AI talent
Edwin Yoji
- See
- Hear
The brief
Build a second AI talent with a face that carries real years, and keep him consistent from every angle.
Edwin Yoji is 68, of Japanese, Native American and African American heritage, and lives in Oregon's Willamette Valley. He stands 6'4" with a retired heavyweight's build.
My role
I created him: the concept, the direction for every image, the comp card and his voice. I generated him in Higgsfield with GPT Image 2.5 and used Nano Banana for masked fixes.
Solo project.
My approach
Age lives in the details. The first versions looked like a well-kept 55. I pushed for the defined lines around the forehead and cheeks of a man close to 70, without letting him look tired.
His hair had to read as his own: thick freeform locs, some in wide flat clumps and some thin, salt and pepper, and never cut off by the edge of the frame.
Process
Aging him up
Round after round on the master headshot: deeper age lines, slightly bronzed skin, thicker and wilder locs, and designer round glasses in place of thin wire frames.
A reference set
Headshot, both profiles, and front, back and side full-body shots, each checked against the headshot.
The nose ring
Mirroring his profile moved his nose ring to the wrong nostril. A text edit could not remove it. A Nano Banana inpaint with a mask I drew by hand did.
Proportion
The first back view had locs that were too short. I regenerated it so they reach his upper back, in proportion with the front.
Comp card
Industry wording for his hair, "Salt & pepper, dreadlocks", and his measurements on one page, every photo on the same backdrop.
From prompt to piece
1 · First output
The first headshot read closer to 55 than 68.
2 · Turning point
Profiles after the nose ring fix.
3 · Final
Approved: close to 70, thick salt-and-pepper locs, round black glasses.
The work
Next
Video: short clips in his own voice, with his face steady from the first frame to the last.