CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, February 08, 2022

Book of Boba Fett: Who Played Luke Skywalker? Voice Explained

gizmodo.com: The young, post-Return of the Jedi Luke Skywalker who appeared in last week’s penultimate episode of The Book of Boba Fett looked a great deal better than the young, post-Return of the Jedi, and extremely janky CG Luke Skywalker who picked up Grogu in the season two finale of The Mandalorian. However, there was still something off about Luke.

2 comments:

Brynn Sklar said...

I usually have grievances with Disney renditions of Star Wars media and as a whole, Book of Boba Fett has been a huge point of contention. My biggest gripe about the series, aside from the fact that they needed excessive amounts of cameos to carry the plot, was surrounding the uncanny looking character of computer generated Luke Skywalker. In his first appearance, before even uttering a line, I noticed that his facial and movement tracking was just slightly off. With such a large budget for these types of shows, I was surprised to find how little fluidity the character had and how off his gestures seemed. On top of that, his voice. I always thought it sounded oddly robotic and I did not know until reading this article that they used Respeecher to edit old recorded sounds together. Mark Hamill, the original Luke Skywalker, surely cannot sound THAT different from what he did 30 or 40 years ago right? I kind of wished that they just left his character out of this show altogether.

Kyle Musgrove said...

Following various experimentations that Disney and Lucasfilm have done over the last few years of live-action Star Wars has been an extremely fascinating experience for me. Star Wars is in a very unique position, being a franchise that has been around for nearly 5 decades now and has traversed almost every entertainment medium available to it during that time. It began in live-action with live actors and very rudimentary CGI and practical effects, and since then has evolved and pioneered those effects right alongside the larger entertainment industry. However, this position is starting to come with some very noticeable drawbacks. Case and point, it's been challenging to return to the in-universe era of the original trilogy with all of the surviving original cast looking and sounding completely different than they did when it was first released. Even with the tremendous strides technology has taken in the last few decades, it's still nearly impossible to perfectly de-age a person on screen. Personally, I'm in favor of just casting new actors and actresses for these old roles, but I can understand the desire to remain faithful to the original portrayals. In terms of the dialogue issues addressed in the article, I just see it as having been a pretty bad forum to attempt such an experiment in soundboarding.