I’ve always had a soft spot for incredibly crappy film dubbing—especially this Bill Murray SNL classic that I hadn’t seen in 30 years but remember like it was yesterday…

…and not to mention Police Academy (“Damn you, wanna fight? Fight me!!“):

Not every example is so charming, however and now a company called Flawless plans to use neural networks to fit actors’ mouth movements to dialogue:

“The extraction of facial data” — a time-consuming computational process — “runs parallel with the production itself.” The technology strips actors’ faces off, converting their visages into a 3D model, according to Lynes. “This creates millions of 3D models, which the AI uses as reference points,” he says.

“And then, using an existing foreign-language recording of the dialogue, it studies the actor and generates a new 3D model per frame,” he adds. Finally, the imagery is converted back to 2D. Digital effects artists can then manually fix anything that seems off.