Phantasmagoria ep 1 in A.I. excerpt (with sound) Sir Nikolas Valentine 1st scene

Not lip synched. A simple two-hander scene from the opening minutes of Phantasmagoria by Mark Gatiss. The scene introduces the villain Sir Nikolas Valentine.

Lip synching remains a huge hurdle. Understandably at this point the software seems to want a very clean audio track and naturally a radio play, especially something like Doctor Who, is going to be very busy and noisy. Also a ton of clips were generated to "prompt/curate" this scene and in many the characters were "talking" and it's clear the A.I. is more impressive than this sequence gives it credit for. When the characters are "talking" their jaws move, their head moves and sometimes even their body will subtly move with the exertion of talking. The A.I. is incredibly naturalistic which is why merely lip synching a moving pair of lips onto footage is never going to be as successfully convincing. Maybe that will come in the next few generations...??? For now this remains a mere suggestion of performance and possibilities. It was great fun to try to block it and "shoot it" like a proper scene. It was really lovely to find more and more I was making artistic choices with how to achieve this sequence rather than be constrained by what the A.I. would let me do. I had a significant degree of real choice.