Tacoma: An Experimental VO Production Postmortem

hello hi here we're here we all are at GDC 2017 I hope that you're well today and I hope that you've been learning expanding and feeling deeply in your experience at this conference even more so I hope all else above all else that on this journey this week that you take the advantage of accessing the brilliant minds and hearts to congregate here this place this time we share and these people around you are something really special I'm grateful to have you in my life and I'm honored that you've chosen to attend this talk so let's begin firstly now that that's awkward let's make sure you're in the right room here's everything that we'll be discussing today I'll briefly introduce myself I'll tell you a little bit about what Tacoma is and why the vo production

needed to be so weird the majority of our time today thankfully will be spent focusing on the pre-production directorial and technical techniques delet developed specifically for this project and the lessons we learned along the way damn you know I was really really trying to get technical techniques out so much that I just flub the next but whatever and finally we'll wrap up with my personal favorite the ask me anything style QA all right let's do this that's me my name is Michael and I write and direct video games I am the casting and voice director of Tacoma I used to be the dialogue lead at a company called 2k and then I started a company called the bright school entertainment group I'm originally from New York I currently live in Los Angeles and the rare hours when I'm not making games like most of you I do other things so what exactly is Tacoma and again why

did it need the fancy hoopla well it's short Tacoma is Fulbright's follow-up games they're nog roll divisive smash hit gone home it's a narrative exploration game and it takes place on a lunar transfer station midway between the moon and Earth in the not-too-distant future 2088 you arrive at the space station to discover it abandoned and need to figure out what happened to the crew you do this by uncovering fragments of footage that shows in the environment around you they are security recordings of the mix of the missing crews interactions and and movements you can choose to follow and observe any of the AR ghosts of whichever characters you wish and at any time then play pause or rewind the footage and explore the playback from other perspectives if any of you guys are familiar with the off-broadway theatre experiment that is sleep no more Tacomas gameplay is heavily influenced

by it and if you are not familiar with sleep no more I highly encourage you to get your ass on a plane fly to New York try and get tickets wait until you get them no you should probably you know what buy your tickets online and then just go this is very much so one of those things that's best best shown by visuals visualization as opposed to verbalization so here's a short clip of Tacomas gameplay to show you what I'm talking about I can't believe it no you told me we can't renewed yeah but I meant us us not the whole crew I guess there's just something special something special about two coma crew 88 yeah not just special it's unprecedented I looked it up it's never happened before Oh everything happens once no no personally I'm happy for us happy to be stuck up here with these people for another year some of them some of them

are as pissy as you I what's so bad about these people well they believe in a tin can for one thing I think it's a pretty nice cam oh you have a pretty nice cam oh yeah well I think you have a pretty nice cab shut up [Music] so the name obsolescence day it's more like a joke you could say it's facetious okay probably think I'm an idiot for never even thinking about why it's called neck curiosity why did you think that maybe it was when some old type of AI had become obsolete but well I guess that doesn't make sense I think you get the idea and I also want you to remember that that seemed that would air where

they're baking something because it's gonna be relevant later okay so as you can see the narrative paths often split and rejoin creating very complex scenes we're timing and performance worker concerned combined with the aesthetic choices made for the vocal performance in this game we knew the traditional solo and even basic fixed mic Ensemble recording we're just not going to cut it so we made the decision very early on to do full cast ensemble sessions but then also decided to add choreographed full movement performances on top of that focusing solely on the vo performance and not actually performing any motion capture because we are very very clearly insane people click the end result is a technique I've been semi jokingly referring to as folk app so without further ado I'm gonna share with you some of the experiences we had and the

lessons that we learned usually one of the largest hurdles in ensemble recording is scheduling which is as mundane as it sounds coordinating recording sessions were all the actors studios creative stakeholders and so on are available at the same time is no small task I did a talk specifically on this at GDC a few years ago and at this and in the same year also at Miggs so I know what's available on the vault if you really want to dive down that rabbit hole hope you like Excel because pretty much every scene in Tacoma has every actor in it having disjointed and separate conversations it made it actually really easy to juggle the complex what would have been a complex shot list we didn't have to rework the scripts and all the actors could show up at the same time which means actually scheduling this really the easiest ensemble I've ever done we did have one major setback though in

order to get the material together for the early press builds we wound up finalizing the cast a year before the principal recordings then that year later when we went back to do the principal record recordings one of our core cast members was unavailable in shooting on location on the other side of the country so we had to make a really hard call and it's a it's a call that I don't really take lightly I hate recasting I hate it I hate it I hate it and especially when you're doing an ensemble because the actors grow attached to each other and they get attached to each other's characters so part of the psychology behind Ensemble is the actors look forward to coming back and playing with those same people over and over again their actual real human being interpersonal dynamics start blending into their characters that they're playing and it really echoes in the performance quite nicely however because of this because of this recast we had we had to bring a new guy in and man he did really good he slotted in

very quickly we were very fortunate with this and he really built he really brought something to the character that I hadn't seen before and it's a very complex character so it was it was a nice addition that I just you know I'd have been remiss if I didn't give you a big ole warning when doing ensemble and having large gaps in your in your production cycle on the plus side because of these pre-alpha sessions we were able to stress test our workflow and the techniques that we'd invented for the project to make sure that they worked some of them did some of them became lessons to be learned and it became really valuable so that was cool I'll show you some of that script preparation and shot lists we talked a little bit about before this is usually a complex part of the producing ensemble content this too is covered in the talks I mentioned in the vault so I'm not going to go too far into it and again for this project it was dead simple we actually

wound up being able to very neatly packaged everything into three and a half and a three and a half hour long sessions and then with you know a half hour buffer for everybody getting there and be like oh hey the traffic's terrible you know getting to know one another and so yeah we actually had the opportunity to do this project and to end linear which was amazing we basically got to do it as a play and and because of that we were able to have something that sometimes is but really difficult to manage in ensemble work where you're disjointedly going back and forth between scenes we were able to ensure well without a shadow of a doubt that the the emotional transitions between the scenes would be consistent which is very nice I thought and it worked really well on to something new choreography so because we're entering because we were one of the talent to be able to move around and interact with each other and do things with props

every scene needed to be choreographed so here's some excerpts from my blocking notes now I'm gonna bring out the laser pointer because my drawings are shitty where is it pointer options laser pointer great hmm so on these pages I have blocking notes were ever seen most of what you're seeing here is set dressing and movement the actors are these crudely drawn circles with their characters first initial scratched in to the center okay here it is an example of two people starting in a location crossing the room to meet up with another two people and here's an example of two people walking back and forth to simulate having a walk-in talk in a long hallway scene which I'll show you the results of that in a second actually if any of you guys seen the the footage from Tacoma like

the 15 minute gameplay or anything no no okay cool it's the that that secret that's choreographed right there is the is the the opening shot that you see in the in the in the station I kept the set dressing as minimal as possible and I wanted to use what we already had in a studio so we used chairs which are these insanely weird H shaped rooms that are that are sort of pushed onto the page with with with quite an eloquent hand I must add and then music stands are notated by these crudely drawn straight lines so I also sent this this little beauty into the studio ahead of time for setup it is if you can't tell a room layout drawing that's that is labeled because my drawing is terrible because my

handwriting apparently makes things clear to no one for those of you who can't read my handwriting which is all of you this says music stands this is the director stand reader stand talent chairs and chairs because I just can't draw a chair okay well you get actually cool to draw some chairs are we going there no get back good sorry so would it have been simpler to record the game by by bringing everybody in for solo recording sessions absolutely would it have sounded nearly as good no I've said it before I'll say it again and I'll say it on every freakin opportunity I get to say it until it is the norm acting is reacting you can't react to nothing and nobody while you're standing in an isolation booth with an excel sheet in front of you I think Matt Mercer said it best when we were when we were recording masks Arata

he said ensemble is giving us the opportunity and the ability to make adjustments in real-time which is a really good way looking at and from my point of view it removes the it removes the mandate for me to have to have the actors play to the voices in my and allows them to collaborate with me and build scenes together organically and you know actually do the [ __ ] jobs that we were hired to do so that's always nice it was decided early on that the creative direction for the games for the games dialogue should be what I've been referring to as sci-fi mumblecore the emphasis here is being placed on getting organic realism focused performances as opposed to cinematic realism a good sound design analog for any of you who may happen to be sound designers would be like an explosion sound audience expectations are big boomy goofy and and and utterly ridiculously over-the-top but a

realistic explosion sound is a big pop so it's the difference between realism and audience expectation so when an actor is stationary standing in front of a microphone as you would in solo recording or in or even an enlarged room ensemble their instinct is to focus more on their own vocal performance which naturally draws them back into cinematic realism this is generally the desired result for pretty much every other project on the planet but not this one think about it really I mean in your day to day life are you focused on the quality of your voice and a moaning effectively as you talk to a friend or coworker or giving a lecture at GDC probably not because you sound ridiculous though I could probably sound a lot better I'm really sorry I I try to go to bed at 10:00 last night it did not happen so so for organic realism the more distracted the actor is the better movement helps put the actor in the scene and it gives them honest pacing

and it also allows them to focus less on their vocal performance so here's some example of performances that without the help of movement in the faux capture methods it's my opinion we would have never gotten to now please note before I show you this the audio in the videos is from the camera and not from the board so it'd be gentle oh my god wait is today obsolescence Jenna didn't Odin give you a job to do no a computer playing favorites ooh what does the never cease are you okay can you feel your feet and hands but we enjoy what you can Williams forever

[Music] [Laughter] sorry I had to leave so that last shot by the way where she jumps into her arms that is the final screen-used take the audio quality was [ __ ] perfect which blew me away and I'll talk a little bit about how we got to that in a moment in addition to the stage blocking I also used some basic props to further distract the talent and help them with the scene pacing being in a treated recording environment though I had to be extremely you dishes in which perhaps we couldn't could not use obviously we want to steer away from anything that

generates self noise but we also needed to avoid props that would make noise by way of manual manipulation or or door brushing against also I wanted to give the talent the smallest possible toolset so that they could familiarize themselves with the props quickly and not have to learn new mechanics for how to handle things so I narrowed it down to these a set of rubber-coated dumbbells and a couple of packs of broken in bicycle playing cars of which my house has many I use the weights to help in scenes where the talent needed to show Hertz or if they were like unpacking supplies carrying large objects or catching something the cards I used in scenes where the characters were doing detailed tasks like checking in on lab equipment or decorating a cake and what I would do is I'd have them had like a red deck and a blue deck and I would have them sort the cards in in in suit

order in in in natural decks suit order and then also by red and by blue so it was something that they had to focus on while they were performing and then you'll see in a second how cool that sounded it does and I have proof so yeah it's fun but we'll be able to breathe on the drones so that'd be nice come on lift that maybe was when some whole type of AI had become obsolete but sighs it's no AI aren't like designer hardware as soon as the new models out you trade in the old one for customer loyalty AI have more like and they're more like mighty redwoods ancient organisms growing and adapting year after year decade after decade right how do you think is this

that man both of those guys all the actors that you just saw are really really talented people TJ Remini is charming as [ __ ] in real life all right another little trick I used concerns the seventh member of the of the crew Odin their ships AI is sort of a bit quittez seventh crew member that can they can be in multiple locations and engaging multiple dialogues simultaneously it's very similar to the a iOS structure in the movie her has everybody seen her yes okay I'm one of the performance between the human crew members to feel so subtly natural and organic but I wanted to have psycho acoustic you that was diff and when they were when they were interacting with Odin so we did something a little different there to get to their I I had Odin record outside of the ensemble in a traditional solo isolated recording session we also did

this with the with the protagonist who is not a crew member she's actually sitting right there Erica isn't everyone and we did that so that they would have a disconnected feel from the rest of the organic performances that were going on around them it came out really cool and and what we did in the ensemble sessions though was I had my production assistants stand in as a reader face to face with whoever was talking to Odin at the time that was the two little crudely drawn sticks they were on the other side of those whenever they were talking to Odin all right she's gonna do some technical stuff script preparation something we do on every project is to take the script as it's delivered to us and reformat it into our game script template which is basically the standard theatrical format with a few minor modifications like seen numbers individual line numbers and if the game has it at file names if it doesn't then

we just leave that blank usually by the way when we do file names we do them in micro text on the far right margin in case you're really nerdy about your formatting and really want to know that one it's but the reason we do the the the line numbering though it allows me to quickly tell the talent which sections of the script we'll be working on for each take I'll call things and say like alright let's take let's take one and two and we'll grab those two takes back-to-back and I'll say all right let's move on and we'll do three on down to twelve or you know in this case I'd say three to end of page and it allows us to quickly communicate what chunks of script we want to be working on in any given moment it also allows me to after we're doing the ensemble takes if there's something that I feel that we didn't get there on a line that we didn't didn't quite get to and needs a needs a safety pickup go back and give me four and give them a lead-in on three so give me three and four it's it's just a quick quick way of communicating it takes like 30 seconds to do

or that's it how much I assumed that my assistants take the it's probably a lot longer it's also very important and silly for me to have to say this but numbering your pages when you're using paper scripts it gets really messy in the studio and you will totally kill valuable actor in studio time having your actors or an assistant or an engineer or you digging around on the ground looking for page six when you're on page 200 not fun well I mean you can easily do it if it's numbered six but if it has no page numbers on it you're [ __ ] it's also really it's also really useful when you're using tablets which we pretty much exclusively do now this motion happens all the time and then oh [ __ ] where am I everybody else is on page twenty twenty twenty if they have the page number they can see that it's page twenty if you'd forget to put the I'm telling you this because

when I first started out nobody was numbering pages I'm hoping by now this is standard I'm sorry this is really boring stuff here I love actors with all my heart truly but for the most part actors they don't really have a lot of knowledge about audio and what microphones pick up and what it sounds like at the end and how it gets from their mouths to the in-game I mean it's not that they don't have the vaguest of ideas I'm talking about really technical stuff like shirt motion or things like that but mostly I'm talking about paper so that's why we use tablets and there's been so many times when we would be even using paper that the actor be performing they'd be in the middle of the most beautiful take you've ever seen little golden BAFTA trophies we're just smiling in your eyes and then can't use that take one of the biggest lessons from our pilot session was that paper scripts absolutely need to be eliminated when you're doing any sort of

movement in the studio for the same reason the same reason so tablets for everyone you get a tablet you get a tablet you get a tablet and you get a meme for anyone who didn't get that joke all right when working with folk app Ensemble or any ensemble project really pre-populating your markers and Pro Tools is practically essential so and the same with providing shot lists for the engineers to work off of and for the talent for you when you're at your director post to understand how much time you've used versus where you should be in your estimates here's a sample of the shot list and then following that the template that I sent over for the engineering team a few days before the session here's the shot list if you want to effectively manage your sessions not waste money and make your engineers happy you need to be really [ __ ] organized this shot list shows the

engineer on the ache on the B column every name of every scene that we're doing in the order that we're doing it this one was easy because it was linear column C is showing the estimated time for how long each shot should take to record and then and then the the other columns are all lists of who is on Mike and should be being recorded at any given time that's a really really really I can't make it any smoother than that but on the Pro Tools sides of things I had I had I had I had this made it's a one track per actor character that the track names are pre-populated with the file naming convention that I've been using forever it's year underscore month day underscore actor name understood character name that way when your files come out and if you've ever seen me talk about my my post-production process when your files come out they're all auto numbered Pro Tools is one of the only dawes that'll do underscore oh one which

is one of the other reason that I'm that use this sorry it's one of the only reasons that I use Pro Tools every other system uses the operating systems file naming convention in order to name its files so you're so your first take will always be named file name your second take will then in Windows be named file name parenthesis one end parenthesis dot WAV file three will be parentheses parentheses to end parentheses the reason that I use Pro Tools isn't because I think it's a great da because file number one is named underscore O one so that when I'm tracking a little entire somebody else is tracking all this stuff in an excel sheet and they're saying okay that was take one a was the Select that we have a tool that parses that excel file at the end of the day goes through and Auto renames all the file names with zero margin of human error into the into the Depot so that saves legit a lot of time all right hmm

markers are then pre-populated horizontally across the time line what I do is is I use the estimated time that I have in the shot list and then I add a healthy five minutes to each between each marker so if a scene took ten minutes there's 15 minutes worth of timeline to work with there it it makes post-production so much faster because when you file it fire up your sessions later all the scenes are there all of the actors takes are there and you can just quickly identify where you need to be and there's a lot of separation so it's not all clumped together mm-hmm so rounding things out we did some serious homework on mic selection I needed to have something that would work for full motion and and not have any proximity alteration you know getting too close for the microphone or getting any movement noise self-generated noise and

what happens with lavell ears a lot too because it's really thin cable with really shitty shielding is is a self noise made from conductance so that you hear like a like movement noise when the cable is moving around on you so we tested a ton of mics I also if we were using lavalieres wanted all the warmth and fullness that can really I thought to this moment only be provided by a large diaphragm mic because you know I'm I'm really easy like that so after numerous shootouts with a cater of really disappointing lavalier solutions we found a clear winner in the DPA 46 the one man that Mike sent it's so good I'll play you some stuff in a few seconds after some experimentation with with several Mike placements which is very important in lavell ears which included the the headgear with the head facing microphone placement which we found to be much too prone to plosive

miss and then also hairline mounting so over the ear with like a little countryman b3 style kind of thing and you see that all the time in stage and on unlike pop singers and stuff like that we found that that was too prone to to cross nose air movement problems but your nose basically a [ __ ] like little baffle yeah so we we ended up wig miking so Center forehead this got rid of all plosives it sounds super clean it also makes everyone look ridiculous which is great by plate that's for poor Natasha thank you by placing it here we removed all of those all those things so if you're gonna use the lavell ear that's where I would put it if you don't believe me which I wouldn't either here's some raw completely unaltered audio from those

sessions I think and oh it's still on the laser pointer mmm that's the pen no sorry sorry I'm not gonna sing for you while we're waiting there we go my god wait is today obsolescence day Jana but didn't Odin give you a job to do no huh a computer playing favorites well one doesn't ever cease yeah that was that little walking talk from before and again we did there's a 2-0 editing on this I just pulled these straight out of Pro Tools yeah it's [ __ ] but we'll be able to breathe on the drones so that'll be nice oh that was the the little wait scene that you saw earlier and then I'm telling you this was this is completely raw this is the jump scene then I start thinking we should [ __ ] clean as a

whistle I couldn't believe it when that happened I was just like oh yeah we're not gonna be able to use that take and the engineers in my cans like yeah no that was clean I stopped the session sorry I stopped the session I went into the control room and I and I said play it back and I heard that and I went so yeah there's DPA forty sixty ones I really like them alright so here's an area where you really don't want to scrimp you do not want to try and save yourself a few dollars by getting four sets of labs for six actors and have them like switch out in between scenes and then start dividing your shot list so you only have four on like well there well you could be using six the logic there being that you're gonna save a few dollars renting or purchasing

microphones but your talent is the most expensive commodity in that studio when you're doing ensemble you will absolutely come out cost- if you factor in the time suck that is swapping out between takes so one mic per actor built clipped with an XLR the engineer would come in in between each shot he would unclip and he would recoil all six mics and then start addressing everybody else additionally when I wrote out that stage blocking I was really conscious and made pre-visualization like drawings which had been erased because they were even shittier to visualize the cable pathways when when blocking out those scenes so that I would make sure the actors didn't cross paths or do anything stupid like wrap themselves around a chair I mean who knows what right that's um that's pretty

much it for the technical stuff which really kind of rounds us out and that's it so thank you all so much for coming please stick around for QA which is again like I said my favorite and I hope you guys have questions this is a really weird [ __ ] there's mics in the aisle so if you have questions please line up now and use them also as you leave please thank the CAS and the a/v team for doing such a great job at this show without them this entire conference would be an unmitigated disaster so please also remember to thank you and please also remember to fill out your surveys especially if you really like the session and my review of you today I just really enjoyed having you here so without further ado Q&A your first I

believe fight it out okay I win okay [Laughter] really insightful talk really awesome on your shot list you had time budgeted for each of your shots in the scenes that you were recording mm-hmm did you ever go overtime for any of those shots and if so like how was the best way to deal with that thank you that's it that's a really good question so what I do is I buffer in a little bit of time for each shot I also know that the earlier shots in the day are going to longer than the later shots in the day because like I said that's everybody's getting there especially if it's the first day you got a buffer in like half an hour or so maybe even an hour I don't even call that buffer I actually just called that getting to know each other and try and do like an hour of dedicated just hey let's meet each other and figure each other oh you were in that I was I know so and so from that like all that kind of crap so you need to put that in once everybody gets starting to work yeah you need to make

sure that you're going at a pretty good clip and making sure that you're staying on schedule but you also need to have the foresight to know that you're gonna need a little bit of buffer also on multi-day shoots if you go if you if you do hit a little bit under it's okay because you have you you have thankfully left a space on each of your sheets because you're scheduling isn't that's why I schedule it three three-and-a-half hours and not like max to four well it's also when you're doing if you're doing it like we did you also need to factor in time for getting everybody miked up week taping wig untapping all that kind of stuff so yeah awesome thanks hey no worries hi this was great thank you so what I was really struck by it was even your use of the word ensemble because especially talking to at voiceover actors often they never meet each other and they have the other human in their ear so like what is the moment that they all went and had pizza together and became an ensemble like what is that it's a really really good question I'll

tell an anecdote and then I'll and and I'll answer the question the specific question is that okay yeah so we're working on another project we working on masks errata songs and shadows which was a 1200 page 60 person cast full ensemble that we did end to end ensemble it's great and if you haven't played it which I know most of you haven't you should story is brilliant but I remember there was a really really really seasoned high profile voice actor and I don't don't do the name thing he came in to our studio and was just like he walked in to the room and was just like oh you guys are recording I can go wait out in the no way out and the thing it's just like now dude we need to get you when you get in here we're you know performing ensemble which his agent should have told him by the way because we told her that's a whole nother mess and he's just [ __ ] froze and was just like I could

see the shock on his face and the happiness that was exuding off of him moments later and this is a guy who's done hundreds and hundreds of games and animated films and he's like a major commercial voice that you hear all the [ __ ] time and he said I've never gotten to do this and he gets in the booth and it's like it's just [ __ ] it was just incredible to see him be overjoyed I mean his character needed to be mean but to see him be overjoyed with the idea and concept of being able to play off each other and I think that's when Matt said that quote from earlier that you know like you're able to make those adjustments in real time which you cannot do in solo recording so the specific question that you ask though is what was the moment where they all like pizza up and got to know each other yes and like how do you convince people to pay for that extra time to have everyone in the room that's a great question

if someone is hiring me to do ensemble they've got a pretty good idea of what I'm going to bring to the table and they usually trust my methods if it was when it was earlier on in my career and I was just starting to try this kind of stuff it was it was a little bit of a challenge so what we did was we called it a table read and we had everybody come in for the table read and yes they familiarize themselves with the material yes they got to know one another we also because we labeled it as a table read brought in all the writers we brought in the we brought in the creative director and we brought in the the audio producer and and the executive producer and we all sat down with the actors and I had the writers I had each one talked about what their contributions where's the project

and I had the creative director talk a little bit about the high end caught the high-level concept of the game and we gave people had their character sides ahead of time so they were able to ask intelligent questions about their characters I made sure that the writers were explaining the dynamics and relationships between each character in that room so this is how you feel about them this is how you feel about them usually what I do when I'm writing is I make a character relationship matrix for every single character in that game even if they don't know them I will want to know how they feel about how they would feel if they had met that character and then I usually end up doing that just naturally when I have a script handed to me that I'm trying to think about the dynamic relationship between each character so does that does that help you that was great I want to see that matrix usage hello thank you for the wonderful talk thank you yeah I had a question about assuming that you knew

that you were going to be doing this sort of more experimental method for the actual sessions did that in any way influence the means by which you auditioned actors and major casting decisions yeah that's a really good question we did actually have the agents we highly encourage them to submit their theatrical resumes which you sometimes can't just pull up so we had them submit their theatrical resumes and any any any footage that they may have had that highlighted movement so whether it be whether it be like a walk-on role or a recording of a stage performance things like that the reason that you don't recognize a lot of the people in that room is because most of them came from TV and film so that was something else do we that we ended up doing on this I mean so few of them like like Abigail Marlowe and Natasha Law like killing it in voiceover right now but the others are like are filming TV

people one of them freaking wrote the damn damn Cosby theme song and was on like one of my favorite shows of all times so that was cool yeah that's a that's a that's a really good question however because we were centered on vocal performance we really really we really leaned into who was gonna provide the best characterization of the voice because movement is is natural and we didn't need like okay so tipos and then for you can go into your thing and hey I am angry and Russian or whatever you know like that's a whole nother thing localized movement should absolutely be a thing does that answer your question yes thank you that was very insightful thank you for the question hello I'm a call thanks ru talk I'm wondering you said earlier that it would have been easier had you done non non sample recordings for the for this game but it wouldn't have been as good if you had to estimate how much more time it

took to do the ensemble recording like percentage-wise could you is like 20 percent 30 I will give you a really really good answer to that I hope so with ensemble by its very nature more of your time is spent in pre-production and post-production but less of your time is spent in the studio and in fact most of the time and I can't guarantee this for anybody out there who's like we're gonna do ensemble and it's gonna be great and and Michael Zurich said this and we're taking that to our producers but most of the time is and that's how you all sound in my head by the way most of the time it ends up being cost neutral and I know that that sounds insane but it is that's that's that's it's it's just it ends up being cost neutral that's a good argument thank you thanks cool yes hi Michael thank you very much it was terrific um my question is were there any unforeseen challenges that came in

on the post side of things from doing the ensemble sessions like I guess if you had a performance from one actor that that really worked well for the take but maybe not from the second actor or third in the scene did did that make editing those lines more difficult once you got into post-production would you mind repeating your question and possibly rephrasing it sure because you had multiple actors in the scene I guess within the recording did that make editing those lines more difficult once you did post-production I got it thank you so I think what you're talking about is is step over lines so yes like like just there so and I'm sorry that I didn't go into too much detail on things like that I'm just I've given a lot of talks about ensemble at GDC so I was hoping that we would highlight just the stuff that's specific to the takoma project but I've covered that before and it's an excellent question what I do is

I have them perform the scene as best as possible get the scene to sound amazing and if there's a line that's a step over line now that they've already got it in their system and know what it is I tell them to do the scene again but give me pause for positive the ellipses and it's it works really well there was this game had very little very little step over it worked out really well but for things like combat and and not to like when you know that that was that was a good example of how you saw I had a like a three burst pain reaction in there yeah that was because in the scene she's pain reacting while other people are talking so you do that one time because you don't want to stress the actors voice you want to let had let them do that one time so they get the the the so they get the amplitude of the scene it to the place where you want it and then you go back and have them do the scene without without automata Pia or any sort of stressful voice work and save that for

the end of the scene is that does that help you yeah absolutely thank you very much well does anybody else have questions I mean you can literally ask me anything you want to know how magic works or like hey how are you hey great how are you I'm well thanks awesome thank you for the talk it's really great thank you thank you for coming yeah so um the arm jumping take if the one you thought wouldn't work well what an alternative way would be that you would have recorded that that's a really good question the reason that we did the arm jump was because we had done like three or four takes of that scene that just weren't getting there with the with that joyous like exuberant movement base performance and so because we had them standing still and just being like like jumping for joy or just like just moving or hugging like like air hugging each other and just wasn't getting there and

I'll be honest with you like as a voice-over director working with voice actors sometimes it's really challenging to do things like ask an actor to do something physical to interact with each other you don't wanna make anybody uncomfortable or to put them outside of their outside of their their sphere of comfort and damage the relationship between you and the talent and also between the talent and the other actor they're not [ __ ] toys they're people so you can do things like ask them like I want to try something that might be a little bit weird it's okay to say no would you mind actually jumping but in this case in this case the two actresses that were they were playing the couple really really really like liked each other like right off the bat like in reality and Natasha is just a very like very much so her character like they're both very much so they're characters and so Natasha is just like would it be okay if I just actually jump on and Abigail's leg and she looks at Abigail and

Abigail's like yeah which is why which is which is why wouldn't it - it comes off of that she's just like and it that ended up just being really cool so I wanted them to do that just the one time if like because I didn't think that the audio quality was gonna be very good but to get that amplitude of a motive a motive response into the scene work and be like oh that's how far we need to bring it that's that's why that's why that scene worked out really well there was a couple of other points in the production as well where that happened there's a without getting I did this to be a spoiler free as possible by the way but there is there's a there was a scene where this scene just played better where one person had their head in another person's lap and it worked out really well and again I asked permission said like hey would it be cool if we tried this and they're just like yeah well another part would be if

that didn't work out how would have you adjust what would it all turn into thing be I mean you got the like the wait and they know how would it feel but if the audio didn't come oh if it if it hadn't have worked out I guess I I mean I don't want to like at the risk of at the risk of sounding brash or or arrogant I think I'm a pretty okay director and I like to think that I'm able to coach people into that into difficult situations if need be again this one worked out but I see your point like what if you jumped in she was just still a moding just like yay that wasn't how she was doing it by the way but um but if she had been it's one of those things where there's a few few subtle triggers that you can do to help to coach that performance without being obnoxious one of them is to do have you boys acted before okay who is someone who has not voice acted before who is someone who has not voiced adapted before they would be totally

cool with standing in front of a microwave from a microphone and giving you you okay will do will do will do will do both of you I don't I'm not very good at miming I'm sorry oh five minutes thank you okay okay so you're gonna fight you are going to be punching him that's going to be a one-hit punch so and remember I already have previous knowledge that's neither of these guys are professional voice actors so I want you to do a one-hit punch to him and it's gonna be a quick quick burst of kind of thing so you're gonna be like and your reaction is it

more about the speech or the reaction is much more about the reaction and the way that I like to describe combat which I'm totally stealing from DB Cooper is this when you're hip it's always a surprise so you're caught off guard and things are very valid rivet oh oh there diaphragmatic but in the face especially your mouth is caught open ooh if you are doing the punching the combat comes from a place of knowledge you know that you're going to give a punch so you're secure your jaw might be a little bit tighter so things can be a little bit more consonant driven good yeah okay so I want you to punch him not really go ahead that was pretty good give me

one more taken instead of coming from the confines of a I come from the chest really get it you really get your face set okay that was really good give me a favorite this time I want you two to stay on Mike won't you stay on Mike and I want you to see you two keep your hand like this on your face coaching people into doing combat rapidly like that really really helps set the tone for the urgency of the scene you're faking them into being in a dangerous environment faster oh my god you're in a panic state when you get them to do things really fast so that that helps great I also pretty much always put audience participation in my

talks I hadn't planned to this year yes first of all awesome talking audience participation great job thank you for being here and I got to play the demo down at day of the dough so it's just really cool I was really curious about how you got the zero-g scenes to work the one out the zero-gravity scenes where they're like in the Tacoma Dome oh oh as far as the as far as the the voice stuff yeah and like late we put we played a little bit of it before I don't if you saw but when I play a little bit about that before so what we did was we had like just trash-talking each other you know here I'll just go back to this lack of this fun boo boo boo and then I think that why don't I answer your question while I'm getting the scene queued up just a quick question how much rewriting was there during the sessions I know with this one have a game it can be pretty heavily structured but was there a time when the ensemble was like what is oh wait one more time what was

that was there any rewriting during the ensemble work no yeah writing during rewrites rewrites yeah there were minor tweaks but I mean it wasn't like it wasn't like like like how Amy you're talking about the way the Amy Hennig does her stuff the Steve is the writer on this they're a little bit different he and Carla work very creatively together outside of the studio and they work together they were great together inside the studio too but they're just very very rigorous and making sure that everything is like scratch recorded and played test at a million times before they bring into the studio I want to point out this game we had a very limited budget for the audio recordings so with everything they could do to prepare properly they did and we've been working together for a very long time on other projects so it was just a very natural like hey this is what we're what we're doing can we do this and I was like yes we'll make that work so you know what after class and I'll play you that video unless everybody really wants to see Jupiter gravity dunk all right fine do I have time to fire up Jupiter gravity dunk all right cool and

then after yeah so after this I'll be in the hallway and you guys can can all find me there I'm around all week this conference is about meeting people it's about building connections is about it's about having friendships please please please don't be frightened to talk to a person just remember that they're a person and be kind I encourage you if you want to talk to me please just do so I was I was really scared and nervous at my first conference and George Sanger made everything okay for me just like you did with DB if you were in that talk before so I hope that at some point I can I or somebody that I know or one of you can you pass that along to somebody else here is the motion video with Jupiter gravity dunk oh my god wait is today obsolescence day Jenna didn't Odin

give you a job to do no a computer playing favorites oh one doesn't never cease I don't think I could fast forward are you okay can you feel your feet hands um but enjoy it while you can Williams [Music] [Laughter] dirty dance enough sorry that was me

that was me to having my rings on my giant jug of water that I usually carry around it's a weird thing so that's our talk my talk okay thank you for coming and I hope to see you outside [Applause]