Mad Skillz for Directing Dialogue

[Music] my name is DB Cooper I'm a voice actor I'm also a director of uh of stage and video games I also do talent and casting so I help people find the voices they need one of the Hallmarks of early um game development was how bad the dialogue was okay so like using the guy in accounting who always wanted to be a DJ was pretty much a fire way to get your game on audio atrocities. okay but luckily the scope of games has certainly grown and so has the investment in narrative and so we've got better scripts and better directors better actors and really overall an understanding a better understanding of what has really become a craft but now all kinds of games are adding voice acting and history is kind of threatening to repeat itself

indie game developers especially are inundated with the demands of audio of of dialogue and audio folks who may never have directed are finding themselves in charge of a whole huge cast of characters with voice Talent who may never have played a game so no matter what kind of game you're directing I am hoping that some of the things you see today will help you get better results from your actors some of the stuff may seem obvious um but let's address it anyway when you invest time before a recording session it can solve problems before they even start if it's at all possible get your script into the hands of the actors before the recording date even if it's not final and the same thing goes for um for character briefs anything you can do to give your actor time to learn about his or her character is going to be great for you in the long run it makes it feel a lot less like jumping out of an airplane without a

parachute the characters that your actors play uh quite often are not the ones they auditioned for uh it's a little bit daunting when you show up expecting to play a Rowdy Southern girl because you're going to be shooting people and all and they want you to be a f fatel with a French accent it's nice uh it's it's nice to know in advance because it's a bit of a stick in the spokes if you're surprised some of us have a little bouquet of characters that we have in our pockets we have a little bouquet of of voices we can automatically do straight straight out of the gate but others need exercise before they're trotted out okay just who directs dialogue here okay just and say it out loud do you always do auditions yes excellent okay so we don't need to talk about the E efficacy of auditions in case you're getting into directing

auditions are the first best way to separate the wheat from the chaff you want to be able to tell if the people that you're asking to do your game with you can take Direction and that's what auditions are for something else that needs to be determined before the recording date is the studio hierarchy you get one director have one person be the conduit through which information is passed on to the actor just one person guiding the actor Direction by committee is like a recipe for the ulation of time and having your actor's head blow up have you seen the Santa sessions um on YouTube where there are like Five Guys in the control room telling Santa how to say ho ho ho yeah yeah yeah you know I didn't feel it that time okay so uh having other people in the control room is fine as long as it's fine with the director okay and the engineer and as long long as it doesn't interfere with

that connection between the director and the actor and once the actor gets in the booth and has his headphones on and the engineer has come in and set his microphone just use the talk back to talk for a couple of minutes just shoot the breeze what' you have for lunch do you have any kids um did you see that program you know on Sunday night any just anything especially if it's the actor's first time doing a game it's really kind of overwhelming if an actor's never been in a booth before you've got all of this fabulous technology all around you and if you use it for something really comfortable and familiar like a nice conversation it makes it a lot less anxious and a lot less formal and I've lost my ah there we are if you're part of the dev team you know a lot more about the game than a script can ever tell anybody okay

especially if your script is a spreadsheet and so any character brief any script will never be able to reveal the amount of information that you have as a developer so take a moment tell your actor what his place in the game is what his uh character what his character's place is what the relationships are um what triggers fights what triggers changes of scenes just the whole business about some of the mechanics of the game and anything thematic that matters you want to add information if you can because as director you're so much more than a traffic cop you are in charge of the way the game speaks to the player literally now regarding the actual words you use to uh to speak what you think you are saying is not necessarily what the actor hears okay okay so it's a good idea to let the

actor know at the beginning of a session that it's okay to ask you what you mean I was once a an assistant to a director whose two key terms his two key instructions for the actors were loosen it up I just need you to to loosen it up you know what I'm talking about so I just need you I need you to loosen it up and his other direction was tighten it up and sometimes and I kid you not he would use both for the same passage okay and he didn't loosen it up but I just needed to tighten it up and the D and the poor actor was in this in the booth going and I could tell he had no idea what the director meant and neither did I until I went to dinner with him later and I said you know you use this term loosen it up what does that mean and it turns out that loosen it up means don't make it sound so scripted get a little more relaxed with the way that you're delivering it so it doesn't sound like you're reading a line make it sound

authentic and tighten it up means that he just wanted it a little brisker with the delivery okay I never would have known if I hadn't asked I recently did a session with Tom Keegan uh where I was a tough girl with a Russian accent and the Russian accent is one of the accents I like to be able to pull out of my pocket and I practice it all the time you know I listen to the radio and I listen to BBC so I can make sure that I can always keep track of the way that Russians sound um because I want to make sure I'm I'm I'm I'm spot on with my accent so my hoodlum girl had these shouts like uh get down from there you coward you know big and round and Tom kept saying you know what I just need a little sharper over here and we need to put an edge on it and and I want a little more less less a and More in and that kind of stuff and he was being really precise but I just didn't get it so at the break I told him how I keep my accent shirt by listening to foreign

radio and making sure that I've got uh an authentic Russian accent I Saidi want to be able to deliver you the authentic goods and he goes oh no we're not doing authentic we're doing Hollywood Russian oh it's more Boris bad enough right so it's not get back it's more get back okay awesome so the deal is when you start your session with the permission to ask ask you what you mean you're establishing a respectful freedom to communicate without relinquishing your Authority and something else when you're the actor in the booth here you are in a box with a window and sometimes at the end of a scene or when a or uh let's say we're done with a certain character or even at a page change the recording stops down and the guys in the control room talk

about sushi and other stuff or something that happened hilarious that one of their children said this morning and they all laugh now the actor actors tend to be thinking oh my God they're laughing okay so if you possibly can keep the talk back engaged so the actor doesn't feel completely out of the loop otherwise it's like being on display in an aquarium okay so here's the coraly to letting your actor ask you most of the time actors want to give you what they think you want but if you don't get what you want be ready to explain your direction okay so don't just jump into a line read we were actually talking about this yesterday at Mike CK's talk about how to get a point across to an actor a line read is where a a director will actually say the line to the actor as he hears it in his head and it seems like a real expeditious thing to do saves

time monstrously insulting to the actor and and and is is not very good for um you know the overall U Congeniality of of the session no one likes to be force-fed so you're going to get a far better result for the entire session if you just take time to engage the actor's frame of reference as an actor so something like instead of just I you know I need you to say this line like um you're going down mister okay whatever um but say something like um you know as a teenager how mad were you when your dad wouldn't let you use the car it's not just angry but thwarted okay so that's going to be mean something hot to your actor and you're actually going to get a better performance overall this is collaboration because if you give him a line raate otherwi what you're actually asking him to do is pair it back your inflection in his

voice now sometimes and it's going to happen you can get an actor who truly stumped with something okay and that's when a line read is appropriate and frankly if uh after like three tries at a line if if he's still not getting it an actor is very likely to ask you for a line read himself if he doesn't ask you should ask that is you can offer to say here's how I hear it and here's something that David Chan mentioned yesterday in Mike sur's talk he never gives a line read with exactly the line he paraphrases the line so it isn't identical so the actor isn't trying to Simply mimic what he said he's not trying to replicate the line in David's inflection he'll give a paraphrase of the line so the actor can get the gist and usually it's like oh click I get it when it's it's presented with a spirit of genuine collaboration

it's freeing and not limiting something else I've been asked about is interrupting sometimes you need to make a directorial adjustment while you're working on lines please wait till the end of the line please just wait to the end of the line honestly unless the actor is narrating the origin history of Epic Saga can I say Saga I can say Saga right there really aren't a lot of full-scale paragraphs in most of the scripts we do a lot of the stuff we're dealing with is lines and interrupting the actor once again it may seem like a timesaver but just be patient just for a few seconds because what what interrupting does is it immediately alarms the actor and will either undermine his confidence or irritate him and that's going to make him less likely to be receptive so either way you lose a

strong performance veteran voice actors usually like I said come with a little a little bouquet of characters that they're ready to give you but sometimes actually when is smooth too smooth even season Pros can approach lines of script as elements that need to be rendered whole okay but what happens is scripts end up sounding stilted if all the lines are read as lines there's just something about the visual cue okay of a page full of these short sentences that makes them look like dirts and everybody's heading for the punctuation as a goal no please enemy fire getting fogged here blah this is racing when you're heading for the end of a sentence even the best actor can sound stilted or odd when speaking all the lines perfectly

fluently clear all the way through pure fluency really doesn't exist all that often in the real world you hear it in plays especially where actors are stepping on their cues and everybody's got their lines memorized and you hear it um think of the old movies from like the early the Early 40s or the 30s where everybody's talking really rapidly and there's this just super quick RAR well sometimes you're going to have something like that with like um your face looks like get caught on fire and someone put it out with a brick okay so sometimes you're going to get something blasting all the way through but other times you're going to have something instead of just they have no authority over the Red Lanterns if given the chance I will destroy Everlast one of them okay people speak in phrases they have no authority over the Red Lanterns if given the chance I will destroy every last one of

them so conversation tends to be rendered in bits for the most part if you don't want your game script to sound like a performance the other thing you can do is allow for mistakes and Corrections and pauses as well as fluency we want authenticity we want reality and we want honesty in our games so at the beginning of the session assure your actor that there is time to find authentic pauses so the line great now we look incompetent becomes great now we look incompetent to self- interrupt sorry guys I know you're coming off a case but um we're going to have to make a detour becomes sorry guys we've got to shoot I know you guys are coming off a case but

we've got to make a detour to say ah like real people do so instead of Jesus he looked pretty mad you get Jesus he uh looked pretty mad in fact you might want to record that shoot the breeze conversation before the session record it and play a little bit back to your actor if he's got some authentic dialogue because he'll be able to hear the way he truly speaks in real conversation the series reads as you begin your session you can use some tricks to get a grip on the vocal quality of your character these are like little theater games that allow the actor to stretch his imagination okay and offer up some really juicy choices so you use short lines like hey you there I ain't seen you before the Goldilocks read it's too hot too cold just write and it's whatever that means to the actor you just let him go so um too h hey you there I ain't seen you before

too cold hey you there I ain't seen you before just right hey you there I ain't seen you before okay and so the like don't like close to series you like the person you're speaking to you don't like the person you're speaking to or you're very close to the person you're speaking to okay and that's in proximity so we've got uh I like you hey you there I ain't seen you before I don't like the person I'm speaking to I'm going to speak to an empty chair so nobody thinks I'm I'm mad hey you there I ain't seen you before and close to hey you there I ain't seen you before okay so you get all of these different choices there are other things like the good day bad day normal day angry bored excited it's kind of the same thing there's no correct rendering for these lines everything is completely subjective you using these exercises as trials at the beginning it gives your

actors a chance to try something before committing to the right voice and frankly you may end up hearing something you never thought of and never knew you'd love wh lining is when you're driving right down the center of the road sometimes during a long session your actor's imagination can become fatigued and you can hear her white lining that's driving right down the middle of the road it's a middle of the road performance it's really safe it's not terribly interesting okay this happens when there are lots of those short lines you know like in battle chatter so this is where you can take a moment to go off-road completely was that five thank you you can read a set of lines like wildly declaiming Southern preacher like a total doofus or like a pony okay so it's like you know when you're constantly going over lines like force

field active Force wall up force field ready Repair Station online Repair Station ready you can just kind of get into this groove that's a little bit uh oh sounds a little boring so if you just take a detour and you Deployable everything's accessorized upgrade new hardware pulse generator deployed pulse generator out generators pulsing what happens is you break the dam when you do something wrong so do it wrong keep the tape rolling and then do it right without stopping and then you can also just take a break everybody needs to get out of the control room for several minutes every hour no matter what so if you invest bits of time with your actors you give them the freedom to enjoy the process it becomes a fully shared experience you have a richer

recording experience and everyone ends up with great audio I am DB Cooper now we've got about four minutes before they're going to throw us out of here so if we have any questions please step up to the mic and if we run out of time we'll roll next door Michael thank you this is a very good session today you're looking lovely this morning as well can I have a copy of that photo please yes you may in fact we'll roll back to it because it's so great these are happy audio guys yeah anybody else all right if you need to come and see me later you'll probably be able to find me um and uh have a great rest rest of the GDC thank you for coming