A Fix for Film Dubbing

The process of dubbing a film into a foreign language hasn’t changed much over the past century. When a movie is dubbed, the dialogue often gets changed to fit an actor’s mouth movements, which leads to two big problems: first, the new dialogue never really fits; and second, even skillfully altering a script can wind up sacrificing a film’s meaning and nuance. To address those issues, Flawless AI, founded by former film director Scott Mann, has created software called TrueSync, which analyzes the entirety of an actor’s performance and then subtly alters the original footage of the actor’s face and mouth movements to fit any vocalization. So when you see A Few Good Men in, say, French, Jack Nicholson’s mouth really looks like it’s speaking the language. The end result, according to Mann: “We’re going to get to enjoy and experience content from abroad in a way that we’ve never been able to before.”—Jesse Will

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