In The Book of Boba Fett's penultimate episode, Luke Skywalker took centre stage while training Grogu. The technology used to de-age Mark Hamill had definitely improved since The Mandalorian's season 2 finale, but did you know that it wasn't actually the actor's voice we could hear during his latest appearance?
Variety (via SFFGazette.com) explains that Ukrainian company Respeecher created Luke's younger voice, using only old recordings to synthesize a version of the actor's vocals.
"We heard recordings from 30 to 40 years ago, and those recordings were not good," Alex Serdiuk, the company’s co-founder and co-CEO, told the trade. As a result, they turned to old ADR sessions, video games, and audiobooks to find what they needed, fed it all into the Respeecher app and ended up with an artificial version of Hamill and Luke's voice they could use in the show.
"Our technology applies a digital voice skin, digital vocal apparatus of that particular performance, and that gives content creators and moviemakers that full content over how it should sound and even inflections," he explains. "If a director wants a voice sounding specific, we can tweak our models to meet those expectations. Our technology is very disruptive."
It's actually a little scary to think about how amazing this technology has become, and it might not be too much longer before we get a movie or TV show featuring younger versions of Luke, Han, and Leia who are indistinguishable from the original actors who played them. Crazy, right?
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