36 years after Val Kilmer first starred as Lt. Tom "Iceman" Kazansky in the 1986 movie Top Gun, he has returned with the assistance of AI voice-generation technology to the film’s sequel.
Kilmer plays an admiral in the 2022 Top Gun: Maverick sequel film. The actor was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014, and after a series of treatments that included a tracheotomy, Kilmer’s iconic voice was all but gone. He didn’t publicly announce his illness, however, until 2017.
During production of Top Gun: Maverick, Kilmer worked with the London-based tech company Sonantic, which used AI technology to reconstruct his voice, enabling him to act once more in the sequel film. The company used old recordings of Kilmer’s voice to reconstruct it and give the appearance that he was speaking in the movie.
“From the beginning, our aim was to make a voice model that Val would be proud of,” John Flynn, CTO and cofounder of Sonantic, stated in a blog post. “We were eager to give him his voice back, providing a new tool for whatever creative projects are ahead.”
According to Fortune, the limited voice recordings posed a challenge to Sonatic, yielding less than 10 times the usual amount of data needed. In the end, the company created a brand-new algorithm to account for this lack of data.
“In the end, we generated more than 40 different voice models and selected the best, highest-quality, most expressive one,” Flynn said. “Those new algorithms are now embedded into our voice engine, so future clients can automatically take advantage of them as well.”
Jack Kilmer, Val Kilmer’s son, took part in an interview with People back in August 2021 about the film.
“They honor the legacy of Iceman, and he was so stoked by it,” Jack Kilmer said.
Additionally, Maverick film producer Jerry Bruckheimer said in the same interview that Tom Cruise was the “driving force” behind Kilmer’s return to the franchise.
“He said, ‘We have to have Val, we have to have him back. We have to have him in the film.’ And he was the driving force. We all wanted him, but Tom was really adamant that if he's going to make another ‘Top Gun,’ Val had to be in it.”
“He's such a fine actor, and he's such a good individual,” Bruckheimer said of Kilmer. “We had such a good time on the first one and wanted to bring some of the gang back together again.”
Bruckheimer went on to describe the “really emotional experience” for the film’s cast and crew when Kilmer and Cruise arrived on set together.
“It was a long time getting there, but we did.”
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Val Kilmer Used AI Tech To Re-create His Memorable Voice In ‘Top Gun: Maverick’
Source: Pinoy Inquirer News
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