According to Vanity Fair, a Ukrainian tech worker at Respeecher shares the story of how he had to hurry to bring back James Earl Jones’ legendary voice for Obi-Wan Kenobi.
What’s Happening:
- Bogdan Belyaev is a synthetic-speech artist at the Ukrainian start-up Respeecher. The company had worked for Lucasfilm to generate the voices of the young Luke Skywalker for Disney+’s The Book of Boba Fett.
- For the recent Obi-Wan Kenobi series, they were given the task of making Darth Vader sound like James Earl Jones’s dark side villain from 45 years ago.
- Belyaev made it his mission to finish the work as Putin’s troops came across the border. "If everything went bad, we would never make these conversions delivered to Skywalker Sound," he says. "So I decided to push this data right on the 24th of February."
- The company's co-founder and CTO, Dmytro Bielievtsov, was able to get online in the theater where tabletops, books, and more had been stacked in front of windows in case of blasts.
- The programmers were able to replicate Jones' voice, and the editors put together this work from the corridors in the apartment. One even went to an ancient brick basement that was no bigger than a crawl space.
- In California at Skywalker Sound, Matthew Wood, the supervisor sound editor, was receiving transmissions from Ukraine.
- "Certainly my main concern was their well-being," says Wood, who is a 32-year veteran of Lucasfilm. "There are always alternatives that we could pursue that wouldn’t be as good as what they would give us. We never wanted to put them in any kind of additional danger to stay in the office to do something. "
- Respeecher did an incredible job of recreating the unforgettable menacing way that Jones, who is now 91, sounded half a lifetime ago.
- Respeecher has continued to work on many projects that are still top secret.
- "It’s been hard," Serdiuk says. "A 44- million nation is in pain. Many refugees, many civilians died, many people in the army died because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We all have the additional [responsibility] of helping each other. You’ve seen how united and resilient Ukrainians are at this moment, but in terms of how we live now: We wake up, we go to work, and then we go home and try to get some sleep. I’m currently separated from my family. So my wife and daughter, they’re abroad. I brought them to the border as soon as it all started.”
- After completing the work on Vader, Belyaev started helping victims of the war. He has helped refugees find food and shelter, and those who have suffered immensely.
- Many have asked why he was so determined to finish this work, and he responded with, "Why did I do it? It’s a big honor to work with Lucasfilm, and I’ve been a fan of Star Wars since I was a kid. Even if it’s war, there’s no excuse for you to be the troublemaker of what you loved from childhood."