Dale was always swearing by video game work but tonight’s Heineken seems to have animated him even more than usual. “I finally got my car back from the shop thanks to that Eldritch gig,” he says, waving the stub of his cigarette around. “I know you think you’ve got better stuff to be doing, but that dinky theater company of yours isn’t going to pay the rent. Right?”
Rebecca stares off the balcony into Culver City’s balmy orange night. “Yeah. Not here, anyway.”
“Well, either you’re gonna make it work here, or you’re gonna give up,” Dale says, with uncharacteristic bluntness, as he lights up again. “Don’t think it’s going to be any easier in New York. Seriously.”
Suddenly, he sits up in his cheap plastic patio chair, mouth widening into a frown, chest expanding with air. “In a land long obscured by the Shroud of Mist, a new evil something something. And they were called... the Eldritch Kings,” he stentorates, then belches. “Seven hundred dollars.”
Rebecca smirks. “How many beers have you had?”
Dale gives a sharp, short laugh, and raises his bottle. “Still on my first, baby.”
Of course she runs into Dale in the lobby, as if this gig wasn’t going to be embarrassing enough. But instead of rushing over to crow about seeing her here and how he got her the job and everything, he just waves nonchalantly.
“Sorry,” he says as they approach each other. “I’d chat but I just shouted my throat sore, and I need to let it heal up before I perform tonight. Take it easy.”
A kid who looks like he just turned nineteen is holding scripts and ushers her into the booth. Two guys, plus an engineer, are hanging out in the studio. She picks out the game designer immediately– the other one seems to be local, some typical Hollywood sound guy. The script, quaintly, has a cover page. It says The Eldritch Kings II: Spirits of Hul’nor.
Rebecca puts her headphones on and after the requisite can-you-hear-mes the game designer starts talking. “So you’re this elf who’s like a strong-willed fighter, you know, really ass-kicking... she’s lived through some dark times, seen her village attacked and wiped out by the, uh, by the bad guys. Basically, even though there was a truce called at the Council of the Eight, it turned out that, you know, it wasn’t taken very seriously, and there was a–” he’s cut off. The audio guy has punched out, and now they’re arguing with each other. Rebecca flips through her script. Okay. This thing must be at least fifty pages. It’s got a section at the end headed “non-verbal exclamations.” The last page is a sheet with a character biography and fantasy art of a chick with pointy ears holding a sword and wearing armor that bares her midriff and her thighs.
Boys.
“Let your arrows fly!”
“Uh. One more time?”
“Let your arrows fly!” Inside the studio the game designer’s head is glued to his script, nodding autistically at each line. “Press the attack!” The longest this session can last is four hours before they have to start paying her extra. “Destroy them, my sisters!” After reading some lines they called “cinematic”– because, she guesses, it was like the cinema– they had moved onto these bursts of dialogue they designated as “chatter”. She can tell they just want to power through these, and they are going to need to in order to fit this all into one session.
“For the kingdom!” Dale said something once about repetition being the enemy of video game voiceover, which is why they always recorded thousands of lines. “My life for victory!” Apparently the game would just pick one of these randomly in battle situations. “Expel the invaders!” And because nobody could predict exactly when these lines would be triggered, she’s doing them all in the same cadence, the same level of excitement. “I will bring them to ruin!” The words weren’t repeating, but the reads were– wasn’t that just as bad? “Wipe them out! All of them!” In the studio the game designer is laughing, and the audio guy turns the talkback on again.
“That last one was an Easter egg,” the designer says, still snickering. “You know, The Phantom Menace? Star Wars.”
“Okay, looks like we’re done with the weapons and magic spells... yeah, we’re almost done, just gotta do the deaths. You’re doing great, by the way.” Rebecca nods, her mind wandering to the beer she’s planning on chugging when she gets home. Dale wasn’t kidding about letting his vocal chords heal up.
The game designer steps forward. “So, this first category here is just, it’s just normal death.”
Normal death. Is there really such a thing? Maybe in video game land. “Ghk. Ghhk! Blrgh. Argh! Aaargh! Nguh!”
“Good. Okay, so the next one is for being sniped in the head by an arrow, or a crossbow bolt.”
Uh-huh. Do people even make a sound when their head is hit by a crossbow bolt? “Auhk. Gaak. Hgah! Hgagh!”
“Nice, nice. Uh, next one– death by falling. Like, over a cliff?”
“Aaaaaaaauuh! Weeauuuuuuuh! Aieeeeeee!” Rebecca considers the fact that she has died about a dozen more times in the last ten minutes than she has in the rest of her acting career.
“Heh! Good, good. Okay, last one, now you’re flailing around, on fire. Actually it’s spectral fire, but... you know, it still hurts.”
“Aughrgharrgh! Raauaagh!” She gives up on acting and just starts channeling. Let it out, all of it: this idiot place called Los Angeles, this ridiculous job called acting, the existential absurdity of everything. “Hrrrrauaugh!” You are really making the big bucks in the big city now. Way to go Becky.
You fucking moron.
She gives one, final, anguished, bloodcurdling scream. It surprises even her. There’s a pause in the studio. Rebecca watches them through the glass. She knows they won’t use that take, but doing it was cathartic. More than that– it was almost something like... fun.
Finally, after some animated discussion, the audio guy punches in.
“Hey, would you be free for another session later today or tomorrow? Mike here thinks, and I agree– we’ve found our Banshee.”
Rebecca smiles, unable to decide if what just happened is good or bad. “Sure.”
Comments (5)
Sometimes I'll play a game with a lot of dialogue late at night. Usually I'm fairly stoned, I tend to smoke a bowl of Cannabis about once every night to unwind from my day at work.
This has an interesting effect on my perspective of the media I consume. Rather than hear a character, standing in the middle of a wasteland speaking to me about the problems he has, I hear the reality of it; an actor standing in a studio, completely detached from the situation he's attempting to portray to me.
When I was younger I assumed video game actors took the time to play through the sections of the game they recorded so they could see how it all comes together, so they could understand the context. Now that I'm older I realize most of them simply don't give a shit about their work.
Posted by Daniel | July 22, 2009 7:34 PM
Posted on July 22, 2009 19:34
I think most actors do care about their work, generally speaking, but we developers do not really give them the opportunity to care when recording voiceover. To the actor, the process resembles coming in to record a radio commercial for a local mattress sale.
Most actors working in film or theatre have a lot of experience with the medium as audience, but the ratio of actors used for video game work to those who actually play games is necessarily low. In cases where the actor actually does get games and enjoys playing and working on them, one can hear the difference.
Posted by Matthew | July 23, 2009 11:55 AM
Posted on July 23, 2009 11:55
Take a world famous actor, say Jack Nicholson. Take control of his arms, his legs, his fingers, his toes, and all the muscles in his face. Then, for kicks, blindfold him so he has no idea how his body is acting. Tell him to read his lines of dialogue.
I can guarantee it will be the worst acting performance he has ever given.
Posted by Jon Porter | July 24, 2009 7:44 AM
Posted on July 24, 2009 07:44
Having just been semi-closely involved with the VO recording process for the first time, this strikes home for me a bit. It is really strange hearing the lines on paper come into contact with a voice actor just doing their job, as opposed to only hearing the final product in the context of the game. Once you start thinking about the person in the booth, it makes me feel a sort of imperative to write better lines... so I'm not embarrassed to make someone read them out loud.
Posted by steve | July 25, 2009 10:23 AM
Posted on July 25, 2009 10:23
Seeing writers go through the triage of "get writers in early, and in the studio", no doubt direction is also something worth considering. At least there are signs of it improving vastly - noting that full VO games are not exactly that new, only 10, 15 years ago did they start doing it. I did hear some nice talk recently about how you can train game designers to be good directors, although doing it the other way around is hard (getting a audio or film director to understand games).
Anyway, I'm always more pleased to hear less voice barks in some games - those special cases they come up, or rare occurrence of use make them sweeter.
Also, I hope that screen actors do get into their characters more, or they're simply used less and kept to what they know. I've heard some dismal performances by them before, both doing animated works and videogames. I am sure not playing videogames is something to do with it, as you said Matthew! This can only improve in the future, high hopes here.
I'd love to sit in on a VO recording sometime, just to see what it's like. I don't doubt almost none are Futurama-like everyone-in-a-room-at-once though, although it's obviously not necessary I wonder how it improves things giving someone at least a sound board to bounce off.
Posted by Andrew | July 28, 2009 2:35 AM
Posted on July 28, 2009 02:35