Motion control + Morphing

[Pete Raynell]

I have a studio job coming up that I would love a second opinion on.

The brief involves a young actor made up as an old man, walking through a white studio space past various props delivering lines.
As the spot progresses his appearance changes at certain points and he starts to appear younger
(eg: he starts the spot bald , removes his shirt over his head whilst walking to reveal his hair has grown back, and another gag where he wipes his hand in front of his face and his skin is less wrinkled)

This spot all needs to appear as one continuous tracking shot and the ageing transitions to be fast and seamless.

The way I am currently approaching it is to use a motion control robot on a 40ft track to do the camera move, and also have a video split operator on hand doing overlay work to line our actor up.

The obvious variable in this situation is that the actor will never land in exactly the same spot on every take. So I have suggested we use the video split to get this as close as possible. Then request a VFX team in post do some Morph work with something like the RE:Flex Morph plugin for After Effects to avoid just trying to use something like a cross dissolve that may produce ghosting as the images overlay. An example of this morph plugin is can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrySJ4dJwBc

Has anybody here had experience with this sort of thing before? Am I going down the right path?

Would love a second opinion for the reassurance with this one!

Cheers,

Pete,