In much the same Carrie Fisher was unable to voice the younger version of Princess Leia in animation, so Mark Hamill required A.I assistance (AIssistance?) to bring to life a version of Luke Skywalker who was over three decades younger than he currently is. ILM wizards used their skills to make that happen visually, but vocally the task fell to Ukrainian based company Respeecher, and their latest blog catches up with sound engineer Bogdan Belyaev who discusses his work at the company, the strains of working during an invasion and of course, working on The Book of Boba Fett and helping create that younger version of Luke Skywalker.
Which Respeecher project is a benchmark for you and the one you are really proud of?
Luke Skywalker’s voice, of course.
Tell me everything. Were you a Star Wars fan before doing the voice of Skywalker?
Absolutely. I was crazy about it! I even remember the day when I fell in love with this movie. A friend called to see the third part of Star Wars in the cinema. At the time, I was a fan of Lord of the Rings and other epic high-fantasy films, so I was a bit skeptical about Star Wars initially.
I even had a disc with every episode of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and The Matrix. It was my favorite artifact. It is a pity that it remains in my hometown city, which is now under Russian occupation.
I remember how the team decided who would lead this project, and I just wanted to touch the Star Wars galaxy at least somehow, to be related to this project in any way. I asked my colleague to make at least a dataset if he was given this project, but to my surprise, he told me to take the whole project. To say that I was happy is an understatement.
And what did the work on the project look like?
The project was not as easy as we thought. The quality of the first audios was not so good and there were problems with the data because they were recorded in the 1980s. The first Star Wars had bad funding, so the sound quality was so-so. Apparently, it was not bad for the 1980s, but for 2022, the quality differed, to put it mildly. At the same time, Star Wars was something like a spaghetti western, and no one expected that the movie would cause such a stir. That’s probably the reason why they didn’t invest so much in sound quality back then.
We worked on the project for nine months.
Wow! Almost like having a baby. That is, all this time was spent analysing the data and analyzing the voice of Mark Hamill (the actor who played Luke Skywalker)?
No, we did several iterations. They didn’t like my first conversions, which we overdubbed so that the sound had the highest possible quality.
For more on how they vocally brought Luke to life, you can hear our conversation with the CEO of Respeecher Alex Serdiuk on Episode 108 of Making Tracks, and keep ’em peeled for our chat with Hal Hickel of ILM coming to Fantha Tracks Radio over the coming weekend.
