how did they make harrison ford look young

They made Harrison Ford look young again mostly through advanced digital de‑aging in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny , combining AI‑driven VFX with his real performance on set.

Quick Scoop

What they actually did

• Ford still acted every scene himself, in costume, with lights, stunts, and dialogue like normal; the “young” look was added later on top of his real face.

• Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) used a system often referred to as FaceSwap plus a capture setup called Flux, which used infrared cameras mounted near the main camera to record detailed facial data as he acted.

• Artists then built a highly detailed CG version of Ford’s head and face, adjusted to look like he did in his late 30s–40s, and blended that onto his current performance frame by frame.

How the “younger” face was created

• Lucasfilm has decades of footage of Ford from Star Wars and earlier Indiana Jones films; machine‑learning tools were trained on this archive so the system could “learn” what his younger face looked like from many angles and lighting setups.

• ILM scanned Ford’s current face and also used older scans (for example from Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) and then digitally “aged him down” to the right era for the flashback scenes.

• They built a library of facial expression shapes using techniques tied to the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), so every frown, smile, or squint matched how younger Ford’s face would actually move.

Why it still feels like “real” Harrison Ford

• Ford has emphasized that it is “literally my face from 40 years ago” being used as reference, but he still had to do all the acting in the present; the tech doesn’t replace his performance, it re‑skins it.

• The eyes, timing, and micro‑expressions are his current acting choices, which helps the de‑aged version avoid the stiff, “dead‑eyed” look that older digital doubles sometimes had.

Is it just a “deepfake”?

• It’s related to deepfake concepts (AI‑driven face replacement), but the studio used proprietary, high‑end tools plus a lot of manual VFX work rather than a quick, automated filter.

• The process reportedly cost tens of millions of dollars as part of the movie’s huge budget, blending AI, traditional CGI, and human artistry instead of a single push‑button effect.

TL;DR: Harrison Ford looked young again because ILM trained AI and VFX tools on decades of his old footage, built a younger CG version of his face, and then mapped that onto his new performance so it still feels like genuine Harrison Ford, just time‑shifted back about 40 years.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.