Flemish Innovator Jo Plaete Wins Emmy for AI Film Tech
A Flemish innovator has won one of television’s top technical honours for AI software that lets filmmakers change an actor’s age or likeness without altering their performance. Jo Plaete, from Brakel in East Flanders and now based between Hollywood and London, is co-founder and chief technology officer of BRAHMA AI, which was named a recipient of a 2026 Technology & Engineering Emmy Award, VRT NWS reported.
The award, presented by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, was handed out on 14 October 2026 at the Television Academy’s Saban Media Center in North Hollywood, California.
A Shared Honour for a Breakthrough Tool
The Emmy was given for ‘AI-Based Face Replacement and Performance-Preserving Post-Production Transformation’ — technology that can change a performer’s age or appearance while keeping their gaze, emotion and timing intact.
It was awarded collectively to Disney Research, Rising Sun Pictures, Digital Domain and BRAHMA AI, the company said in its official announcement of the win. BRAHMA AI is the only AI-native company among the four honorees.
“This Emmy recognises technology that has been proven where the bar is highest: feature films, television and live production, in front of performers, directors and global audiences,” Plaete said in that announcement.
Proven Where the Stakes Are Highest
The technology, branded ‘Neural Performance’, holds a performer’s expression, movement, lighting and timing fixed while allowing controlled changes to age, likeness and identity. It was proven at feature-film scale on Robert Zemeckis’s ‘Here’, in which Tom Hanks and Robin Wright were de-aged across decades, with younger versions visualised on set in near real time.
“With that technology we can, for example, make the 70-year-old Tom Hanks a twenty-something again, or bring back a deceased actor in a sequel,” Plaete told VRT NWS.
The company says the same system delivered roughly one hour of final 4K transformation for the finished film. Its core methods are protected by US Patent No. 12,322,018.
Opening New Markets — and Raising New Questions
Beyond de-aging, Plaete says the latest generation of the technology can dub films into other languages in the actor’s own voice and with their own facial expressions — a prospect he argues could widen the reach of small-market cinema.
“Flemish films today have a limited market, but this technology can give them access to a much larger international audience,” he told VRT NWS. “We went from silent film to sound, from black-and-white to colour. I think this will be the next big step for the film world.”
The Emmy comes amid significant commercial momentum. In September 2026, BRAHMA AI raised a $150 million round led by Multiples Alternate Asset Management, supporting research and a wider push into enterprise audiovisual content.
Yet the recognition lands in an industry still wary of AI. Plaete acknowledges those fears, which were central to the 2023 Hollywood writers’ strike, when scribes demanded guarantees they would not be replaced by AI, as VRT NWS covered at the time.
“But we have built ethics and consent into the architecture of our systems,” he said. “That way nobody can just use Tom Hanks’s face without his permission, and all images used are licensed.”
What to Watch
Plaete frames the Emmy as evidence the sector is warming to the tools rather than fearing them. The next test comes in November 2026, with the planned US release of the Indian film ‘Ramayana’, for which BRAHMA AI supplied performance-preserving English-language lip-sync. For a Flemish technologist who helped launch Disney’s AI division in 2018, it is the latest step in a two-decade arc — one he casts as human creativity amplified by AI, rather than replaced by it.