As if what we saw on screen wasn’t enough to make us shake our heads and marvel at modern technology and its ability to make our childhood dreams come true by creating a youthful Mark Hamill for The Book of Boba Fett, the visuals were just half of the story. Completing the other half of the presentation was the unmistakable voice of Hamill…or was it? Turns out that’s not the case, as Matt Wood explains the vocal trickery on show.
Hamill didn’t record lines for The Mandalorian, according to Jon Favreau. In Disney Gallery: Star Wars: The Mandalorian, he revealed, “Something people didn’t realize is that his voice isn’t real. His voice, the young Luke Skywalker voice, is completely synthesized using an application called Respeecher.”
Matthew Wood: “It’s a neural network you feed information into and it learns,” Wood says. “So I had archival material from Mark in that era. We had clean recorded ADR from the original films, a book on tape he’d done from those eras, and then also Star Wars radio plays he had done back in that time. I was able to get clean recordings of that, feed it into the system, and they were able to slice it up and feed their neural network to learn this data.”
We were fortunate enough to interview Alex Serdiuk, the CEO of Respeecher on the 108th episode of Making Tracks as he gave some fascinating detail on this incredible new application.
