Voice Talent

[SquareDanceSteve]

Anybody have an opinion on voice talent?

[Christian]

Voice talent is something good to be born with...

(sorry i really dont know what you espect, try to be more... specific?).

Anyone knows where can i learn this skill? any links or tips?.

[Chris Evans]

If you're doing anything beyond quick sound bites, I definitely recommend using professional voice talent for extended dialog. I say it's probably better to have no voice acting rather than bad voice acting. Bad voice acting can be really jarring. So if you're going to do spoken dialog make sure you do it right.

When I used voice talent a couple of years ago, the agency I used charged $300 for a hour with a single actor. Additionally, the recording studio charged $125 an hour. The actual recording session was fine. The hour was plenty of time get a lot of recordings. It was the sound editing afterwards that killed me. That took some time...

I went local, but check out our service/hire forum. There's about a billion sound guys there, I'm sure one of them offers voice work at a decent price.

[PoV]

You can hire a range of talent from ametures to professionals (Radio, TV, Cartoons), and do job postings online at Voices.com (http://www.voices.com).

If you want to learn, beyond taking acting classes (which I think might be half the battle), there are several books on the subject. This one (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0240804791/sr=8-1/qid=1154840161/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-1254693-8649520?ie=UTF8) is good, and this one (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0823083705/sr=1-1/qid=1154840746/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-1254693-8649520?ie=UTF8&s=books) has an intriguing (but initially complex) warmup routine. There are many more books under the topics of "voice acting" and "voice overs", just these are the ones I've read.

As for some getting started tips, the general consensus from the literature I've read says you need to learn to relax. Neck, tongue, belly, and you probably didn't even realize you were not relaxed. As far as voice is concerned, you need to not be shy or afraid to speak when your up to the mic. Beyond just having a lowsy Mic, bad voice acting as you see in flash cartoons is often the result of whisper acting. People starting out are often too afraid to speak loudly in to a microphone. So you may need to build up enough confidence to speek more freely in to the mic before you'll start to get acceptable results. And a nice instant gratification tip for articulation, albiet, a little messy. Place a pencil horizontally in your mouth (not down your throat), supporting it with your front teeth. Then while supporting the pencil, read something and overly enunciate every significant sound in each word. That means don't forget to voice the trailing t (teh) sound, which I found I would do. Do that until your cheeks start to get a little sore. That's how you can strengthen some face muscles. Immediately after even the first time you try that exercise, you should be able to read something (without the pencil) and notice a difference in your articulation and clarity. Record a before and after, and be amused. That tip, and a lot more can be found in those books I suggested.

Of course, that just covers the voice part. Character voices require time to refine and to be able to voice naturally, and acting is a lot harder than you'd expect. I've been doing it as a hobby for quite some time, but I'm still not quite there yet.

[AnthemAudio]

There is nothing worse than when a programmer or other executive really wants their voice to be in the game and they have a horrible voice for the part. Or just a horrible voice in general. (I said programmer because that's "usually" who it is I will have to deal with. Anyone can be perfectly bad at speaking aloud.) In that case I'll usually have his friends in there in the booth egging him on. It creates a lot more noise and a whole lot more editing on my part but I can get better results when they loosen up and speak normally. Still a pain in the ass. If you can afford the talent, go with it.

The tricky part is the studio fee and the editing hours. I've gotten really fast editing dialog what with having to do several hundred edits in a day at least a few times a week. For instance, if you had an upcoming project that did need voice over I could give you a good estimate of what I charge.;)

My previous career before doing game audio full time was a live theater manager. Which also means I've done tons of acting and have a pretty good speaking voice with plent of accents to boot. Every time I go back to California, all my actor friends ask how they can get into games, so there isn't a shortage of talent if you know where to look.

Most projects I end up doing multiple voices myself. Heck, I could show you a trailer where I did all three voices of the characters in the scene...where is that...?

SoulKeeper Trailer (http://www.machinima.com/films.php?id=2254)

I had actually contracted three people to do the voices but we just didn't like their performances. We were really nitpicky about it since we were bringing it to IGF for Best Mod so I just ended up doing all three voices. One morning I had a very bad cold and said to myself "DIFFERENT VOICE!!!" so I re-recorded myself again as one of the characters but with my sick voice and it worked rather well.

Hmm...think I'll update my Art & Sound Portfolio thread with an emphasis on voice work so I stop spamming threads with my project links.

Tony

[PoV]

There is nothing worse than when a programmer or other executive really wants their voice to be in the game and they have a horrible voice for the part.
Dude, OddWorld: Stranger's Wrath. I bought the game 'cause a friend was involved, but Stranger's voice was done by Lorne Lanning (President/Founder of Oddworld), and the acting, voice, and dialog was so bad, I refused to play the game. I swear, the recordings were overdriven as well. I couldn't stand it. Now I crack out that game whenever friends/colleagues and I get in to discussions about character voices.

[Anthony Flack]

It's not too hard to record voices if you have a decent microphone and half-decent soundcard, and you make sure to set the levels right and don't breathe on the mic. And the editing is time-consuming, but it's something you should be able to do yourself. Even if you hired a studio to record in, I don't see any need to pay someone to cut the tracks for you. Any programmer type should be able to handle that job well enough.

Using good actors is the main thing. People who can deliver the lines relaxed; not uptight - as AnthemAudio says. It may be that some of your friends could do a pretty decent job. I used a friend who's very funny in real life, and who had some voiceover experience. And I gave him prompts, but no script, and let him ad-lib for a couple of hours. Then I grabbed all the best bits. Usually they came out after he'd been ranting for a while; it's hard to deliver a natural-sounding line "cold" after someone's just said "okay, I'm recording now". It came out pretty good, and it was free.

Resident Evil 4 was the last game to depress me with its voice acting. After all that money they spent, why was the script and acting so horrible? Yes, I know, it's better than the "master of unlocking", buit still...

Psychonauts, on the other hand, was the last game to impress me with great voice acting.

[Christian]

Thanks, voice seems to be pretty interesting and fun thing to do, yet another cool thing to learn :)

[milo]

A word of caution when outsourcing voice: Make sure you can be present in the studio when they are recording your script. Most games are filled with made-up words and place names and character names, and you can't expect studio actors to know how to pronounce "Zyxzifritzis" or even to mispronounce it consistently from one take to the next. Even if you provide them with a pronunciation sample guide, the director is not likely to memorize it well enough to catch these kinds of errors in the studio.

[PoV]

Then a word of advice then. Don't name your characters "Zyxzifritzis". Players will have just as difficult of a time remembering such names. It's not like going from Zyxzifritzis to Zax will make the character any less significant... unless name length has some status in social/command structure (like "the tallest"). And if you must use freakish names, at least spell them in the script phonetically (phone-et-ick-lee). 'course, that's probably a good idea weather you're dealing with professionals or not.

[AnthemAudio]

That's the first thing I usually do once I get the script. I highlight every question mark of a pronunciation and try to get a phonetic spelling or reading over the phone. The last project I had to do this the words "Rinukah" and "Oort" were in the same sentence on the very fiirst page so knew I was in for some fun and got the guys phone number.

Although I think I did a good job of guessing what the hell all those words in the last script for DROD. I didn't play Journey to Rooted Hold much so I guessed (I think pretty accurately) what the hell was going on. The players seemed to think so on the Caravel forums at least and that's who mattered.

Tony

[lennard]

I've used them a couple of times and they were very reasonable, let me have several takes over the internet, etc.. You can hear them on Battle Castles (the word is yelled when the game starts) and they did all three narrators on 50 Castles.

[milo]

PoV: Just to make this more concrete, here are some names and words that were consistently mispronounced, or were pronounced inconsistently by different actors:

Borova, Baradan, Janus, Janek, Marakan, Hegemony, Force:Space, Force:Intel.

You wouldn't think (or at least I didn't think) these would be all that difficult to get right. And I provided an audio file of myself giving the correct pronunciations*. Nevertheless, I had to edit or re-record quite a bit of material to get it consistent.

--milo
http://www.starshatter.com

*For those of you playing at home, the first five words all carry the strongest emphasis on the first syllable, and almost all of the A's are short as in "hat" except for Baradan = /bear'-uh-dan/ and Marakan = /mare'-uh-can/. Force:Space should be pronounced as one word, the same as "airforce".

[PrefixEx]

PoV:
*For those of you playing at home, the first five words all carry the strongest emphasis on the first syllable, and almost all of the A's are short as in "hat" except for Baradan = /bear'-uh-dan/ and Marakan = /mare'-uh-can/. Force:Space should be pronounced as one word, the same as "airforce".

...For Force:Space and Force:Intel it *might* be the punctuation - if it were written as ForceSpace or ForceIntel, I think most actors would pronounce it just like AirForce or PowerPoint.

This note comes from just having an actor look over a script I was working on that had equally odd punctuation.

[PrefixEx]

Anybody have an opinion on voice talent?

Generally, I have found working with voice talent to be one the the most fun aspects of game design.

The problem is that often you need to:
A. write your script,
B. have the voice acting done
C. screen it to someone outside the process
D. do re-writes and loop to B.

[Brian A. Knudsen]

what cost is it to get voices in game? which ranges? I'm curious how to allocated it on budget.

[Reactor]

I was just about to mention this super-talented guy named Tony we had do a few voices for our game, and also about how great the voices were in that SoulKeeper Trailer. I looked back at the trailer post again and... there was Tony, doing what he does best ;)

[Brian A. Knudsen]

i downloaded the soul keeper trailer. Jesus its long, but i was surprised to find to it was same actor doing all voices. Its neat.

[AnthemAudio]

The trailer is in fact hella long. Personally I think it could have used more editing. But people at IGF really dug it and I had a blast doing those characters. Heck, someone has to do deep and commanding now that Tony Jay is gone.

If you don't know who Tony Jay is, check out his IMDB.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0419645/

Guaranteed you've heard his voice in a cartoon or videogame. Sniff:(

[PoV]

Aww crap. It was this commanding/evil sounding guy. :(

http://www.poetsonbroadway.com/Sounds/TV%20Commercial%20Promo.wav
http://www.poetsonbroadway.com/Voices.htm

I didn't know him by name, but somehow, given all the press, I suspected it was that voice. His work's been sampled a bunch and used to give presense to some evil sounding electronic music. I can't remember what though.

[soniCron]

There are some excellent articles here:

http://www.voiceacting.com/vo101/

[conat]

This is algo a good information website for voice overs and voice talent http://voice123.com/ they have a resource center where you can find lots of articles. Hope this helps.