The actor lost part of his voice after suffering from throat cancer and undergoing a tracheotomy.
The actor Val Kilmer relied on the help of technology to return to play the character Tom “Iceman” Kazansky in “Top Gun: Maverick”, that’s because, in 2017, the actor had to have a tracheostomy to treat a tumor in his throat, which ended up compromising your talk.
In order to communicate, Kilmer uses a voice box at neck height, but even so, words come out with extreme difficulty. That’s why, for the film, an Artificial Intelligence recreated the actor’s voice.
“They managed to dub it with their own voice and that’s amazing. It’s such a technical feat, to be able to project his voice in that way, and it’s still an extension of the special effects contained in the film.”, said the actor’s daughter, Mercedes Kilmerto The New York Post.
According to Fortune magazine, in August 2021, London-based tech startup Sonantic teamed up with the actor to create a new voice entirely powered by Artificial Intelligence. It would later be used in the film.
“From the beginning, our goal was to make a voice model that Val could be proud of.“, he wrote John Flynn, CTO and co-founder of the technology company in a post published at the time. “We were looking forward to giving him his voice back, providing a new tool for any creative projects ahead.“
According to the magazine, the generated voice is “fully synthetic and imitates old recordings of the actor“, but still, Sonantic said that the case of Kilmer demanded “a little more manual work“.
“In the end, we generated more than 40 different voice models and selected the best, highest quality and most expressive“, said flynn. “These new algorithms are now built into our voice engine, so future customers can automatically take advantage of them too.“
In a video posted on YouTube in August 2021, it is possible to see how artificial intelligence managed to transform the set of sounds – recorded while the actor was still active – into a voice with a timbre and tone very close to reality.
One of the great drivers of the return of Val Kilmer to set of filming was the actor and friend Tom Cruise. According to the producer Jerry Bruckheimerthe star wanted the shooting of the scene to be a moving day for everyone.
“Tom said: We have to have Val, we have to have him back. We have to have it in the movie“, remembered Bruckheimer. “He was the driving force. We all wanted him, but Tom was really convinced that if he was going to make another ‘Top Gun’, Val had to be in it.”, he added.
Source: cinebuzz
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