Using latent space manipulation and neural animation to generate hyperreal synthetic faces is described. A machine learning model(s) may be trained to generate a synthetic face of a subject featured in unaltered video content based at least in part on video data of an actor making a mouth-generated sound or a three-dimensional (3D) model of a face of the subject that has been animated in accordance with the mouth-generated sound. Latent space manipulation and neural animation may be used with the trained machine learning model(s) to generate instances of the synthetic face, and the instances of the synthetic face can be used to create altered video content featuring the subject with the synthetic face making the mouth-generated sound.