resolution AI face-swapping technology in productions including Star Wars and Marvel properties.