How do they do it?

Anyone into TV/Film production and special effects tools?

I've been watching these new "Direct TV" commercials, featuring Christopher Lloyd, Charlie Sheen, and Sigourney Weaver...reprising their roles from "Back to the Future", "Major League" and "Aliens", respectively.

In each instance, though the movies were made 20 years ago (give or take)...the stars appear not to have aged at all in the commercials.

What sort of special effects trickery are they using to achieve that?

I dunno.... Surgery?

At least for the Christopher Lloyd one, I think he was made to look older back when the movie was made - now he's probably just caught up to the makeup.

I don

Dermatological resurfacing techniques/Cosmetic Surgery, "pancake" makeup, lighting and camera angles would be my guesses. Plus, maybe a few haven't allowed themselves to put on the pounds over the years as the average modern day American does.

I haven't seen the commercials, btw.

They're on youtube.

I'll have to agree with Jon Gnash on this one.

It's either done like that, or very simalar movie technics that allowed "Forrest Gump" to be rendered into a JFK clip. Or the way Clint Eastwood, Tommy Lee Jones, and Donald Sutherland were un-aged during segments of Space Cowboys.

Just botox, plastic surgery and a {censored}load of makeup, Ted. No big technological solution for this one.

They got Captain Kirk to transport them through time on the Enterprise when he was in town to do the Dish Network spots

I just assumed it was carefully done shots that make Sigourney Weaver look like she hadn't aged. I haven't seen the Charlie Sheen one, but the Back to the Future one has enough makeup, you'd never know how old Lloyd was.

Or maybe they have age regression CG software now?

They're all wrong, Tedster. DirecTV cut those commercials 20 years ago, and kept them in the can until now. Pretty insightful company!

Botch knows all.

I hope this excerpt helps:

All were created using the same basic technique, said Jon Gieselman, DirecTV's senior vice president of advertising: Production crews shoot new footage of the actor, then edit this material into actual scenes from the film.

The trick is in how cleverly the old and new footage are intercut and the attention paid to details in the original film. Costumes, makeup, props, haircuts, lighting, camera angles, music and sets all have to match those used in the movie to sustain the impression that movie and ad are one and the same, he says.

Sometimes the new material can be shot on the film's original set ("Back to the Future's" main street still existed on a back lot), and sometimes the ads require improvisation. Watch the new "Aliens" commercial closely and you might be able to tell that the mechanical contraption surrounding Ripley in the new segments isn't the same as the one in the movie. The movie prop, known as a "power loader," is in a museum in Seattle, and the commercial's producers couldn't get access to it. So they built a smaller copy and shot Weaver in it only in close-up.

Not computer-generated

"Everyone thinks this is a big [computer-generated imaging] operation, but it's really not," says Eric Hirshberg, president and chief creative officer of Deutsch Inc. in Los Angeles, the agency that created the series.

"The biggest production assignment has to do with disciplined re-creation of the movies," he says. "When we started doing these, we told ourselves that 1 percent off [the original] is 100 percent off."

Some computer manipulation is used to make the actors look as young as they were when they starred in the movie. A few perpetually youthful-looking types -- Weaver and Sheen, for example -- didn't need much of this electronic Botox. It took a bit more effort to make actor Ben Stein, who played the droning teacher in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," look as he did in the 1986 comedy.

"I loved doing it, [but] it was a lot of work," Stein said. "We had to match it with the original. It was me with my hair dyed to make me look younger."

For the most part, Hirshberg and Gieselman think the ads get it right. They are particularly proud of a spot that featured "Star Trek's" Capt. Kirk (William Shatner) extolling the clarity of DirecTV's picture on the Starship Enterprise's big-screen TV, an ad they say drew praise from "Star Trek's" detail-obsessed fans.

Awesome! Thanks for the info.

Cliff...not a bad research job at all for a Florida grad...

Jeff - You're welcome!

Tedster - Anything for my favorite 'Nole!

I was wondering about those also. I once read that for a movie they drew in additional hair on Bruce Willis frame by frame to hide his receding hairline. Anything is possible with enough time and money.

My favorite was the American Pie one