The Swedish film Watch the Skies, a tale of UFOs, marks the first full cinematic release to employ Flawless’s “visual dubbing” technology powered by artificial intelligence.
The film is originally in Swedish. The AI tool TrueSync enabled “seamless integration of dubbing actors’ voices into the film, ensuring perfect synchronization and completely eliminating the need for subtitles.”
“The film by Flawless, fully supported by SAG, is a leader in creating ethical works using artificial intelligence, pushing boundaries and ushering in a new era of cinematic storytelling,” the announcement stated.
The film is set to release on May 9 in the United States. For the American release, the original cast re-recorded their performances in English, and Flawless used the machine learning technology TrueSync to alter lip movements for synchronization with the speech.
“Many directors and actors will initially be frightened by this technology, but we have creative control, and dubbing the film in English turned out to be very interesting. It’s still our film, it’s still the actors’ performance, and that’s the key part,” noted writer-director Victor Danell.
The film follows a rebellious teenager, Denise, who teams up with a UFO watchers club to solve the mystery of her missing father.
At a 2023 presentation, Flawless co-founder Scott Mann explained that the TrueSync technology uses deep learning to create a comprehensive 3D representation of actors’ faces throughout the film, which can then be altered to match dubbed dialogue. It was previously used in the 2022 film Fall.
Flawless is collaborating with XYZ Films to release a series of films localized using TrueSync. These include Run Lola Run, Smugglers, The Light, and Vincent Must Die.
Back in November 2024, director Ridley Scott, known for films like Gladiator, Alien, and Blade Runner, changed his views regarding AI.