How to Produce Voice Overs that don’t SUCK, Part III: The Talent

Posted by John on March 11th 2006 to Blog Post

In the last two articles that I’ve posted (Part I, Part II) in this series we’ve discussed both the why and the tools regarding making voice overs for your game. Today, we’re going to talk about the talent.

Auditioning
Auditioning talent can be quite tricky. Assuming that you aren’t going through a professional talent agency and are assured of professional actors, how do you “scout” for talent amongst your friends, neighbors, colleagues, classmates, relatives, etc. to find some people who could pull off the job?

Before you begin, make sure that your script is done. Have everything that you want that person to say figured out and written down. If you’re making a WW-II era game ala “Call of Duty” and you’re going to have a bunch of guys jumping around yelling short phrases and screaming, make sure you decide how many screams you will need. How will they be different? Think about their placement in the game… will you hear lots of scream sounds cued in short order? If so — you may want to go for multiple effects for the same “action” so you don’t have a sound effects track that winds up sound like this during game play:

Ahh!
Ahh! - - Hhh
Ahh ahh hhh
ahh ahh ahh aahh

(you get the picture)

Also, if you DO have the same effect, and they are cued simultaneously, will you have multiple sounds overlapping or have them essentially interrupt each other and start over? Planning ahead for durations and frequency can really help prevent these problems.

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Recording Voice Overs that Don’t SUCK: Part II, the tools

Posted by John on March 01st 2006 to Blog Post
How to produce voice-overs that DON’T SUCK: Part II, The ToolsGreetings! If you have not read the first in this series, please review that section now before proceeding.Now, the tools! In this article I will lay out for you the minimum tools that I would recommend to record a quality voice over (VO).Computer
Mac, PC or Linux… choose your poison. Although I profess to be a Mac guy myself, I have no beef with any OS. The bottom line is that you need two high-quality pieces: a good sound interface and a good audio editor. These abound by the dozen. If you are going to be doing this sort of thing for the long haul it would of course behove you to investigate the pros and cons of all of them before making your purchase.

In general, I would recommend looking at a multitracker as opposed to a 2-track editor. The reason being that two-track editors offer a more simplistic environment and often offer advanced sound design and editing features (such as those found in Peak Pro, a favorite sound effect/VO editor of mine. For example, I found the ability to loop a sound with a cross-fade built in extremely easy and very convincing for taking seemingly random sound scape materials (such as crickets in the forest) and slicing it down to a meer 20-30 seconds without it ever appearing to “loop”. This is easy enough when you are dealing with sounds that have a very finite beginning and end (foot steps, for example), but becomes extremely complicated when you start working with sounds that are continuous (a train flying down the tracks, or crickets, or a waterfall, to name a few).

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John Seguin
Composer/Sound Designer