Lionsgate’s ‘Fall’ Used Deepfake-Style Tech to Change 30-Plus F-Bombs, Bringing Movie From R to PG-13 Rating
09.08.2022 - 21:19
/ variety.com
Todd Spangler NY Digital EditorThe filmmakers behind indie action-thriller “Fall” were facing kind of a big freaking problem.Lionsgate wanted to pick up the movie for U.S. theatrical release.
But “Fall,” a vertiginous white-knuckler about two young women who are in danger of plunging from the top of a 2,000-foot-tall radio tower, was rife with F-bombs — which would result in an R rating, cramping the box office take for the small-budget pic.The producers of “Fall,” which had a production budget of about $3 million, couldn’t afford to reshoot all the scenes in which the petrified tower-climbers screamed “fuck” (along with various permutations).The solution? Scott Mann, who directed and co-wrote “Fall,” turned to the artificial-intelligence dubbing technology system developed by London-based Flawless, for which he also serves as co-CEO. According to Mann, the Flawless team in post-production changed more than 30 F-bombs throughout the movie into PG-13-acceptable epithets (like “freaking”) along with a few other lines of dialogue.Flawless, founded in 2021, originally designed its TrueSync AI-based system to provide a better dubbing solution for films translated into other languages.
Employing the same principles used to create “deepfakes,” TrueSync alters the facial expressions and mouth movements of the actors to match the alternate dialogue being spoken (a process the startup calls “vubbing”). Mann realized the Flawless engine could also be used to clean up the F-words in his movie.“For a movie like this, we can’t reshoot it.
We’re not a big tentpole… we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the time, more than anything else,” Mann said in a behind-the-scenes video feature about the film. “What really saved this movie
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