While “The Greatest” depicted a wider range of disabilities, the new ad shines a personal light on speech loss, drawing on people’s concerns over missing out on moments with loved ones due to the inability to speak.
The narrator and actor who plays the father in “The Lost Voice” is a real user of Personal Voice: Dr. Tristram Ingham, a physician, associate professor of epidemiology and a disability advocate from Wellington, New Zealand. Ingham has facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy, which causes progressive muscle degeneration and can lead to speech loss.
To create the narration, Ingham used his own Personal Voice on the iPhone, recording 150 prompt phrases that were then processed to read out the lines of the story.
The film’s score—an avant-garde track called “Yodeler” by husband-wife duo X Carbon—was also created out of human voice samples.
Waititi—known for movies such as Jojo Rabbit and Thor: Love and Thunder—shot the ad in his native New Zealand. Besides the animated characters and puppets, the human cast are all from the country, as well.
Along with the film, Apple turned the book that the dad reads from into a real storybook, which will be available as a free download on ebook platform Apple Books starting Nov. 30.
The goal of the book and film is to raise awareness but also to help others process speech loss with their families and young children.
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