Slamdance!
After a long hiatus, I am finally back to finish my series on how to creat voice overs that don’t suck… but first! Slamdance!
It’s been a busy last month for a multitude of reasons, part of which was attending SlamDance in Park City, Utah. A game that I worked on, Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa was a finalist in their “Guerilla Games” Division. If you’d like to see some pictures of the event and parties before and after (if any of you are going to GDC — you are bound to meet some of these people!) I posted a photo tour off my website. Enjoy!
As a musician and sound designer there are few things I learned here:
1. Always carry your business cards on your person
I handed out cards everywhere from the bus, to the bathroom (awkward), to restaurants to parties. If you don’t have a card with your name, business, phone number and email/website… you just don’t look like you have your act together. Nothing looks more amateur than having to scrawl your email on the back on someone ELSE’s card. I seriously questioned folks who didn’t have a card to give back to me in return.
At conventions/competitions like these, everyone is there to try to network and find the “next gig” as fast as possible and to generate the most leads. Having a card that presents yourself in a professional manner… perhaps with a good company name and/or logo really help. I also developed a pet peive — the translucent business card. The fact that you MUST place these plastic cards on a white sheet of paper to READ THEM seems a bit ludicrious to me. Just one man’s opinion.
2. Try to make your game as self-explanatory as possible
If your game is installed on a machine that runs all day long, you want people to be able to easily, and on their own, understand your game and have fun playing it. This may take the form of a simple, professional-looking “cheat sheet” set up next to your station or maybe an in-game tutorial mode. Sure, it helps if you are around the whole time to help teach people the ins and outs — and this is of course desirable — but you do need to eat, sleep and network (that was pretty much my schedule for 4 days!) so you can’t be there all the time.
3. Bring flyers! Print Posters!
If you haven’t experienced a Sundance/Slamdance/Filmfestival x event… it goes something like this. Most indipendent artists are there with their super-low budget productions to try to get funding for their NEXT project or possibly distribution for their current project. Some desire to get noticed by major commerical studios, others are just looking for private investors to help jump-start the cash flow in their current independent company. In this way it is very similiar for games.
As part of this, the festival’s wild popularity benefits from the fact that a lot of hollywood descends upon the same small town for 1-2 weeks a year. The difference between this and LA however, is that this town is pretty much empty for the rest of the year — so this sudden influx of hollywood makes ALMOST anyone you meet a film maker, actor, director, art director, musician, etc.
So, there is a lot of competition for people’s attention. At any given moment during the day, there are probably 10-12 films being screened at the same time. Some may be lucky enough to have another screening, others — this will be their one shot.
So there’s tons of folks walking up and down the street handing out flyers and stapling them to pillars, trying to lure folks into watch their films. Oddly, I was the only one who thought of doing this with the games and people were genuinely interested and came to see it. Whether you realize it or not, to many “non-dev” folks, game making DOES have some of the same sex-appeal as film making.
4. Always be posititve
Never, ever bash someone else’s game or put down their skills or talent. Its a small world out there and you see people get quickly alienated when you hear about them becoming pompous or mean to other devs, filmmakers, etc. You can learn much more by making friends instead of enemies.
5. Always talk about future ideas
Not in a “hey steal this idea” sort of way, but this will quickly bring collaborators to YOU instead of you trying to hunt them down. Ideas excite people — so if you have a good one, let them know!
Anyways, it was a great time and I’m glad I had a chance to go!
Coming soon will be part II of my series started here about recording voice overs that don’t suck.
Cheers,
John Seguin
jseguin@seguinsound.com
www.seguinsound.com
