Dan Morris: Apps are fun, but it is time to keep it real

While a good proportion of filters available across mobile apps are designed to smooth out the creases and show us at our waxwork best, this one had the opposite purpose.

By the time I got home that night, FaceApp’s ageing filter – one that would transform any facial shot or selfie into a wonderfully wizened version of the subject – seemed to have taken every social circle I move in by storm.

I’d been fascinated earlier in the day by the sexagenarian version of myself that looked back up at me from my phone screen. I was pleased with the result. My slightly-thicker-than-usual brown beard had been antiqued to a wonderfully lupine shade of mottled grey. My hair was almost entirely white, and my skin bore distinguished creases that another 30 years worth of sunshine and cigarettes should more than comfortably achieve.

I looked like a retired trawler captain, or a blues guitarist who had completely forgotten to retire at all. Maybe a North Sea fisherman who upped sticks for New Orleans one weekend and just never quite finished his drink… I should probably get up and dance.

It wasn’t long until my usual compadres in crime started to share their aged selfies.

A friend of mine collated a few and re-posted a composite image intending to represent our local’s dominoes team, circa 2049-50 of course. Naturally I had a good cheeky laugh at who of us, in theory, time would be a little less kind to than others.

The following day a national newspaper had quite rightly jumped on the bandwagon and displayed a few famous faces that had been artificially pushed beyond the free bus pass watershed.

I picked over them with a grin. This latest flash-fad was proving to be pretty fun.

Concerns around privacy threw FaceApp into controversy, though aside from this I started later in the week to think a bit more about how easy it is these days to change our appearance via technology.

Showing a doctored or ‘enhanced’ photo to the world is of course nothing new. Airbrushing has long gone hand-in-hand with magazine cover shoots, and supposedly even Elizabeth I had her portrait artists heavily accentuate her better features while heavily diluting her worst.

These days though, the capability is right in the palm of our hands.

Most photo filters are a bit of fun, but as I scroll through the contacts in my phone, it's interesting to actually pay attention to how few of them display an unfiltered mugshot.

And most it seems aren’t edited to add dog ears, Mick Jagger’s lips or a Marie Antoinette bouffant. They’re modified with filters designed to brighten our eyes, smooth out our skin and dimple our cheeks.

This sort of technology is of course improving all the time, and Hollywood is certainly proving to be its showcase.

As we now see more and more frequently, and with incredible examples, CGI technology has reached a stage when an actor or actress’s age means less and less, as they can simply be de-aged by a couple of decades to fit a role’s requirements (see one Samuel L. Jackson in superhero blockbuster Captain Marvel).

And though this technology may still be far from perfect, Hollywood has even used CGI to bring certain actors back from the dead (exhibit B – Peter Cushing, OBE – Rogue One: A Star Wars Story).

Such technology is incredible to behold, and an achievement in special effects deserving of applause. Yet with such use of computer generated imagery becoming an ever more utilised solution to cinematic casting conundrums, are we on the way down a rocky path?

Will the day come when Hollywood stops searching for new talent because all of the required male lead parts are perfect for a CGI Richard Burton or Clark Gable? Perhaps instead of bothering to discover the next Julia Roberts we will simply digitally recreate the old one. And what if the part called for Julia to be black, or Asian? Would producers bother to look for a talented black or Asian actress… or would they simply ‘make’ one? It’s a disturbing thought.

And as for Joe Public, is the rise in ‘filter culture’, and the growth of our instinct to doctor any photo before sharing it leading us to care less and less about what is real? Are we taking casual though alarming steps further along the road of fantasy over reality?

With Hollywood able to resurrect the dead, and mobile phones able to change our faces in a second, is ‘real’ slowly becoming irrelevant, and a thing of the past?

By merely using phone apps we can become old, young, whatever we want to see and whatever we want to show. If this continues, and technology becomes better and better, how long could it be until nothing we see is completely real at all?

I look back into the eyes of the aged version of myself that my phone has constructed. I hope one day to look at them in the mirror for real, and hope that in 30 years time there are still plenty of other ‘real’ eyes in my world to meet their gaze.

For now, I’ll delete the pic. Fake sexagenarian Dan was fun, but when I do meet him, I’d like it to be very real indeed.