voiceover is hard, part 37
i couldn’t have said it better myself.
well, maybe i could have tried, but it would have taken a great deal more effort to do so, and it’s much easier to just link to someone else’s strong work and go, “yeah! what he said!” i have a bit of experience with what he said, having been involved in voiceover production for a so-called “triple A” MMO. and everything he says rings true. tragically, depressingly true. getting VO into a game of that size typically follows this sequence of potential pitfalls…
1) a script is written. and when i say “script”, i mean a collection of lines & phrases pulled together from hundreds if not thousands of seperate moments of gameplay that may or may not be interconnected. and when i say “written”, i mean a collection of words & punctuation concatenated in some more-or-less readable fashion, often by people with little training as writers. so the script ends up being tens of thousands of fragments of dialog, penned by dozens of non-writers, seperated by team divisions, over the course of years. sure, it’ll all feel like an organic whole. and we’re off!
2) the actors are cast. but due to budgetary contrainsts and the basic laws of physics, there cannot be a one-to-one correspondence between actors and speaking roles. so the talent search becomes complicated as it becomes more of a ten-to-one correspondence, with each actor being responsible for as many roles / voices as you can get out of him or her. this of course means you want to find actors that not only have a great voice, but have ten great voices. and for the love of god, this means no more “in-house talent” (read: co-workers who are up for anything). stop it. we’re done with that.
3) the actors perform the script. which usually amounts to a lone figure in a booth reading hundreds of lines once or maybe twice, straight down the page. this proceeds for hours, with only brief pauses between lines for a sip of earl grey or to look over the exhaustive (one word) stage direction for the next line. “angry”. “happy”. “purple”. so much for in-depth character study and the proverbial “what’s my motivation?” no time for that. we’ve got 12,000 lines to get through by 5pm. hustle, hustle! it *would* be nice if we had more time to spend on each line. it *would* be nice if the actors actually got to interact with one another. someday, maybe. but even so / in the meantime…mad props to the actors who manage to make the dialog work 95% of the time, despite all the limitations.
4) the audio editors edit the VO recordings. no matter how awesome batch processing is these days – and it’s awesome – some of that stuff just has to be done by hand. truncating files, chopping out bits you don’t need, needledicking every last mouth click and breath noise, etc. and once you introduce the possibility of human error into the production of 50,000 audio files…stuff happens.
5) the VO gets integrated. if you’ve really got your shit together, you can just drop the files in and the magic will happen, right? you won’t have any instances of multiple lines simultaneously coming out of a single mouth, stepping on each other. you won’t have different actors voicing lines spoken by a single character. and each actor will have read every line for a given character in *exactly* the same voice character, maintaining perfect consistency across those hundreds of lines, perhaps even spanning multiple recording sessions and re-do / pick-up takes. and of course all the VO will match the onscreen text perfectly. yep. what could go wrong?
going by the above, it’s a wonder *all* game VO doesn’t suck eggs. and it’s a testament to the professionalism of everybody involved with those games with great voiceover.
