Rachel Maclean gives a spy thriller its entire cast

Sean Connery encounters Marilyn Monroe returning from the dead. That is the premise FACT gives for Rachel Maclean’s 2023 short film DUCK, which turns a British spy thriller into an unsteady world of familiar faces.[2]

Those faces make a promise about what the characters will be like. FACT’s description points out that Maclean, often acting deliberately unlike the original stars, breaks that promise. She plays all the roles.[2]

The film transforms Maclean’s face and voice with deepfake techniques. For the audio, Martin Disley, then a PhD candidate at Edinburgh’s Institute for Design Informatics, developed a voice clone for each character. The models converted Maclean’s voice recorded on set into the characters’ voices.[1]

This leaves two kinds of work in the same line of dialogue: Maclean’s performed delivery and the model’s transformation into a recognisable voice. Her acting acquires a different audible identity.[1]

At Edinburgh Art Festival’s Sounds of Deep Fake installation, visitors could manipulate those voice models firsthand, according to the institute.[1]

In the gallery’s reading, Monroe understands the power of being an image and uses its instability to her advantage. Connery becomes less sure of his world. The film turns the spy genre’s gendered expectations back on its protagonist. Casting and characterisation pull apart: recognising the star no longer tells the viewer how to read the person on screen.[2]

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