After whittling down 100s of actors to a shortlist of six; after holding
auditions whilst patched-in by transatlantic phone call; after having MP3s of
their voices sent over to Cambridge; after making our final decisions; after
notifying the actors; after arranging the studio in LA; after arranging our own
flights and hotels … after all of this, we STILL had one actress who was
astonished by the whole set-up: “Oh my God! It’s a GAME! I thought it was the
extras for the DVD,” she cried on day one. Games clearly still have some way to
go before they’re accepted as part and parcel of the process. Either that, or
she’s not been listening to her agent.
The A list the stars from 24, people like Kiefer Sutherland, Elisha Cuthbert
and Carlos Bernard - tend not to have much experience of the interactive market
either (and not too surprisingly they’re rarely videogames players), but their
talent more than makes up for that. Kiefer in particular, is quite
extraordinary. He’s a very intense man, and once he gets into the mode, he’s
there – bang, bang, bang. With most people, we tried to do at least three takes
of all their speech, and to do each utterance three different ways. With Kiefer
it was almost always right the first time.
It’s interesting to see how actors perceive voice-acting for videogames, as
there’s already a hierarchy within the Hollywood community. For example, on
GhostHunter, which starred Joe Morton, who is a big stage and screen actor, we
also had Rob Paulsen, who has a vast number of voice-acting roles behind him. On
day one, Joe Morton and Rob Paulsen were working together and Rob was noticeably
deferential to this guy who’d been in theatre most of his working life. Then on
day two, Rob was in doing takes with a group of ancillary actors who were all
saying “Wow! I can’t believe you got Rob Paulsen on this! He’s great. Have you
heard him in Ninja Turtles/Animaniacs/Pinky and the Brain/etc?”
Aside from the stars, you expect voice actors to be able to double up in
their roles and take on a number of parts – this happens a lot in animated
movies as well, not just games. Sometimes getting an actor to play multiple
characters can be problematic - you can ask the guys to do several different
voices and they obviously have to modify their voice tones to make it notably
different for each character. Sometimes however they can exaggerate these
differences and start to sound too cartoonish. Sometimes it’s easier for the
actors to differentiate the characters they are tackling by producing very
strong accents rather than more subtle variations; whilst you want a range of
accents in something like 24, you don’t want to go from Surfer Dude, to Texan to
Brooklyn all in one scene!
One of the things we were most concerned about was getting the best from the
actors, as quickly as possible – I mean, they’re rarely cheap! We decided that
there were a couple of things that would help. First, we got Paul Gadd a
Producer from the TV show to come and act as our Voice Director and secondly we
also got in a ‘line bouncer’ that the actors were used to working with. The idea
was that we would make everything seem as close to a normal working day on the
show for them as possible – even down to hiring the same recording studio that
they use for ADR. It worked.
Page 2 of 2 »
