Visionary. Achiever. Legend. These aren’t just a mishmash of adjectives thrown together but a brief summary that can be lent to describe Robert (Bob) Paisley, arguably one of the world's greatest football managers.
His achievements with the Anfield-based club, 20 trophies in a nine-year spell, can hardly be rivalled home and away except by a select few footballing paragons.
As part of the centenary commemoration of Paisley’s birthday, Standard Chartered Bank launched Project Stand Red, envisaging a revolutionary feat to bring the Merseyside legend into the 21st century, as well as millions of Liverpool’s supporters, through a competent cocktail of cinema and technology.
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As part of the effort to recreate the Durham-born icon's managerial and personal accomplishments on celluloid, Standard Chartered have closely followed one mantra - “Using the power of technology” to bring about better human connections.”
After due cognizance, experts working on the project first produced an AI to synthesize speech that can resemble anyone's voice. The team diligently went through over 12 hours of recordings of Paisley's voice, between three & four weeks, to produce content that fits studio quality.
Because many parts of the film are recorded in a live action format, the expertise of a vocal coach was necessary so as to ensure the actor playing Paisley on the big screen imitated the six-time League Manager of the year awardee's distinctive oral movements effectively.
Talking about facial recognition, the engineering team brought Paisley's distinctive features back to life on the screen using grainy images from close to five decades ago. A lot of texture data from photos was put into a model, to produce around 200 unique facial shapes.
The team studied 120 hours of footage, used 42 markers and over 10000 polygons to get the exact shape of Paisley's face and head moulded.
Overall, it’s been a monumental effort and no doubt the creators, as much as the fans, are eagerly awaiting watching their hero in action on the big screen.
To learn more about Standard Chartered’s Project Stand Red and view all the films in the series, visit www.StandRed.com