CLUTCH CARGO: THE NEXT GENERATION! First “visually dubbed” feature film hits US theaters this May.

Swedish sci-fi adventure flick Watch the Skies is using a technique called ‘visual dubbing’ to alter the cast’s lip movements and map them to dubbed English dialogue for international audiences – without reshooting a single scene.

That’s thanks to Los Angeles-based movie-making AI firm Flawless, and its TrueSync technology that analyzes the entirety of an actor’s performance, utilizes deep learning to create a volumetric 3D representation of their face, and then adapts their mouth movements in the footage in post-production.

TrueSync has actually been around for a few years, and was notably used to remove F-bombs from the PG-13 edit of the 2022 British survival horror movie Fall (which happened to have been directed by Flawless CEO Scott Mann).

* * * * * * * *

This time around, Flawless’ tech is being used to visually dub an entire movie. Watch the Skies, which debuted in its home country back in 2022 as UFO Sweden, follows a teenager searching for her missing (and possibly abducted by aliens) father with a UFO watchers’ club. The original actors dubbed their own performances into English at a recording studio, so their Swedish accents are intact.

Knowing that this effect was used, audiences will likely be staring very closely at newly swapped-in AI mouths, which may make selling the illusion a bit more difficult. And I hope the script wasn’t just run through AI for a quick and dirty translation into English. Very bad things can happen if the dialogue isn’t carefully reviewed by someone who actually natively speaks English, as I wrote in 2023: Springtime for AI.

But this technique has definitely made massive progress since the days of Clutch Cargo in the late 1950s:

(Via Justine Bateman.)