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How to Direct Voice Actors in Video Games

How to Direct Voice Actors in Video Games

Video games are continuing to boom as an industry. And as a result of that greater popularity, the expectation for voice acting is only getting higher and higher. Gone are the days of getting your friends to do it for free and hoping that would work out. 

Voiceover: I'm fully aware of what I'm doing. Can you see? Man committed a sin, disturbing the lifecycle of nature. The original sin that man is responsible to, to protect the life cycle. 

This is the second of three videos about the best ways of working with actors for video games. The first cover the casting process, and if you haven't watched it already, you can check it out here. In this video, we're going to look at how you can make your actual recording session with a voice actor as creatively stimulating and productive as possible. This is intended to apply to all forms of voice acting and video games. But for something as specialized as performance capture or motion capture, those are subjects that I would really like to approach in another video in the future. There is also an important distinction I would like to make between a voice actor and a voice over. And there is a distinction. 

Of course, both require acting skills. But with voiceover, there's a particular style to it, there is a pattern, a formula that's actually at work. With voice actors where the emphasis is on the second word, then there's more process of using our imaginations, engaging emotionally with a character and actually putting ourselves in another person's shoes. Now performer can be both a voiceover and a voice actor simultaneously. You just need to be aware of the distinction, to be aware of the different skill sets that are associated with each. It's quite a confusing topic because different people brand themselves in different ways at different times. So for my commercial and corporate work, I will brand myself as a voice over but when I'm talking about games, I'll emphasize the acting part. Actually hiring a voice director to work with the actors on your behalf is probably the best solution. And it also allows you the opportunity to learn through observation, but you may not be in a position to hire them. And either way, some of the points that’ll raised in this video may be useful for your future learning. So to start, let's talk preparation. 

If you can discuss the character with the actor before the actual session. Talk about their characteristics, their background, their relationships, and the world of the game. If you have time, be open to a dialogue and make the actual creation of the character as collaborative as possible. Provide the scripts which are often called sides as quickly as possible. Most voice actors can actually be very good side readers but the more time we have with the script, the better the end product will be. If the game has a lot of conversations between different actors, then try and organize a table read of some sort, even if it is only through zoom. It means that everyone will get a whole sense of what the world is like, what the interactions are like and that's something that can feed through even into individual sessions. And then if you have a discussion at the end, where people can ask questions, it means that you only have to answer them once rather than repeating yourself time after time. 

Looking to the script itself, if there are any unusual pronunciations, then make sure that you have a guide so that everybody is on the same page. And try to resist the temptation to actor proof your script by throwing in objectives all the time telling them how they should say something, the odd direction of angry or whispered can be very good in terms of providing context to why someone is saying something in a particular way. But if it's every line or every other line, then it just limits the potential options open to the actor, which stifles their creativity and will probably be deleted anyway. Essentially as performers, we can only perform to the size of the space that you actually grant us. And finally, whenever possible, budget for more session time than you think you'll need. When a session begins, make the process clear for everyone. Make it clear how many scenes that you're covering, what different emotional states are required in each and where they come from in the game. 

Obviously, that could just be you and the actor, that could be a director but there could also be a producer or writer or any other number of people on the line. Regardless of how many there are ensure that only one person is actually giving direction to the actor, so that they're not lost in a cacophony of voices. Spend the first five to 10 minutes of the session, just checking in with the other actor, seeing where they are, how their days been, and what they're going to be like to direct. Obviously, in all cases, time is money. And if you've got 5000, as opposed to 500 words to do in a three hour session, then you want to be getting on with things. But still having that chat at the start is useful for gauging the tone for the whole session. Ask the actor if they have any questions about the character about the background about the sides, whatever. But obviously, if you've been able to build in some pre session time, this will be less of an issue. 

One crucial aspect to bear in mind is the order in which you approach material. If there's a particularly emotional scene or a lot of shouting involved, then it's usually better to place that towards the end of the session, but each actor may work differently. For some they may warm up with shouting first and foremost, different actors voices work in different ways. So check in with them before coming to a mutual decision. And one final thing before starting make sure that a break schedule has been agreed. Make sure that you enforce it, not the actor. Actors will tend to want to keep going and sometimes that's absolutely great because they're in the moment, they're feeling something, but they're still not necessarily the best objective judge of their vocal health, especially if they're inexperienced. Small breaks are important, both to replenish the mind and the body. When you finally get to the recording, you need to tell your actor at every scene, the where, the what and the why. 

The where, where does the scene take place? Is it a battlefield? Is it a council chamber? Is it a bedroom? How big is the space? Are there other people there? And how far away am I from the person that I'm talking to? The what is the essential physical action. Am I running away? Am I in the middle of the battle? Or am I working in an office. And the why is what is the objective behind the characters actions? Of course, all of this information combines with the Greater Life of the character, and also the world of the game. And again, if you've done all of that prep work in advance, then it means you can be a lot more succinct when you're actually recording. But it's crucial to focus on these essentials rather than getting distracted by any extraneous information. It's also very useful to think in terms of the characters emotional state, and generally they break down into being either mad, sad or glad. 

Obviously, there's a whole spectrum of choices lying across those three distinctions, but it's still useful to have one in mind as a starting point at each scene. It could also be useful to think of a character's driving forces coming from either their head, their heart or their groin. Just saying the same line with the same logical objective but those three different things in mind will give you different results. When at all possible, be flexible with the actual words themselves be open to the idea of aligning words or changing them if they don't feel quite natural. For theatre actors, especially the can sometimes be a reverence for the word on the page. So sometimes you need to actively give permission to mess things up and make things more believable. Hesitations, gasps, half said words and repetitions are all little things that can give texture to language in a whole new way. Think of encouraging these improvisations even before the actual words begin. 

Adele Cutting, a voice director suggests using them as springboards into an actual line itself, which you can cut afterwards. Different actors work in different ways. And if you try and enforce some one size fits all process for everyone, then it's probably going to end up limiting the results that you actually get. But try to describe the stakes in a given scene as vividly as possible using the right transitive verb. The more vivid a transitive verb is, the more stimulating it is to play as an actor. There is the difference between telling an actor to ask for forgiveness and telling them to beg or plead for forgiveness. You want to use language that is going to ignite an actor's imagination, not stifle it. So familiarizing yourself with a book like Actions, The Actors Thesaurus, would be a really great stuff to that process. Boiling down a scene to what it's essentially about is always important, but can be particularly important when we're thinking in terms of genre.

To give a personal example, I was recently working on a scene with a video game director, in which one of my companions was killed. My initial response was to take the subsequent scene very literally, like it was therefore going to be a fight to the death. But after I'd gone in horribly wrong a couple of times, the director actually pointed out that in the context of the game, which was set in a post-apocalyptic world, with lots of zombies being killed all the time, the actual essential of the scene was actually about confronting a bullet, not about a fight to the death. It was a subtle changing of the stakes, as opposed to a lessening of them, which completely changed my playing of the scene as a result. 

I think the final thing I want to say is that you should be thinking in terms of how you want the character to make you feel, as opposed to how you want them to actually sound. If you start a session with a very preconceived idea of how things should go, then it's going to be very stifling, and collaborative and also very uninspired. Sometimes lines have to be spoken in a particular way for a particular reason. And if necessary, alone reading can be justifiable if an actor really isn't getting it. But it really should be a very selective approach. You want to be part of an exciting, collaborative, creative experience. And by approaching it with the right preparation, and the right attitude all the way through, it can really be achievable. 

Next time I'll be looking at your relationship with the actor after the recording process, which is typically the part most overlooked. If you enjoyed this video, please do like subscribe and turn on notifications and I look forward to seeing you next time.

How To Cast Voice Actors For Games

How To Cast Voice Actors For Games

By British Male Voiceover Artist Chris Tester

Whether your game is part of a huge Triple A billion franchise, or it's just you as a single developer, getting the right voice actors to be part of your game is particularly crucial. Especially with gamers expecting more believable, authentic performances as standard. In this video, I'm going to talk about how to cast voice actors. The when, the where, the how, and the what. This will be the first of three videos on the subject, with a second looking at how you actually work with the voice actor during a directed session itself. And the third looking at your relationship with the voice actor after the game is released. How they can help with marketing and promotion, and expand your broader network. So let's get started with the where. Where you cast your voice actors will depend on what you're looking for, your budget, and how many roles you need to fill. Recommendations and referrals from other game developers, voice actors or voice directors is a great way to start. It's a way of being introduced to a whole variety of talent that you might not be familiar with, but which has been vetted, been proven in some way. Of course, a pretty standard route is to contact agents, either voice agents and acting agents and ask them about the talent on their books. 

If you have a particular talent in mind, then just google their name and an agency and it'll probably pop up. Or alternatively, just google any major city name and voice agent or acting agent and lots of options will come up to. You could collaborate with specialist audio production companies who have their own talent database. You can look on social media, and especially Twitter, where a lot of voice actors are particularly active. And either put a casting call out there directly yourself, or alternatively, reach out to a company or an individual that specializes in casting indie games. You can google search voice actors and find out more about them from their website, which might be quite a long winded way if you don't know exactly what you're looking for. But if you like an actor's previous work, then you may be able to reach out directly. Or of course, you could put a casting call out on a pay to play site or voiceover casting site, inviting lots of voice actors that you may not be familiar with at all to audition for your roles and seeing what the results are. Now there is no best or worst source of where you can actually get hold of the actors that you want to audition in the first place. 

But I would say be wary of making your casting call too broad or open. Some of these avenues will result in you receiving hundreds of applications which you'll have to trawl through in order to find what you want, which can be exhausting. So the more selective you are at the front end, the more seamless the whole process will be afterwards. When do you cast your voice actors? Again, it depends on a project by project basis. But typically, if it's a more character based game than the earlier, the better. If you cast early, then it allows your writers to become more familiar with the voice that they're actually writing for, which will result in a greater degree of authenticity. It means you can have less time sensitive meetings with your actors to discuss the role and you can be a sounding board for each other's ideas. These sorts of creative discussions in the early stages could mean that your time actually in the booth recording with the voice actor is much lower as a result. But if the role is more functional than that's not necessary. 

[Voiceover: Now, you will suffer our wrath.]

In which case casting closer to the actual recording time may be more suitable, because it ensures an actor's availability. How do you cast your voice actors? The wisest thing to do to start off with is to delegate if you can afford to. Voice directors will often already be familiar with talent, how to direct talent, and it will allow you to pick up experience along the way through observation. Each actor may need a slightly different approach depending on the material. A professional director can save you time and get creative results that you never might have expected.

Voice over[Troy Baker on Director Neil Druckmann]: We start shooting the scene action and I go straight into it. And it feels weird and it feels false. And we do it three or four times and Neil walks up to me in between takes and I'll never forget this and he says I'm picking up on some resistance. And I said yeah, you're damn right, you're picking up on some resistance because we've got it. It's in the can it was take one. And he said let me tell you what I have. I have a man broken, I said guy his fucking daughter just died. He goes, No, I have a man broken what I don't have is what's happening, this is happening. I can fix it. It's not working. She's going she's gone, I’m broken. And that is when I realized that Neil Druckmann was the greatest director I've ever worked with.

It can be argued that not all voice directors are created equal. But the majority may provide a level of expertise that can prove invaluable. But if it is only you and you can't afford a voice director, then I do suggest that you check out a couple of acting books. 

Something like Stanislavski’s, An Actor Prepares and David Mamet's True And False. A crucial part of the casting process is creating an actual character breakdown with imagery of the character, their age, their physicality, their accent, their voice description and biography, ideally. When casting you'll be asking actors to read lines for the character that you might want to actually cast them as. These lines are typically called sides, audition sides. And when you write them, it's important to provide as much context as possible. An actor will say a line completely differently depending on who they're speaking to, why they're speaking to them, and where they're speaking to them as well. Try to resist the temptation to copy and paste some of your actual script for the audition sides. You want to hear as many different facets of the character as possible as quickly as possible. So if that's possible in existing lines from the actual game itself, that's great. But if not, then write a scene or an exchange that actually serves that purpose, so that every single different part of the audition is actually helping you to make a choice. 

Depending on how in depth you want the process to be, I would recommend having a first and then a second round of auditions. In the first round, have them a sample based auditions, where you provide direction the actor records them, and then you review them. And then you could have a second round, which would be a live directed session. So either you or the voice director would be working with the actor through a set script, and you could see what your relationship is like and how free and open they are to actual direction. If you have reference points to the type of game that you want to make, then share them. If you tell a voice actor that the game is in the style of The Last of Us or in the style of Zelda or in the style of Doom, then we immediately get an impression of what that world is like and how those characters would interact. Even if we don't, if we're not gamers, then we can go on to YouTube, see some of that game footage and get an impression very quickly as well. Above all else, look for people who are voice actors as opposed to voiceovers. If that makes sense. Many voiceovers may have a beautiful voice and it does also require acting, but it's a different kind of skill set. Appreciate that Screen Actors might give very detailed realistic performances, but they also might struggle in being able to communicate verbally what they would normally Express physically, facially.

Voice over: It has been amusing watching your sea-wracked corpses stumble and doddder as you tracked the prey

Some stage actors may be particularly good at bigger characterizations or multi character parts, but some of them could be a little bit too big or performative. And again, depending on experience, some might have quite a lot of mic technique, and others may have none. All of these things will have a greater or lesser importance depending on the type of game that you want to make. So for example, if you put a filmic Actor in a performance capture context, where they're also going to have their face mapped as well, then all of those issues might not be an issue at all. And similarly, if your voice actor is working with an audio engineer during the session, then then being on or off mic is going to be less of a practical concern rather than if they're recording from a home studio and are responsible themselves for gauging their distance from a mic. 

If your project is going to involve home studio talent, then ensure that all of their auditions take place using the setup that they'd actually use. Have the recordings vetted by an audio engineer. Because even if something sounds possible, there may be issues with it. Also bear in mind that you're looking for acoustic continuity, you want to ensure that all these voices sound as if they've come from the same place with a minimum of fuss. And also cast as authentically as possible. It's 2020 and there's enough talent out there. It's not an excuse to say that you can't find it. And finally, for what, how much would you actually pay your voice actors. Actors fees typically break down into two things; a per hour fee, called the basic studio fee, which covers their actual recording time. And a buyout that actually licenses their voice for your game, which is normally the basic studio fee again, or a multiple of it. Obviously, as the demands of a project expands, so will the fee.