Collaborative Approaches to Getting Great VO Performances

[Music] today we are going to look at collaboration first as a mindset and then as a practice designed to help you get the most out of your recording sessions and foster relationships to inspire creativity and engender productivity my name is julie nathanson i've been a voice actor for over 20 years doing games and animation and commercials and whatever they tell me to say um in terms of games i started out doing games like psychonauts i played lampeda in the final fantasy games i'm prish into city at duodesum in 132 enlightening returns i am and i apologize in advance for this chocobo galina uh let's see i play a wide range of roles thank you thank you um i play a wide range of roles from soldier and metal gear solid peace walker to maxis in call of duty black ops

chill in the skylanders series and uh just black in far cry 5. um and as i stand here next to eve who is the voice over lead at arena net i can tell you that in the decade that i've been working on guild wars 2 i have voiced over 30 characters i am eve eschenbacher i'm the voiceover lead at arenanet as julie just said i've had maybe as varied a career as julie's if not quite as prestigious i've been in games for about 14 years now i started as a localization editor at a translation company in tokyo japan working on a few metal gear titles and varied other games i've been a freelance japanese to english translator for a number of games and strategy guides and then i was a translator at the pokemon company where i worked on pokemon platinum heartgold soul silver and other titles i got my started arena as a copy editor and then i took over vo from one of the producers and built the process and the team to what it is now

which enables us to put out large frequent content updates every two to three months so sorry i'm balancing two computers collaboration guild wars 2 is a little unique in that we have our living world content updates that we put out every couple months uh since gw2 launched in august 2012 we've had four seasons of living world and two expansions uh in six and a half years uh we've released over 50 000 lines of vo from 70 actors across 38 episodes of living world in addition to two expansions involving another 50 000 plus lines of vo from over 100 actors some of our actors have been working with us for over a decade even going back to the original guild wars and that level of commitment and consistency really necessitates a more personal approach in my opinion because people are more likely to want to continue to work with you when you treat them well i can vouch for this um so my experience working on guild wars 2 has been particularly collaborative and i i've pulled my voice actor friends and it seems to be a

consensus we all look forward to these sessions and i think one of the reasons is this collaborative attitude and collaborative process that guild wars has afforded us all as a luxury and uh this collaboration is not just because they almost delivered my baby which is a true story so years ago i was like ginormously pregnant and started to have some like you know early labor stuff that wasn't ready for the kid to be knocking on the door so they just briefly put me in the hospital and i had to miss a guild wars 2 session which of course i apologized for profusely and uh and when i got to sessions still pregnant a few days later they all greeted me these are directors and editors and developers going okay we know how to deliver your child mark will get the hot water eve and i was like thanks guys uh luckily that form of collaboration was not needed and my child was born in a hospital thank you for your concern

he's nine now that's true it was a long time ago why collaboration um i've had to study how to handle social situations because they don't come naturally to me because i'm autistic i'm constantly adjusting and fine-tuning my approach and i learn from other people i observe i adapt and as i mentioned a moment ago i work with a number of actors on a fairly regular cadence every recording session i'm bringing in 25 to 30 actors and about two-thirds of them are people who have been playing named recurring characters for years so i've gotten to know everybody really well and i've found that a certain approach and mentality work better to keep everybody happy and excited to continue working with you basically my stance is that everybody in the room is a professional we're all an artist of one kind or another and i'm talking about the sound engineer and the director and the actors and the writers and myself we're all practicing our version of art and we all want to do our best communication is the key to quality so you treat your actors like they're part of your team

we like that part so in terms of defining collaboration you can get a lot of definitions that have to do with problem solving there's nothing wrong with that but i kind of like looking at it from a different angle dr britt andriada who wrote wired2connect the neuroscience of team leadership spoke about it in a podcast i listened to recently and she called collaboration a mutual engagement of two or more people trying to achieve some kind of common goal that they both contribute to in new and unexpected ways so it's really an act of creation she went on to say that when people are working together whatever they're building is going to get tweaked and changed because of the input of each member of that team so no one can predict how it's going to turn out because it's constantly evolving that's game dev right so to explain in addition to voiceover uh which i love i'm also a writer i've written for live

action tv i've written some disney mobile game scripts i've written and consulted on the upcoming gildlings game for servo and because i am from a family of shrinks with a great interest in psychology i also happen to have a masters in clinical psychology so i have three perspectives when it comes to collaboration from a psychological standpoint i see so many benefits from social connectedness to neurosynchrony which i promise i will get to it's the coolest as a writer i know that the vacuum of the singular creator doesn't yield a lot of that inspiration and innovation that comes from being in a room of other excited creative minds and as a voice actor i know that when i am brought into the process with renderings videos storyline and given access to the world of the game i'm being asked to inhabit i'm more likely to feel connected to the narrative relationships and life of the character and more dedicated to the experience of

recording your game so in short i feel included and inclusion matters exclusion by comparison is measured in the brain in the same way that the brain measures physical pain exclusion is measured in the brain the same way that we measure physical pain so inclusion by contrast offers this openness this connection and attunement and from there real collaboration is possible so what happens when we have real inclusion and real collaboration and we really really really work together neural synchrony it's really group neural synchrony so neuroscientists have hooked up people's brains with eegs with the thing that sounds like snuffleupagus but isn't the ends of falafelogram that's why i don't say it um but it's so so you can hook up these people's brains all working in a room together and then and view the electrical activity in the brain check out the

brain waves right the more people were connecting and truly working together their brain waves start to look the same not just a little bit but they could be traced on top of each other so when they're really engaged and feeling really really connected to each other and having a higher degree of empathy that neural synchrony is even more pronounced so that feeling of being on the same wavelength or being in sync when you're really getting it when you're working with someone else that's real brain science stuff so that's why we feel like collaboration might be kind of a cool thing to add in all aspects of the creation of a game and why do this now i mean coming together is more important than ever in today's world i mean the old model was kind of more of an exclusionary mindset the sense that you know we pay you to be here for four hours you come in you stay

and do whatever we want because we gave you money and you leave and that's not great well at the end and we just feel like it's possible to add a collaborative mindset so that just means really from the get-go looking at a we over a me stance right valuing open-mindedness and holding the belief that other people have something to add and that we're always learning right so just starting from that mindset might shift something might shift a few things and we're also going to give you some more concrete tools that might be helpful once you adopt a collaborative mindset getting the most out of actors starts with getting the most out of their auditions hey fancy that look we all want the same thing you guys want us to nail your audition we want to nail your audition we want to work for you so when we get your audition material it's all we get and most of us are going to be self-directed

most of us working actors at this point we have home studios and even if we're not just directing ourselves at home if we go into the agency that represents us to audition the booth director there doesn't have any more information than we do on the piece of paper so unless you have us go into a studio and work with a director in person who knows your game you got to make sure that what's on that piece of paper is really crucial and helpful for us to build what we can to make the character you're looking for and in the spirit of collaboration if you don't hear exactly what you're looking for listen beyond the voice print don't just listen to the sound of the voice if it's rough if it's resonant it's not just that right it's it's whether someone's connecting with the material someone who makes you curious about whether or not she could maybe do something else with that character that's who you might want to bring in so guild wars 2 is a really big game it's a giant world with a lot of npcs

having conversations giving quests and whatnot and while we do work with blind light who's our external vendor to run auditions for our big new roles i end up with a lot of little small part npcs around the world every episode so i work with the writers and the designers to get a sense of what they're building so i can make sure that there's enough voices to go around for all these npcs we also have a number of monsters and enemies that need to be voiced and i work closely with our audio team as we're working out the processing for new monsters uh for example we have this large camera you see a monster you pointed to a monster pointed to our audio okay i feel so much better now i thought she was like and the monsters does anyone see something that i don't see yeah this large creature that needed any voice the performance needed to be done in a certain way so that when we overlaid the processing on the lines it didn't become unintelligible uh for that or for that we got one of the writers to help us record some in-house scratch audio to test with the processing

and then we could take that into the studio for the actor to hear so he we could demonstrate for him that this delivery plus this processing is going to equal this line and the actor was awesome he took that cue and he made the performance his own so even just the act of sharing that information was an act of collaboration right some of this stuff seems so simple but again coming from a mindset the rest of it will start to be possible in other aspects of your experience working with or even considering working with voice actors so casting sides for auditions if you can give us an image of the character we get so much out of it and and you can also give a vocal reference right you can say well this really sounds like you know maybe something like hermione in harry potter so that might give us a sense but a picture does something to our brains because our brains are natural problem solvers we are looking for clues we want our brains are dying to fix and

finish that puzzle that you're giving us so for a moment i want you to imagine that i've given you a 1 000 piece puzzle no let's make it worse 5 000 piece puzzle and i'm going to dump it right in front of you and say make a thing but i didn't put a picture on the box your brain is going to get stuck you can put the corner pieces in we want to find the corner pieces and you could do the barriers little boundaries after a while you're just like i'm gonna shove this purple into the purple and that kind of looks like your brain starts to distance from the experience and maybe even shut down but once you put a picture on the box the brain starts firing toward completing the puzzle our brains fire toward possibility and if you like that read everything dan siegel has ever written

it's amazing so uh in the character backstory section you probably don't necessarily want to give away exactly the plot or the who and the when of your ip especially if you're working on a fairly recognizable franchise uh on guild wars we've been cautious in the past about noting that we were recasting beloved characters from guild wars 1 who are going to make an appearance in guild wars 2. but you still need to find a comparable event or experience that you can reference to give your actor a sense of the journey that the character will be undertaking without giving away the story you also want to hit the points of emotion so be sure to include the range of emotions that this character will need throughout the game to offer opportunities for your actors to to show you that they can go there so a this will help you cast that particular character and b give you a sense of whether or not that actor can handle the emotional arc of a similar character as you've said sometimes you might be sending out 10 audition sides for 60 characters

you're looking for if the character has any combat scenes make sure to include a small amount of that in the sides because that warns the actor that the role requires vocal stress and it also gives you a sense of how they can do efforts in gutturals auditions and protecting your confidential material because casting sites for auditions are a bit public i mean they're sent out widely to actors and agents that aren't necessarily under nda you probably want to obscure cut and obfuscate your ipv specific terms you put war never changes in an audition side the game's press goes ooh maybe there's a new fallout game coming uh you say you're recasting a british woman who plunders ancient burial pace places and they're probably going to guess that there's a new tomb raider game in the works there's a tendency to cut away so much from the casting sides to hide your ip that it becomes over sanitized leaving actors too little to work with you know you cut too much meat off the bone and all you're left with is scraps

what we usually do is write the casting site as if we were writing it for an internal review or an nd8 actor and then just disguise find and replace and and yes please do change the important details of the character but don't just for fun for example don't change your main prehistoric villainous dinosaur creature to a member of the geek squad at best buy make parallel changes and keep the emotional arcs so i want to give you some audition examples i'm going to pretend that i'm casting a game and this is the audition side that i would be sending julie uh through our vendor this first casting site has been scrubbed of all sensitive information so let's see let's pretend i've never seen this before so emily is in her 20s that's all i get i have three lines from emily remember bravery is not undone by injury but by lack of faith stop no more i may have may may not have been made for war but i will fight with everything i have

and now attack so i am going to look for any clues i can in this extremely sanitized audition piece i have bravery i have injury i have war and fight okay so she's in her 20s and i'm going to say she's a soldier right and maybe at the beginning she's talking to herself right maybe she's got to remind herself that she can do it you know get her bravery back because she's been injured and then now attack well okay well hold on now maybe she's the commander so i want to make her really commanding and give her a lot of control so my stab in the dark with very little information would be remember bravery is not undone by injury but by lack of faith stop no more i may not have been made for war but i will fight with everything i have now attack so we have no idea if that was any good

because we don't know anything about this character or the game this uh version is a little bit less over sanitized but it's still obfuscated so i'm not giving away my ip i've changed you know changed a few terms gone with a few parallel sort of things but it's not giving away exactly what i'm working on now look at all the clues i get sci-fi fantasy okay so maybe not a first-person shooter in a modern war uh aged twenties but immortal ah so maybe her voice and her appearance could be young but there's gonna be a world weariness there's gonna be an intelligence a wisdom her appearance ha look it's so pretty look there's glowing lights that tells me there might be some magic there's power i can see her eyes are determined her sword there's a lot of mysticism there and a lot of power and a lot of contemplative emotion so there's a

lot for me to play with just from that example that's a stock photo i pulled from shutterstock you can too so she's a high priestess okay great probably some mysticism there too selfless wise empathic and determined back story high priestess emelina and you'll notice that we changed emily to emelina why because emily feels so modern right young and cute and modern or just you know modern earthling emelina spelled funny well i don't know maybe it's a little bit more fantasy just to bring us in she is the benevolent spiritual leader of the peaceful palace an alien race of human-like creatures with the ability to assume powers of nature when invaders began to siphon her planet's resources to fuel their biological weapons emelina is forced to become a warrior training her people to save themselves and their home so what do i have here benevolent

spiritual leader so we have a leader with kindness and connection we have uh we've got invaders so so this beautiful planet is being taken from me and it's my responsibility to now become and forced to become a warrior this is an unwitting warrior who will now have to lead so now the line the first line we had benevolent spiritual well now i know i'm not injured someone else is injured okay so i might benevolently say remember bravery is not undone by injury but by lack of faith the next line internal conflict then determined so i'm gonna say not that i wrote this or anything but i'm going to say you know work with me that stop and no more is she's she's looking and seeing something that's too painful for her and then has to make a decision

maybe because i know this character is going to make a transition during this game because it's in it's in the sides that there's a character arc for her that she has to become a warrior maybe this is the minute that she makes the decision so stop no more i may not have been made for war but i will fight with everything i have and then leading her people into battle well we've got the now attack that part's probably about where we went before but we have an attack effort at the end i almost want to cover the mic for it i don't want to hurt your ears right but she's going to bring her people into battle now attack has a little more life to it i'm going to cast myself in that role to shift gears a little bit casting actors for multiple roles

uh sag rules say that you can get three roles per four-hour session with actors so you know sometimes i i cast somebody for a named character and also a generic npc off to the side um sorry you want to know the actors range and listen for ad-libs and goofs in the session first of all we're all goofs we like to listen to ourselves talk and so when we get in the booth you're going to hear a lot of things also you listened for flexibility in our auditions right maybe you heard me slate julie nathanson and then i went into my little kid character and went hey who gave the dog all my peanut butter so from my slate you went oh you know what she could probably play the kid's mom the mom just has a couple limes and then also the kid right so you're listening for any clues you can from us about how to enjoy our versatility if we're lucky enough to have it i've been able to give a lot of our

actors different roles with the confidence that they nail them based on demos credits and just goofy voices they've done between takes um i cast one of our actors as a skrit queen which our in our game skritter just these little rat like creatures just based on the fact that she had worked as a henson puppeteer you know knowing that she would nail it preparing for recording sessions what we do in preparing for the recording sessions there's a lot of table reads and script review you want to read it all out loud before you ever start sending anything out because nailed down the pronunciation is the important important words in your world and if you're having a hard time saying it it probably needs a rewrite gather image and video references to share with your actors of the game content get your scripts in chronological order if you can this helps this helps everybody keep track of where they are in the story

it's confusing to jump around in story arcs and have to tell your actors oh yeah that guy you just killed now you're meeting him for the first time create an episode or chapter character art summary sheet if you can this is an example of one we put together for season four episode two at uh arenanet it's the overall arc of the episode and summaries of each chapter and there were also a few sentences on each named character's backstory motivation and arc for the episode it's a quick reference for actors directors and you uh for a long running game like guild wars 2 this kind of helps our actors remember where we left off last time on guild wars 2. so um excel style scripts sometimes you got to use them right sometimes we get into the studio and it's like we need you to do 400 lines in seven minutes so context goes away and we just do our thing sometimes it's the only format that works for your content you know it's just a number of lines like an announcer some but it's harder

to follow the through line of the story and it often lacks context so as before right without the context you know just a generic human female i would say no more breaks we've got work to do and then yeah and the captain will have our hides if she sees you loafing about ah do what you like but if i'm gonna die i'll die on my feet i have no context i have no emotional quality i'm just gonna say the words and you'll get it in your game but it might not give you the feeling you need in contrast movie style scripts these are what the actors are used to seeing gives the context to the scene you can see the previous and following lines and it's easier to follow the through line so here we can see that you've got two corsairs near some wreckage the first speaker that would be me at work gathering crates oh okay cool so i'm moving while this is happening and the second speaker is sitting down oh now i get it i'm basically accusing the person next to me of not working that really changes

the context so i would say no more breaks we've got work to do work to do do you hear yourself right now krakatoric's coming the brand will take us all yeah and the captain will have our hides if she sees you loafing about i'm not spending the last moments of my short little life hauling crates do what you like but if i'm gonna die i'll die on my feet okay so i still don't know if that was what they wanted but i sure got a lot more out of it focal stress that's a fun topic isn't it um look it's a hot button issue and we know it professional voice actors we know we're gonna have to scream and and be electrocuted and die by fire we know you're gonna have to have us take damage and we're gonna have to slice a lot of people we got it the thing is that the body can only take so much so there are ways to structure and handle vocal stress that again is more collaborative understanding that perhaps it may not always just be combat

for example one time i got some audition sites for a villain character and i i noticed that in the side she wasn't yelling right didn't seem too intense so i made her a little darker and i gave her this rumbling raspy voice but booked the job and then i got in there and it's not that she had to yell but everyone she talked to she was very intense it killed so i had no clue and i had offered a voice print that i couldn't really sustain for four straight hours right in this character at that intensity so that's why the clues are so helpful help us help you so you had to be in there somewhere right it was my line there's a misconception oh yeah there it is that is your line pretend i didn't say that there's a misconception that soldiers have to have a dark

gruff voice print and that's not necessarily true because soldier's an attitude anybody can be a soldier but help your actors help you you know tell the agents roughly how much shouting is going to be needed for the session because actors can have multiple sessions in a day and this helps them schedule and manage their performances so they bring you their a-game every time it can also be helpful for agents and actors to have a sense of how many sessions you're going to need them for there's sag rules and guidelines regarding focal stress about a two-hour maximum if you need more break it up across sessions mix it up with content that's not vocally stressful save your most extreme stuff for the end at the end of the session if you have a scream and die by fire and electrocution in the beginning by the time you want us to do that really connected scene we sound like frogs listen to your actors and notice when they're breaking monitoring their vocal stress and offering breaks and relief builds trust you know it's a marathon

not a sprint so one really great tactic is to map out the percentage of your game or at least of that session that will be vocally stressful and and give the actors a heads up hey you're going to have 30 of your work today is going to be like combat oriented 10 is going to be the highest intensity and some death screams 10 is going to be uh whispered intensity and then this other 10 is going to be efforts right that lets us know how to plan and then part way through you've got this amount left we've got this many more lines before break and what that does is it lets us plan like again the way you would do in a marathon with mile breakers right it lets you know where you are if you start out sprinting by mile 21 you're gonna face plant so in the studio hire a good director and follow their lead let them speak to the actor give context when necessary but just don't give line reads give the subtext the line as a shorthand

but you know your your actors don't tell you how to design the game don't tell them how to do their job either you know try offering intention relationship emotional context and be willing to accept a read that's not the one that you're hearing in your head uh if it works for the moment sometimes you know they they shout and you're like sorry this is more of a one-on-one conversation also in the studio be energetic if you can we know you get tired it's true but remember neural synchrony that really cool brain science thing you don't want us to synchronize with your boredom and your exhaustion because it's catching and also even after all this time i've been doing this work if on the other side of the glass i see that you're like this and you're completely done i think i've screwed up even at this point right in my career i'm like really lucky that i've been doing this a while but i'm really still hoping that

you guys like what i'm doing right and if i think you're disconnected i disconnect i get in my head did i do that right then i start flubbing lines so your collaboration is part of affective resonance right if you're enthusiastic i stay enthusiastic and if you can tell your actors who they're playing opposite in scenes uh it's not required you know actors are professionals but it really helps because they're a tight-knit group and it can help the performance if they know who they're acting to so i had given julie this little uh ghost child young girl ghost to play she's half of a set of twins who are going to be voiced by two different actors here's the uh the in-game models for those girls or for those two twin ghost girls you know how twins can be super close and in sync well that day in the studio all i had to do was tell julie that her twin was being played by her one of her best friends kari walgren and she knew exactly what to do

i got so excited i know how kari is going to handle it i know how i'm going to handle it maybe i won't get every moment of her performance but because i can see the lines before and after and envision one of my best friends and i'm in a unicorn onesie there um i can make it more real and more connected so yeah if you outsource your video yeah if you outsource put together an informational packet for your vendor you know they've signed ndas put together scripts reference materials summary documents casting sites with vocal performance notes for creature process voices because they don't have that information it's in your head give it to them so they can do the job what are our takeaways so we've learned a lot here's our summary of what we've learned prep work is the key putting in that extra effort before you even get to the studio raises the quality and saves you a lot of time everyone's an artist we all want the sound the game to sound great so let's do this together and give

enough information but you know you don't have to give too much so last thing i want to leave you with a tool is sarah elmale in the room somewhere oh there she is this is a lovely woman she's my friend that's sarah elmale for fun you should also know that she's the player character in anthem um voice actors like each other so tight-knit group so i've just joined a team that's called swat specialized workshops and actor tactics and you can write down the website address because you might want it um this is a group that was begun by sarah elmale jennifer hale and jones and the idea is to create a free service and i will say that again this is a free service to help directors to help give developers the opportunity to collaborate with professional voice actors

while your material is still at the precasting stage so we offer two hour sessions for table reads or even performance capture virtually or in person so even if you're out of the country we can do this virtually and we will help you workshop your game the idea here is to raise the level of content community and collaboration you can't record us while we're doing this um but you get union actors breathing a little bit of life into your words before you're even casting and yes if you need maybe one just one more session for each project you get another two hour session so i'm excited about this because it's sort of the embodiment of what we're talking about today the idea of wanting to collaborate together this group is ready to do that so if you have questions sarah is here i have some cards some swat cards here you're welcome to approach me afterwards and we'll be happy to talk to you about it and so will sarah she's nodding and raising her

hand adorably actually thank you very much and if you have more questions you know we'll have it we'll be happy to answer them please make sure to review this talk at the survey link in your email yes and as all uber drivers just stay you know you really like the music that we played and that we didn't crash the car