Swedish Movie with AI English Dubbing to Screen in the US
Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an ever-increased role in television and movie streaming. Thanks to AMC and AI company Flawless, AI is coming to theaters, too. Swedish science fiction movie Watch the Skies arrives in American theaters in May, with AI-powered editing that promises to match the actors’ mouths with the English dub.
AI dubbing, or “vubbing” (visual dubbing) as Flawless calls it, is not unique, although it is still relatively novel. While currently only available to enterprise customers, Adobe’s Firefly AI tools can translate audio from one language to another with lip sync. “Make anyone appear as though they are speaking in another language by matching the mouth movements of newly translated audio,” Adobe promises.
As Variety reports, Watch the Skies will be presented by AMC with similar technology. Flawless AI is performing the work. Flawless is a major player in the professional video editing space and has worked with a wide range of partners, including Lionsgate, Netflix, Lenovo, the National Hockey League (NHL), Grubhub, Highdive, 1986, CNN, and more. The company specializes in dialogue replacement, what Flawless calls TrueSync.
Flawless promises that Watch the Skies, known as UFO Sweden in Sweden, will deliver perfectly synced mouth movements with the English language dub, which is derived from voiceover work done by the original Swedish cast, making Flawless’ AI tech SAG-AFTRA friendly.
Variety spoke to Flawless co-founder Scott Mann last year about the ethics of AI-powered video editing and what syncing technology could mean for filmmakers.
“Showing our materials to filmmakers, especially over the past year, they realize the potential from going to a local stage to a global stage. It’s a huge opportunity to get your work out and it’s been invigorating. They are so excited about showing their work in a wider audience, and especially in America,” Mann said last year.
“The Swedish language is a barrier when you want to reach out around the world,” says Albin Pettersson of Crazy Pictures, the producer of Watch the Skies. “We were contacted by the guys at Flawless to take the movie and make a new version of it in English, but not a dubbed English version. They call it ‘vubbing,’ visual dub.”
“This technology enables things that we couldn’t do before. Flawless and their technology gives us the opportunity to release the film for a much larger audience,” says the film’s writer and director, Victor Danell. “We can go from our small country to the whole world.”
AMC Theatres will show Watch the Skies on 100 screens in the 20 biggest markets in the United States. Flawless partnered with distributor XYZ Films to show Watch the Skies starting May 9.
Image credits: Flawless AI, Crazy Pictures. ‘Watch the Skies’ releases at select AMC Theatres in the United States on May 9.