Lionsgate has used deepfake software on Fall to remove swearing.
The upcoming action thriller starring Grace Caroline Currey, and Virginia Gardner was apparently full of f-bombs… and with Lionsgate desperate for a PG-13 rating, the filmmakers used deepfake to get rid of all that swearing.
“For a movie like this, we can’t reshoot it,” director Scott Mann said in a behind-the-scenes video feature and reported by Variety. “We’re not a big tentpole… we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the time, more than anything else. What really saved this movie and brought it into a wider audience was technology.”
The solution, Mann said, was turning to the London-based AI company, Flawless, where he also serves as co-CEO… and presumably already had a good idea of what the technology could do.
“When we were filming the movie, we didn’t know if we were R or if we were PG-13, so I said the F-word so many times I think Scott wanted to kill me in post when we were trying to get a PG-13 rating,” said co-star Virginia Gardner.
It’s easy to see how those f-bombs could end up in there – Fall tells the story of two women who climb an abandoned radio tower to scatter the ashes of one of their husbands, but when sections of the ladder fall loose, the pair become stranded.
According to Mann, the team edited out more than 30 f-bombs throughout the movie – changing the film’s rating from R-rated to a PG-13. Many of the film’s most egregious curses were changed to teen-appropriate ones such as “freaking”.
“As far as I know, every movement my mouth made in that movie, my mouth made,” said Grace Caroline Currey.
The TrueSync software used by Mann was originally designed to improve dubbing when translating films into other languages. It uses technology similar to other deepfake-style software, altering the mouth movements to sync to new alternative dialogue.
Fall was made on a budget of just $3 million, meaning that reshooting pivotal scenes to reduce the film’s rating was simply not an option. Additionally, the reshoots would have taken months to get done.
The TrueSync edits were made in just two weeks, during the final stage of post-production.
Whether or not we see deepfakes used in other creative ways remains to be seen, but South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker almost made their very own deep fake movie starring not-the=former-president Donald Trump.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on twitter.