Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
This is a quick and ei cient way to cast for projects, as well as a way to
discover unknown talent!
Services such as Voice123 and Voicebank can help aid the casting process when looking for
artists to record voice-over.
Voice-Over Actor
Make no mistake about it, a good voice artist is a major talent, and like
a virtuoso instrumentalist they use all the techniques they have learned
over the years to pull of amazing performances under dii cult and high
pressure situations. Voice work for games is
not
easy to perform. Just
think about this—the average console game possesses around 8,000
lines of dialogue. For a particularly long, epic RPG game, that number
can even go beyond 70,000 lines of dialogue (that's not a typo)! As if
recording all of that wasn't enough, there's more! Voice actors often have
to record the same line in multiple inl ections, so that the best take for
the situation can be used in the game. They also have to keep the energy
and pacing and tone of voice the same over long periods of time in the
studio, sometimes days or even weeks—not an easy job by any stretch of
the imagination.
Union vs Non-Union Talent
Some voice actors are non-union and some are union. What does this
mean? Well, using non-union actors allows for a certain amount of
l exibility in negotiating rates and availability. Union projects demand
considerably more paperwork and come with many restrictions about
numbers of characters, maximum consecutive hours the actor can
work, and more, but there tends to be a higher degree of quality
