James Earl Jones is the voice behind legendary Star Wars’ villain Darth Vader, but it seems the 91-year-old has finally hung up his helmet.

In an interview with Vanity Fair, Star Wars sound supervising editor Matthew Wood said Jones “was looking into winding down this… character”.

Jones’s voice was remastered from the original Star Wars films for recent Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Some of Jones’s archival voice recordings were also used.

For future Star Wars projects, Jones has reportedly granted permission for Disney and Lucasfilm to use artificial intelligence and archival recordings to recreate his voice. Read More

CNN — “Salt” resembles many science-fiction films from the ’70s and early ‘80s, complete with 35mm footage of space freighters and moody alien landscapes. But while it looks like a throwback, the way it was created points to what could be a new frontier for making movies.

“Salt” is the brainchild of Fabian Stelzer. He’s not a filmmaker, but for the last few months he’s been largely relying on artificial intelligence tools to create this series of short films, which he releases roughly every few weeks on Twitter.

Stelzer creates images with image-generation tools such as Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and DALL-E 2. He makes voices mostly using AI voice generation tools such as Synthesia or Murf. And he uses GPT-3, a text-generator, to help with the script writing.

There’s an element of audience participation, too. After each new installment, viewers can vote on what should happen next. Stelzer takes the results of these polls and incorporates them into the plot of future films, which he can spin up more quickly than a traditional filmmaker might since he’s using these AI tools. Read More