Volunteer voice actors?

[Kjaamor]

If non-professional voice actors never voice-acted, then no one would ever level up to the rank of "professional voice actor."

 

...but the vast majority of actors will train at some form of drama school, graduate, and then gain work in their trade of acting. Their profession. In the interim, they are not exactly "non-professional". They have the profession, they're just not working.

 

 

The problem isn't "Omg, no one who isn't a 'professional voice actor' can possibly have a good voice and be competent enough to record lines on nice equipment." The problem is, implementing more voice acting would be implementing more voice acting. If they were still searching for voice-actors for the stuff that's planned to be voice-acted (I really have no idea where they are on this, development-wise), then I'd say "Sure, why not... let people send in samples." If you listen to a sample, it's going to be immediately apparent that it's super crappy and you can't properly judge the voice. In which case, you skip it and move on to the next one. Also, set standards up front. "Only sound files of such-and-such quality and format." Boom. If someone just has a stick mic and Windows Sound Recorder, and tries to send in a sample they made in 5 seconds, then it doesn't even waste anyone's time for review. Why? It doesn't even meet the criteria.

 

Finding suitable volunteers isn't a preposterous idea. It's just not going to allow more of PoE to be voice-acted, really, because money ins't their sole constraint with that.

 

We went through this last time, Lephys. Two professionals, two semi-professional home recording setups, two different sets of acoustics. Bang! Two very different sounding recordings. Sure, you can mix that out, but then you're paying the sound engineer rather than the actor.

 

The joy of in-house recording is that - even aside from the fact it allows direction - is that you have the same consistent acoustics around the voice acting, even if your accounting department is doing it. The issue many of us have with mods is not actually the sound of the actors, but the unwanted sound around the actors.

 

Even aside from the legal aspects, community submitted voice acting requires far more quality control than simply removing the 'stick mic and Windows Sound Recorder' files. You're sifting through files on the basis of acting, quality of recording of that which you're trying to record and quality of recording of that which you're NOT trying to record. Presenting the issue of quality as somehow being binary is absurd, and even if we, the community, personally sorted out the 2,000 submissions into 10 we thought were any good the chances are the engineer would be able to point out the sound inconsistencies and why he would strongly advise against using them.

[Karkarov]

Even aside from the legal aspects, community submitted voice acting requires far more quality control than simply removing the 'stick mic and Windows Sound Recorder' files. You're sifting through files on the basis of acting, quality of recording of that which you're trying to record and quality of recording of that which you're NOT trying to record. Presenting the issue of quality as somehow being binary is absurd, and even if we, the community, personally sorted out the 2,000 submissions into 10 we thought were any good the chances are the engineer would be able to point out the sound inconsistencies and why he would strongly advise against using them.

Just as an aside it isn't as hard as you might suspect to get a simple no background noise recording, sound proof room or not.  Or make the background noise so slight you can't really hear it.  Also the whole point is that if used for city chatter or similar purposes the sound engineer is going to have to edit the files anyway sound proof room or not to make them sound like they were recorded in a city.

[Kjaamor]

Just as an aside it isn't as hard as you might suspect to get a simple no background noise recording, sound proof room or not.  Or make the background noise so slight you can't really hear it.  Also the whole point is that if used for city chatter or similar purposes the sound engineer is going to have to edit the files anyway sound proof room or not to make them sound like they were recorded in a city.

 

As hard as I might suspect?

 

To make these sounds sound like they were recorded in a city, you either need to record them in a city or record the voice in a pure consistent form that can be overlayed onto sounds of city. If you are overlaying noise (and noise is not the same as the "background noise" you're thinking of) on top of existing recordings then the "silence" from track 1 will muffle and distort the "sound" from track 2.

 

Please do not try and explain how things work to people who plainly understand them better than you do.

 

 

 

EDIT: And again, all this nonsense is making it sound as if there is even the slightest bit of debate about this. There isn't.

Edited December 19, 2013 by Kjaamor

[Karkarov]

Please do not try and explain how things work to people who plainly understand them better than you do.

I appreciate your speedy response, don't be upset when I insinuate the troll in the thread you called out earlier isn't the OP. 

[Kjaamor]

[Walsingham]

I certainly did not pay $250 to hear Mkreku pretend he is a dwarf or an elf. Nor did anyone pay to listen to me do voice overs.

 

I now support this on two grounds:

 

1) I  think mkreku would make a good dwarf

 

2) I'd like to hear Volo  voice anything. Ideally a trestle table.

[Yellow Rabbit]

What's so special about full voice-over? It's not the main advantage of a good game, not even close to it. Why bother?

 

Just for clarity, I've played a game once which had full voice-over done only by amateurs. Trust me, such a things should NEVER be done in our world if we want it to survive a little longer. Leave voice-acting to professionals!

 

P.S. Don't know about other people, but personally I learned to read this funny little things they call "letters" when I was 4 years old. And I damn proud of it!

[Lephys]

Heh heh heh... My bad, Kjaamor. Guys, apparently we're not allowed to discuss anything contextual to this topic. All we can say is "Yes, Obsidian should use volunteer voice actors," or "No, they shouldn't." And only one of those answers is correct, so that's all there is to it.

 

Also, all those 11-year-old prodigy singers, and high school freshman athletes who are super awesome at their sport, don't actually exist. They're all just figments of our imagination, as clearly, it is impossible for anyone to be skilled and knowledgeable in the art of voice-acting and/or sound recording unless they have a masters in Voice Recording and work in a professional voice studio.

 

Also, if you're already using a sound studio for your non-volunteer voice actors (because they probably don't all own their own sound studios), it would somehow cost a DIFFERENT amount of money to use that sound studio for a volunteer person, instead of a "professional"ly-established voice actor.

 

And finally, all of that can't possibly just mean that it's quite possible for there to exist a human capable of delivering quality voice-acting who is willing to volunteer to do so, and NOT mean that it's still probably less trouble and more feasible for Obsidian to just stick to established professionals.

 

Thanks for clearing that up, Kjaamor. You're the best. ^_^

Edited December 19, 2013 by Lephys

[Jarmo]

Voted "absolutely not" but that's not really my stance, exactly.

 

Bunch of amateurs doing voice overs with various equipment and skill levels, hell no!

That'd sound like so much mismatch I'll rather have nothing at all.

 

Then again, if Christopher Lee volunteers with his studio pals and Obsidian tells him to not bother because I said so, 

I'm going to feel pretty bad about the whole thing. Or about anybody else with actual talent and capability, famous or not.

 

There's also another thing, that even being a professional voice actor with quality equipment,

doesn't mean the lines just appear magically into the game.

 

I occasionally do professional work with professional voice actors, and I can tell you can't just take two separately recorded (with differing recording setups) voice clips from two actors and combine them and have it sound anything like they were anything but two separate clips mixed together. Not without doing quite a bit of stuff with voice levels and stuff and more stuff.

 

So still quite a bit of work involved even if the acting and recording was done as a gift.

Edited December 19, 2013 by Jarmo

[charms]

The translators of the PS2 game Chaos Wars were bound by their contract to include English language voiceovers in the translation. Since they ran out of funding, they thought it would be a good idea to have volunteers do the voice work.

 

Guess what happened.

 

[Kjaamor]

*garbage*

 

You realise you could spend the time you're giving to sarcastic attempts at being a smart-ass instead bothering to actually understand the incredibly simple point I've been making?

[Hassat Hunter]

The translators of the PS2 game Chaos Wars were bound by their contract to include English language voiceovers in the translation. Since they ran out of funding, they thought it would be a good idea to have volunteers do the voice work.

 

Guess what happened.

 

But... but... thats AWESOME...

(Yes, severe case of sarcasm incase one cannot notice)

[Lephys]

*Actual quote instead of childish reduction to insult inside of some asterisks*

 

You realise you could spend the time you're giving to sarcastic attempts at being a smart-ass instead bothering to actually understand the incredibly simple point I've been making?

You realize you could spend the time you're giving to trying to convince me I'm somehow wasting my time, instead, on actually acknowledging what it is I'm saying, right? Then you could've saved yourself the trouble of emphasizing your "incredibly simple point" in the first place and pretending that yours and mine are mutually exclusive. *shrug*

 

Also, didn't realize I had failed at being a smart-ass. I guess I'll have to try harder next time.

 

Cheers.

Edited December 20, 2013 by Lephys

[Silent Winter]

Full VO? No thanks - largely because I can read a lot faster than they talk and I'll probably skip most of it.  (I don't speed read, but it just works faster in my head.  Even with fully-imagined character voices with intonation etc)
I like the BG way of having a starter line voiced to get the character and then read from there.

Volunteer voice acting for minor NPCs (dialogue and/or battle/city-sounds) - not against the idea per se.  But as has been pointed out, even with professional equipment, you get different levels and it all needs mixing to make it consistent.

So from a work v. payoff stance, I voted no.

 

Of course, it's not a stupid idea to propose and if Obsidian reckon I'm wrong, then they should go with their own ideas on the matter because I'm not a pro

[Osvir]

 

Well the only two substantive objections I have seen Junta boil down to "The community is a bunch of no talent hacks based on BG mods" and "It would be too much work."  Past that I am not really seeing anything and one of those reasons it patently false, I am sure there are some very talented people in the community more than capable of delivering a short line into a mic effectively.

I'm actually only seeing "it would be too much work."

 

It would. There have been pretty good explanations of why it would be too much work. I'm not seeing the "pro" camp address these objections much. Seems they prefer to ascribe all kinds of unrelated motives to the "con" camp instead. I know, less work that way.

But what's the difference? If Obsidian finds someone with:

 

A) Good gear and good voice

B) Ability to record for free

C) Takes time to record/It would be much work

 

Versus professional:

A) Good gear and good voice

B) Costs a ton of money

C) Takes time to record/It would be much work

 

As for copyright issues or suing, like someone else mentioned, just make a written and vocal understanding that the work is volunteer *shrug* otherwise, as I said earlier, if the game is shipped with the "allowance" (in code and in dialogues)* for fans to add their voice to the game~ that's pretty much the same thing but post-release ofc. And I'm satisfied with that too, but I can't help but feel that a volunteer or two could cost Obsidian less money, if organized in a good way. And yes, I meant to say that a volunteer would replace a professional.

 

* Kind of like the discussion about Portraits, having placeholders for factions and such, and then allowing fans or modders to replace those placeholders. In a dialogue or VO kind of way, it could simply be "silent", i.e. no recorded voice at all, then fans could insert a recorded voice in the empty slots.

Edited December 24, 2013 by Osvir

[Vernon Vincent]

I think there may be a perception that getting quality voice actors would be a problem, especially if they are volunteer (i.e. unpaid). But I think the concerns of quality - both with the recording equipment and the talent - may not be as bad as some believe.

 

I currently do voice work at home (I'm unpaid voice talent on a fan-driven Wing Commander audio drama) and it works out reasonably well. I use a laptop computer, with a decent condenser microphone - no headset mikes -  in a quiet (but not soundproof) room to record my lines. The producers usually run our lines through a process to remove any extraneous background noise and to help equalize all of our lines (since all of us are in different locations across the country). You don't need an expensive setup to do this unless you're doing high-end commercial quality - like for animation.

 

In terms of talent - there are a number of voice acting websites out there. VoiceActingAlliance.com is a big one, but there's also VoiceActingClub.com and others. Many of the actors on those sites are good. They're not necessarily "fan-boys" or "fan-girls" (although some are), but they usually are committed to giving good vocalizations to the characters they portray.

 

The majority of the projects on those sites are unpaid, but you can still find decent talent for the project that would be willing to work unpaid.

That said - with a game the size of P:E - you might have a hard time getting people to work on this due to the sheer size of the project. The largest role I've recorded, to date, was a 100 lines for a 30 minute Halloween audio drama. That took me about 4 hours (for various reasons). If there is a lot of recorded dialog, with a lot of branching decision trees - then that's going to take a lot longer to record. That would need to be considered if you planning on relying on your unpaid talent to generate major amounts of content that you, in turn, will need to process and standardize audio-wise.

As an aside - I work a day job, and take vacation days at specific times to bulk record all the lines for the various projects I'm involved in. It works at the moment, but I know I'd have to find another method if I make the transition to paid work as that lack of timeliness could be an issue for a paying producer. 

So, while I think using an unpaid base of voice talent wouldn't be as big of a problem as some had presented, it does have it's own set of challenges that need to be considered and accounted for if it is to be a success. Good talent can be found if you want to look, but you need to consider things like deadlines, script complexity, the need for post-production processing of recorded lines, the need for specific redos (in case, for example, the lines of two actors don't happen to sound right together - even if they sound fine individually), and other technical requirements.

For myself, I like voices in games. Done well, they really help me get in the mood of the game. I really liked the work in DragonAge and DA2 and some others. But that's a personal preference and I can see where others might not.

 

 

[Bryy]

What's so special about full voice-over? It's not the main advantage of a good game, not even close to it. Why bother?

 

Just for clarity, I've played a game once which had full voice-over done only by amateurs. Trust me, such a things should NEVER be done in our world if we want it to survive a little longer. Leave voice-acting to professionals!

 

P.S. Don't know about other people, but personally I learned to read this funny little things they call "letters" when I was 4 years old. And I damn proud of it!

Full voice over can really add a lot to a game if done correctly, just like some audio books are really, really good.

 

Please don't equate liking voice over to not being able to read. It doesn't make you look any smarter.

[Osvir]

Black Mesa a graphical update/rebuilding of Half-Life using Half-Life 2's engine, made by fans and released for free. Every voiced line you hear in this game is fan-made. Honestly? I think it's a better game than the original. But that's because HL2 is superior to HL too (in terms of gameplay). Black Mesa made Half-Life (in my opinion) better than Half-Life 2, where previously I thought Half-Life 2 to be the better. Here's a better link for the voice-acting in Black Mesa.

 

Skywind, voice-work scattered about in the trailer really, but it's the subject around 6:30 and some samples provided. Work in progress.

 

This thread title needs a change because okay I get it, half-assed, casual volunteers are a no-go. We get that. But "Passionate Volunteer Voice Actors"?

Edited January 6, 2014 by Osvir

[LeHeup80]

I would like to offer my voice acting prowess, I am always being told that I should do voice acting, according to very many people its a very unique voice that people very easily recognise as me. Very often, with years between interaction, I am recognised.

 

The best way I could describe myself (in others words) is in between Jean Luke Picard and Orson Wells in tone and speaking style, aka distinctly British.

 

I do not have the equipment as such but hopefully the Obsidian peeps have good enough tech to be able to polish and tweek.

 

Ofcorse this would be for free and I would be more than happy to sigh an extremely bias non disclosure contract which would also include the "upon pain of dismemberment" endorsement. 

 

I think this is a great idea and yet another way for the community to help build the game of all our dreams.

 

GG OE 4 POE!!!!!!

Edited January 6, 2014 by LeHeup80

[TMZuk]

Absolutely not!

 

While good voice acting can certainly add something to a game, bad voice acting only deducts from it. And amateur voice acting is ~always~ bad!

 

So NO!

[BLnoT]

I voted for no. Although it would be a wonderful honour to have your own voice in the game, you really need trained voice actors. Its amazing the difference a good voice actor can add to the game compared to a poor one. I really do consider any voices in a game to be very important ( which is most games i think isnt really thought to be too important )

[Osvir]

Here's another for ya!

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2014/02/25/bioware-offering-the-chance-for-your-voice-to-appear-in-dragon-age-inquisition.aspx

 

Now, many people here don't hold Bioware in high regards, but whatever really... Bioware acknowledges that fans with the right devotion and voice can achieve the same high-quality voice acting that paid actors achieve. Not to forget to mention that it is cheaper. 

This whole misconception that "An unpaid unknown amateur person can't voice act because he's not paid for it nor known for it" is so much BS on so many levels.

Again, take a look at Skywind, take a look at Black Mesa. If you're too lazy to scroll or look for it on page 5, here's a link to the post.

Saying "fans can't voice act ffs" is untrue. Sure there are bad examples where it doesn't work, but there are great examples where it totally works.

[Longknife]

Inb4 Chaos Wars

 

 

EDIT: FUUUUUUUUUUUU- charms beat me to it :C

Edited March 21, 2014 by Longknife

[Osvir]

Does Chaos Wars make all fan/amateur voice acting bad?

EDIT: How many did the voice acting for Chaos Wars, like... 5-6 people out of millions of potential good voice actors out there?

Oh, and a little bit of digging:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_Wars
http://www.gamegrep.com/news/10646-theres_a_reason_chaos_wars_voiceacting_sucks_so_badly/

Is it even fan translated?

Edited March 22, 2014 by Osvir

[Osvir]

I just felt like saying...
 

"And amateur voice acting is ~always~ bad!"

 

Wrong. Again, Skywind and Black Mesa are two fan-made projects that have great voice acting and it's made by fans.
 

"...you really need trained voice actors."

Wrong. Sure, you need to train before voice acting, before going up to the microphone, but you don't need to be a fully trained, experienced, or educated voice actor to be good at it.

What you need is a good voice, a good microphone and some self-awareness, self-confidence, and self-insight about your own capabilities. You need to believe in yourself and reach for perfection in your acting (just like any other creative work, be it dancing, writing, drawing, music or whatever), check out some tips and tricks on the internet, listen to what others have to say about voice acting.

We have google today, anyone can pick up whatever they want if they are devoted for it.

And if you really have no clue what it takes to be a voice actor (bad or good), don't open your mouth at all. This thread is filled with misconceptions and comments that make me wonder if people have any idea whatsoever.

Why is Bioware asking their fans to voice act in their game? 2 things I can think of:
A) It is probably cheaper than hiring some expensive famous actor.
B) Fans will spread it mouth-by-mouth (or through the internet "Check it out! They are letting us join if we provide good enough quality!!! Awesome!"). Widening their player-base. It is a Marketing Stunt, a big company like Bioware wouldn't do this unless they believe they get something in return for doing it.

If Obsidian would do something similar, that's something they could save some money on. And if they won't get any good material from their fans, then I believe they'd widen their player-base at least somewhat. This is only if they'd create some sort of "competition" like Bioware is doing and it surfaces on Kotaku or other game journalist sites.