A.I. is all the talk of the film industry, and it ain’t slowing down any time soon with a new wrinkle coming up at the Cannes market this week.
Last year Lionsgate acquired the independent thriller film “Fall” about two young women who climb to the top of a 2,000-foot-tall radio tower, only to become trapped there.
The result is a film that has the characters swearing a lot due to the high-stress situation and thus was likely to earn an R rating on coarse language alone. But the film was released as a PG-13 with the help of an A.I. dubbing technology system called TrueSync.
“Fall” director Scott Mann is also co-CEO of UK-based company Flawless whose TrueSync system alters onscreen mouth movements – allowing post-production changes of dialogue that look like the actors were actually saying the new lines. The process on “Fall,” which involved the removal of at least thirty F-bombs amongst other coarse language, took just days and cost very little as compared to expensive and time-consuming reshoots.
Now, Flawless is partnering with U.S. distributor XYZ Films and U.K. producer Tea Shop Productions to acquire rights to foreign-language films.
The plan is to use the tech to convert them to lip-synced English versions for distribution in English-speaking territories via XYZ. They will also distribute the original versions alongside, with the idea being to offer an alternative to subtitles and out-of-sync dubs.
The plan is to acquire several ‘high-potential’ titles during the Cannes Film Festival, with an initial slate of translated films to be released in the fourth quarter of this year.
Flawless Co-CEOs and Founders Scott Mann and Nick Lynes say in a joint statement:
“There is an abundance of world-class cinema yet to be unlocked, and we are thrilled to be able to leverage our technology, as well as XYZ and Tea Shop’s sterling track records with top-quality films and filmmakers, to help these titles reach the global audiences they deserve. We look forward to demonstrating the immense potential of this model in Cannes, setting the stage for even greater growth.”
Flawless is reportedly collaborating with the dubbing industry, industry unions and guilds. They will be using original voice artists for their ‘visual translations’, no synthetic A.I. voice tech, which reportedly avoids potential copyright implications.
What it doesn’t avoid is questions that come up regarding translations – actors could now be seen convincingly delivering lines they may not have otherwise agreed to say, as opposed to a regular dub where it’s obvious dialogue changes have been made in the translation.
An example of the tech in action can be seen on Twitter.
Source: Deadline
