Dialogue 101

[Music] hello hi that was just for you to set the levels just so you know that's uh welcome to dialogue 101. i have been asked to uh request that you guys move up and into the centers of the rose so that johnny come lately's can occupy the aisle seats now so once again hello [Music] hello hello thank you we've got a lot of ground to cover so i'm going to is that okay with you good yes good here's an overview of what we're gonna do i'm gonna approach this session from the assumption that you have been tasked with getting voices into your game and you said you knew how

don't panic dialogue is really fun at some point uh here is a high level overview of what we're going to be going through uh hopefully by some miracle we'll have enough time for a lot of q a which is my favorite part so this is me it's not super important uh i founded a company called bright skull about a year ago before that i was the the audio lead in charge of dialogue at 2k uh marin i did bioshock 2 minerva's den xcom the bureau and most recently the vanishing of ethan carter i'm also a dad it's pretty sweet two kids public school um a recovering musician uh amateur magician a motorcycle enthusiast uh that's me in a nutshell not important what is important is pre-production get that in your heads pre-production it's important uh before you can begin you need to

gather lots of metrics and provide data for your team and for yourself and your development partners so the first thing i do when i approach a new project is to run analytics on the scripts and extract a lot of data in case you're wondering this is not the fun part i spoke of duh here's an example of the end result of a script uh analytics that i ran recently well it's a mock-up that i made just for this so clearly uh these are not real character names uh pay attention to the slides man there's some good ones in there but the this is all data that i use to forecast budgeting and uh and casting information uh so these columns over here are a list of every character that speaks a line in the project and any relevant data that i might need for casting them uh in this example you'll see the sex the age the accent the unique code used in the scripts to identify that character

it's also usually the same code that's used in engine uh which we're not even going to delve into i don't even know why i said that these columns here are the sum total of all of the lines uh that character speaks in the game divided up by in this case level uh it could also be by um by stage or mission or whoever else your game is broken down the hell oh geez uh i'm gonna try and get through this without cursing i don't think i messed up already but whatever so i break it out like this uh on purpose uh not just because i really love data it's because um when i'm casting the game i need to see how much space i have in between uh in between each character's appearance in the game in case we're going to double up an actor on multiple voicings for a role which happens often in video games but you don't want to have you know one dude voicing the same npc in the same level or even if you can avoid it in back to back levels um also i'm from new york so when i say

dude i also need women dudes i don't know what that means this column here is the sum total count for all systemic or combat dialogue this gets handled separately for engine reasons but also most importantly in casting and in uh in metric analysis because uh systemic lines are usually about four words per line on average and narrative content is usually about 12 to 20 words per line so it's the uh the actual line count uh that you will tally up later i'll probably show you that even uh finally once all that information is gathered i can make a really loose high level prediction for how i'm going to cast the game based on that data so that's pretty much what the early analysis is now real quick before i move on every developer has a different way of doing scripts excel scripts are really good for this but really bad for other things and if you get a word document script a

little pro tip that i'm going to hand you is i use find and replace to do my line counts and what i'll do is i'll do an a specific uh all caps find and replace to find the uh to find the character name in the line headings if it's theatrically formatted and that gives me a good sense of the line count in a rough estimate also i use the highlight highlight tool to replace that so that i can easily look through the script and see if i've missed any hope that wasn't but so now that i have all that data i bring it into this second page in a workbook i don't know if you guys have heard me talk before about how much excel is used in game development but one of the number one questions i get beyond how did you break into video games is what software should i learn excel learn excel learn excel excel see your uh all right so now you have all the data you can project budgets for time and

money which is what your producer wants to know and lots of other people i'm sure including yourself these rows and columns here are the totals for total split down by actor which we're able to parse with our early casting data for all the lines and for all the lines in the game displaying the data like this allows us to see how many total lines we have and then also allows us to see how much estimated time in the booth it's going to take each actor and from that we can extrapolate the estimated cost per actor um some general guidelines to think about uh no more arrows union actors uh you're going to want to budget 890 and 23 cents per hectare i usually round up to a thousand that cost is uh the union fee for actor in a four-hour session block what that means is you get

four hours of actor time you can use 10 minutes or you can use three hours and 59 minutes and 59 seconds and you're still going to pay 890 and 23 cents it's not actually 8923 but that includes the 10 agency fee on top in case any of you are union people going that's not right but it is uh for non-union actors you want to budget 200 per hour with a two-hour minimum uh so that means that when you book a non-union actor you're going to be paying 400 and then every hour after that is 200 uh per hour uh you always round up so that's something to keep in mind uh now studios generally cost two hundred dollars per hour uh that would be good vo studios in major cities smaller cities and lesser studios might be less expensive you might also be booking a like the you know the presidential suite at pop and it might be a little bit more which is an awesome room by the way it's

not called the president it's called the adr stage but if you call the presidential suite it just sounds cooler this fee generally includes the uh the engineer the room the coffee the snacks the massage table the foot rubs only some of those things are true i'll let you figure out which and most studios build by the half day or the full day rate so now that you know how many actors you need it's time to find them the casting process breaks down into three really really intuitive steps you have making casting materials you have auditioning the talent and then you make your selections casting sides this is a term that we use to uh to describe the bio and sample lines that we send out to the actors they contain information about the character [Music] and i'm going to bestow upon you some quick tips for writing casting sides because this is an art form unto itself which i don't feel

many of us have from reading other people's casting sites casting sides should be short one to two pages maximum that's the upper limit for you mathematicians uh the character information should be sent focused and most importantly useful to the actors uh they do not need to know that the character has a twin brother who later in the game becomes your mother who is also your father and it's a crazy story what they do need to know is that the character is male 30 years old caucasian grizzly gravelly bitter and has a slight texas twang that's a lot of adjectives in a short little space that's what people need give the actors the ammunition they need to give you good reads um think about from the actor's point of view which i don't know if many of you have had privy to but uh sometimes the actor will be in the studio once a week and that will be their audition day they will have a stack of auditions about yay hi uh

you give them the writer's version of the casting sides and it's four pages long of bio it's not getting red man all right um when choosing your sample lines pick good ones that's a great advice there right uh you don't need to hear every dramatic moment that's going to appear in your video game what you do need to hear though is the emotional range of content that your actor is going to be performing so do they have a lot of dramatic reads do they also have some witty one-liners maybe some death maybe some gloating you want to make sure that you have the full extent of the palette in there and in fact if you think that that character might change write some fake stuff in there which uh goes to uh goes to another point of mine um which apparently i'm gonna get to in a minute sorry if it's a first person shooter a real-time strategy or any other game

that includes combat always include deaths and combat in your sides you would be amazed at how many actors are not competent at combat vo great at dramatic reads and then you put them in your game and then you go get them in your combat section it sounds like this i did a session once and i'm not i'm not lying to you the the main character we finished all this dramatic stuff and this is when i very early in my career and uh and i did not do the casting the uh the read came out oof eep ah he's a broadway actor very famous and that was what we got so we had to do a stand-in um so here's my advice to you even if the character in your game currently does not become a combatant or die still have them do combat and deaths even if they stink at them

trust me you'll thank me someday with beer uh so this is my final pro tip on uh on casting sides uh casting sides are not going to generate shippable content what they are going to generate are auditions for you to cast off of it's very important to remember that uh you do not have to use accurate character descriptions you do not have to use accurate lines you can write whatever you want and the actor will say it uh what you want to do is inform the actor with the tools that they need to give you the audition that you want that is important and it's important for you to bring back to your writers and producers if they give you guff give them to me and i will fisticuff i don't know what that means but it felt good all right uh so now you have everything you need to find your voice talent great where do you find the actors well you can start with agencies great place to start uh caveat with agencies if you don't

already know not every talent agency represents voice actors a lot of them represent on-screen talent or they represent theatrical actors uh you are looking specifically for agencies that represent voice talent that does interactive and or animation not commercial not radio interactive or animation make sure that those agencies you're working with do that uh another thing that you want to uh yeah i know that's good that's that's all you need to know casting directors are also great resources uh they have very large pools of talent that are pre-vetted uh and more importantly than uh than agencies and yourselves if you're not already experienced is that they already have a network of people so they have access to people that you do not uh if you're even if you're working on a

non-union project this is true we can oftentimes get celebrity vo talent that may or may not be using a different name but they won't do it for you they'll do it for people that they trust so that's why a casting director is a good idea um there's also like online resources that i will not name they're not they they're okay uh they're the kind of sites where you post your project and you say how much you're gonna pay because you think you're saving money but in reality you're gonna screw yourself out of tons of money in the end because the talent you're gonna get is uh gonna cost more than you thought um but you know you can do that and you can do the research if you want i'm just not gonna recommend it lastly there's also shoestring methods there's um you know your friends and craigslist and local theater groups it can work sometimes again it's going to be way more time and money than you originally thought and sometimes it works i'm not i'm not saying it doesn't but if you hire a professional it's uh

pretty much guaranteed that it's gonna work so i'm in a soapbox for a second not like i haven't been doing that the whole time but um audiences are becoming much more informed uh especially when it comes to our games and our and our voices in them and they can be very forgiving about graphics and gameplay and many other things and i know i'm preaching to the choir here but sound is the only real world asset in the game especially voice so when you screw up voice or sound but most importantly voice you really screw up and the player has a very low threshold for uh for for for giving you any amount of leniency on that so very important to uh to think about that up front when you're figuring out how to pinch pennies so congratulations you've got yourself a bunch of auditions to go through um who's right for your game well that's

uh up to you and i mean you not your fans not the people on kickstarter not the people on twitter it's up to you the game designer and the game audio designer and the game casting director to make that choice what's a really bad idea is to pick somebody that you think is cool for the role and then to cast them and then they're totally not the right actor for the role uh never happened to me uh also check their experience actors just like audio people and every other discipline have specialties i mean uh a lot of times people make the mistake of uh not necessarily a mistake but it takes a very skilled director to get it done right to take an on-screen actor and put them in a vo booth well most on-screen actors have only been on a vo booth to do adr which is like looping their own performances they haven't done creative voice work where they're getting a

picture in their head and they're performing to it so not every tv actor or film actor is going to be able to do that their standard practice working is having the script that they read their pages like right before they go on and then they go and they deliver their roles sometimes they read them ahead and get them but that's why theatrical actors are very good for this um maybe they've done some video games but they were in simlish and you're directing xcom that never happened to me so just check their experience to make sure that it's right for your game um let's see oh also uh you want to be aware of their availabilities too so if they're doing tv or theater make sure that they're going to be available three days before cert uh to do their pickups and not at a price check in mexico so so now that you've got a cast uh you have to record them uh first stop find a studio i know this is really rudimentary but i'm trying to give you guys tips through like really dumb ass uh explanations find a studio that's

close to your talent not to you it's way cheaper to fly yourself to the studio than to fly all of your talent to you uh there's that also surprise vo is not music right that's a weird one right uh what that means what that means is that that beautiful studio that you have in mind with the neve console and all the vintage api gear and the awesome tube microphones and the compressors and the bells and whistles and synthesizers that's not your studio you want the cleanest most transparent signal path possible find studios that have john hardy m1s or gml's and a u87 and that's pretty much it what you also on the flip side of that there's a lot of studios that are sad that are dedicated vo studios uh that have these dead lifeless

coffin rooms where talent goes to suffer and die i don't like those clearly uh they usually have uh pretty easy to identify they have lots of pointy foam objects in them and a 416 pointed at the actor um here's a good way to figure this out walk into a room do the clap test if it sounds like a clap that's a good room if it sounds like some sort of weird fart don't book that studio i did a fart joke at gdc again look for uh look for large rooms uh uh it's gonna help it's gonna help with the sound it's also gonna help uh i if you're very comfortable with the engineer like uh i've spent a lot of years building up really good support teams i direct from inside the booth it really helps with the active director relationship to be able to give them

that sort of confidence um you know what here's another good test walk into the room if it makes you feel inspired and creative and empowered guess what it's gonna help the actor to do that too amazing i know pearls of wisdom let's talk about scripts for a second we're going to go on a metaphor adventure here um let's say you have a favorite tool that you like to work with we'll uh use a screwdriver for this metaphor right every day you go to work use a screwdriver you are really really good at screwing now let's say you get hired oh i should have rewrote that now let's say you get hired for a job and your new boss says oh buddy we don't use screwdrivers here but here's a hammer uh you know use on those screws uh same thing happens when we give excel spreadsheets to actors who are used to seeing theatrically formatted scripts

man does that blow a session they won't tell you actors will not tell you what makes them uncomfortable in the booth they're happy to be there and they will do anything in their power to please you um so it's your job to learn about acting and to uh and to make them comfortable one more thing when you give them their beautifully theatrically formatted scripts for god's sake put the previous line and some context into the scripts so the actors can read it and get it in their hands at least two days before the session if you can even if it's even if it's dry like mocked copy get it in their hands it'll help all right for working with talent you need to remember a few golden rules actors surprisingly are neither parrots nor magicians except for some of the magicians that i work with the best way to break an actor and not in like a stallion sort of way just more of a sad broken person sort of way is to

beat them down at every nuance of their performance to get it the way that it sounds in your head you hired professionals to collaborate with listen to them trust them but on the flip side they're not working on the game nearly as closely as you are you're going to need to give them context and direction uh come to my talk on thursday at 11 and i'll give you a master class in directing if you're interested but basically really quick give the actors some time to get the line right if they don't get it on the first try give them two more and if they don't get it on the third one give them a little help an adjective it's not until the fourth or fifth that you really want to get in there and be like okay let's figure out what's going on especially if it's a short it's a long line then clearly help him out but um yeah just give the actors some space to do their jobs so on that point your job in the studio

as a director or as a session runner is to create a bubble around the actor your job is to protect them from the producer and the writer and the engineer and the coffee person and the script person and everybody else that's your job to deal with them you are running the session you are not there to make the actor uncomfortable by making them privy to all of that that said what that doesn't mean is take the talkback loop off because what happens when you take the talkback loop off the actor is now in isolation this is what the actor sees on the other side of the glass and you're saying i don't want meatballs for lunch we had it yesterday i wanna yeah that's pretty much what happens in a studio or did you see a youtube clip i know it's crazy what is he thinking the actor will immediately think oh my

god this guy's terrible why did we hire him get him out of the booth as fast as possible that's after psychology for you i okay now i lost my place i went on a tangent it happens go on this trip with me man all right um lastly have a vision for what you want your game to sound like and communicate it effectively i know it sounds stupid but you can go either way with this you can have no idea what you want your game to sound like oh no the writer wanted something read your scripts man have a vision that's you're a creative professional jesus that's that's dumb that's me on my stump okay all right lastly uh if all this seems really daunting there's a plethora of professionals that are here at your beck and call even if you want to just call up and ask for some advice most of us are really approachable human beings some of us have even worked in-house at game studios before there's voice directors who will come in and work with your talent with you if you're uncomfortable having that relationship there's casting directors that will find awesome talent for you voice productions

houses that will do soup to nuts uh script supervisors that will come and help you groom your scripts and get them treated for the for the studio uh editorial and mastering engineers who are gonna get it to sound way better than you will uh most of you i don't know what your skill level is uh that's basically it that's my talk i wanted to leave room for q a we've got a couple minutes uh let's get some questions going please line up at the microphone you can pretty much ask me anything uh everyone is invited to talk and uh ask questions including the cas who uh who i know uh are just jumping at the bit to ask me to shut up on that note uh please don't forget to thank your volunteers and fill out your surveys i recommend high-fiving cas at any point you get unless they're like weird about hand stuff um lastly uh just to plug my own thing uh at the at the uh if you're one of more boots on the ground look at actually like running sessions come to my talk on thursday where i basically turn this room well not this room turn the room into a live recording situation it's called

vo session live i show the pro tools rig i'll show you how we pull down takes and we have volunteers from the audience come up and run different script scenarios thank you that was me [Music] hi first question hi um i was curious uh specifically as you were talking about um being in the studio with the talent um any thoughts or extra wisdom you might have for dialogue or group talk sessions where you may want to have multiple actors if possible in the same space so that they can riff off of each other on their lines i absolutely recommend it anytime you have two characters in your video game that talk to each other and if you want a very detailed explanation of that either revisit the talks i've done in the past uh that detail ensemble uh voice production or come to the talk on thursday where i'm gonna run through ensemble scripts and show you exactly how to do just that

thank you for that awesome good call thursday three o'clock hi hi my question is 11 o'clock sorry 11 30 11 30 whatever it says my question is um when you have we're working in an indie game and you have no budget and they're forcing you to some person to be the actor as well um how do you prepare to that if you have no experience in voice acting at all if you have no experience in voice acting at all and you have no budget and you are also expected to be the voice talent was that the yes um didn't the behemoth do that and didn't that come out freaking awesome yeah do the best job you can man all right uh so so uh my i'm sorry that was a really dumb answer uh um so two tips on acting uh one just lose all your inhibitions like seriously just just throw them out because they're useless in the studio all of them uh and secondly if if you

want there are totally awesome resources for uh for uh for for learning acting uh in your where do you live colombia cool i don't know about columbia i'm guessing that there are there are none okay uh do you don't have like you don't have like uh local theater or uh or or actors have you seen soap operas have you seen our soap operas let's see they're absolutely horrible it is exactly like i don't know what that means but man is it funny all right um come talk to me in the wrap-up room and i'll give you some actual awesome thank you so much hey i don't know if this is too personal of a question but like and all throughout the talk you seem to have these little bouts of vitriol just like the random crap that happens to you i'm wondering in particular like what is the worst like snafu that's happened in your career that you can think of off the top of your head

actors showed up at nine o'clock in the morning high out of her mind but she was a celebrity and there was nothing we could do about it [Laughter] and so she was there for four hours and she had to do combat that day [Laughter] great best of luck john hello okay so uh we've talked a lot about uh recording in a studio but say you're working on a project that's a very very low budget project and you have to work with actors who are remote who have their own home studios what kind of advice would you offer in a situation like that firstly i would uh have them do test audio with their auditions from their recording environment to make sure their recording environment is uh is compatible with the other actors that you have that you have gotten to work on your

project secondly you can do low budget uh even no budget uh auditioning in within one city uh pick one and do it or pick two if you're bold um i would uh point out that most actors a lot of actors in major cities like la new york chicago they have personal home recording studios that are pretty okay if they don't and you really love them you could always uh approach the subject of maybe we could do better with your recording setup and maybe send them some articles on how to set up a little blanket fort to record in so cool that's the best i can offer man curiosity thank you very much cool i am done but i will be in the wrap-up room uh so please come visit me in the wrap-up room or else i will feel lonely and it's cold in there and the more people that get there the more btus we shed and the more we can hug [Applause] [Music]

[Applause] bye you