Bogdan Belyaev he was working from home when le air raid sirens. They have not been heard in the city of Lviv since the Second World War, but it was the February 24 and the Russia had just invaded theUkraine.
“When we heard that the missiles were attacking and that our connection had dropped from some parts of our country, we took cover,” Belyaev said.
Bogdan Belyaev’s story
Belyaev is a synthetic language artist at the Ukrainian start-up Rep. The start-up in question uses archival recordings it’s a algorithm con artificial intelligence to create new dialogues with the voices of old performers. The company partnered with Lucasfilm on various occasions. The first to generate the voice of a young Luke Skywalker for The Book of Boba Fett by Disney +; the second to give the character of Darth Vader in the series of Obi-Wan Kenobi the same threatening tone 45 years ago. The voice of the actor James Earl JonesIn fact, she’s quite changed since she last played Darth Vader. This explains why Belyaev had to use the old recordings.
Belyaev he was quick to finish his work when Putin’s troops crossed the border. “If all went wrong, we would never have made these conversions delivered to Skywalker Sound,” he says. “So I decided to send these data on February 24th”.
Respeecher’s employees in Kiev also held out, while remaining in hiding. Dmytro Bielievtsovco-founder and CTO of the company, logged into a theater where tables, books and more had been stacked in front of windows in case of explosions.
The programmers who used theIA to replicate Jones’s voice and the editors who put the results together they worked from corridors inside their apartments.
At Skywalker Sound in Northern California Matthew Wood he was the sound supervisor who received the broadcasts from Ukraine. He says they hired Respeecher because the Vocal performances generated by the start-up have an often elusive human touch. “My main concern was certainly their well-being,” says Wood, who is a veteran of the Lucasfilm for 32 years.
What Respeecher could do better than anyone else was recreate the unforgettably threatening tone that Jones, now 91, had many years ago. Wood estimates that he has recorded at least one actor dozen times over the decadesthe last time for a short line of dialogue in 2019’s The Rise of Skywalker.
“He hinted to me that he was trying to shut down this particular character,” says Wood. “So how can we go on?” When he eventually introduced Jones to Respeecher’s work, the actor agreed to use his archival voice recordings to keep Vader alive and vital even by artificial means. TO Jones credit is recognized for leading Obi-Wan Kenobi’s performance and Wood describes his contribution as “a benevolent godfather”.