Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) -- Sber – a Russian fintech giant that owns the biggest bank in Central and Eastern Europe and holds digital services with a monthly audience of over 100 mn – has shot a commercial video starring Leonid Kuravlyov, one of the most famous Russian actors, with 39 years taken off him. This is the first deepfake advertisement in Russia.

The commercial video shows the actor as one of his characters, George Miloslavsky, going from 1973 to 2020 and using the Sber ecosystem services – the banking app, telemedicine, taxi, audio streaming, etc. To this end, the company secured the permission of the 84-year-old actor and bought the rights to use the character’s image.

The filming did not require the participation of Leonid Kuravlyov. Instead, when shooting the video Sber used the technology similar to the one utilized for The Irishman, where the age of Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Joe Pesci was changed with the help of CGI. Not only Kuravlyov’s face was deepfaked. His voice was synthesized too, as it was supposed to sound the way it did 39 years ago. The actor’s voice was created by the Sber subsidiary that works with NLP technology. After digesting audio from the feature films starring the young Kuravlyov, the company synthesized his phrases for the video.

George Miloslavsky is a character in the Soviet movie Ivan Vasilievich Back to the Future, which is based on a play by Mikhail Bulgakov, the author of the novel The Master and Margarita. Some refer to the movie as the Soviet Back to the Future, as the protagonist, an engineer, creates a time machine and sends George and his neighbor back to the 16th century, the time of Ivan IV ‘The Terrible’, while the tsar is sent to the Soviet Moscow of 1973.

Nearly 40 years ago it was watched by 60+ million people in the movie theatres. The film usually runs on Russian TV during the New Year holidays along with the US Home Alone and the Soviet The Irony of Fate. Interestingly, George calls on the viewers to keep their money in Sberkassa, the state-owned commercial bank in the Soviet Union, which became Sberbank after the Perestroika political movement. In September 2020, for the array of its businesses Sberbank began using the word Sber, reserving the name Sberbank only for its banking business.