Gamasutra Interviews Wendee Lee

Yup,
That Wendee Lee. Pretty much video game/animation voice over royalty.

It's a good interview talking about the challenges facing this emerging medium.

This part was my fave:

G: They've only started to hire real actors for games in the new millenium, like with Grand Theft Auto 3, so these concerns are new to gaming, aren't they?

WL: There certainly has been a big change in the way that we recorded in the 90’s and how we’re recording now. That’s really true.

I’m always curious how the audience perceives, say, celebrity talent
versus voice actors, or actors who also do voice-over, that understand
that skill that it takes to really put all of your performance into
your voice, which not all acting requires. There’s generally much more
subtlety for cinema, for film, and I always feel we should leave it to
the professionals who do this!

G: In the case of a game like Yakuza, for instance, and no
offense to certain people, there was a lot of big name voice talent in
it – not voice talent, like, acting talent, and they weren't
necessarily the best fit for it. Unless you’ve got a game like Shrek. Of course you wanna have Mike Myers doing the friggin’ thing –

WL: Right, right. He’s gotta be the green guy.

G: It’s gotta be him, or else it’s stupid. But I think in the case of an original game, you really don’t need that.

WL: I think that’s a really good point. I would like to hear that more
often! You know, it’s kind of a problem for voice actors, because in
the last 5, 8 years, maybe even longer, more and more celebrities with
children want to be involved in entertainment that’s sort of geared for
that – now I’m thinking in terms of animation and so forth, not just
strictly games – and often we feel disappointed that we weren’t given
at least a shot, or we weren’t even in the running.
I feel that’s more of a Hollywood move, to sort of attach names to
titles. And they can work out. But often we feel like we could deliver
something a little more accurate, and it’s infringed on some of our
workbase.
To no fault of anyone, I think a lot of companies tried the celebrity
route. And I think it needed to be exercised to get a feel for how it
works. There’s nothing wrong with giving it a shot.
But I have to be honest: I auditioned for Shrek as a voice replacement for some of the main characters.
And I think that some of the studios are coming around to understand;
one: celebrities aren’t always available for voicing, and when I was a
voice director for live action, the last thing actors want to one their
days off is to come in and do their own ADR.
So then to also be tied to a title that requires multiple days in a
studio, often a celebrity’s schedule doesn’t allow, and they sometimes
feel, to me, that they’re in over their heads. Because there’s so much
screaming, and fighting, and impacts, and reactions, that are nuances
that we have practiced for years and years, and are new to people that
aren’t voice actors.

I totally agree with that. I think celebs can be important to moving any property, but if the voice doesn't quite fit, or isn't quite right, it'll just prove distracting. Sometimes I think even replacing a celeb voice on a game can be better for the game as a whole.

Read the rest of the interview here @ Gamasutra!

Stories From the Golden Compass Video Game

A pretty good article written up by "Asset Wrangler" David Allen, on producing the voice over portion of The Golden Compass video game.

...Before we get into that, I’m going to tell you a bit about the process
involved in doing voice-overs for videogames. I totally underestimated
how time consuming and complex this process is, especially on a game
that’s going to be as BIG as The Golden Compass (I hope), where you’ve
got a myriad of languages to translate during production. It’s a big
deal and it’s the single thing on the project that has taken up most of
my time. Apart from eating the excellent lunch on the movie set. Did I
mention that already? I don’t think even my colleagues realize how much
time is involved in doing the voice-over -- apart from Gabriel, the
game’s producer (big cheese), Josh who helped us out in managing the
process and Katrin who is in charge of all the localization needed for
foreign language versions of the game.


Gabriel fully shared the pain, and then some, in getting this part
of the project off the ground. I naively thought that we’d make a few
calls, chew the cud with a few Hollywood types, maybe do lunch and get
the job done. Oh no my friend… A LOT of work. A LOT of back and forth.
A LOT of to-ing and fro-ing. Voice-over was one the first things I
started working on when I first set foot on American soil back in
February. We did the final record session in the middle of September.
Yep, it took that long to get it all together. I don’t want to bore you
with too much detail but there are so many things to deal with when
managing the voice-over process. This is even before you get to the
good bit of sitting outside a glass box watching someone pretend to be
a dying Tartar while wearing headphones and shouting into a microphone.
There’s a certain way of doing things in this business that I don’t
really understand. There’s a lot of negotiation and maneuvering. You
need people who know how to play the “Hollywood” game. I definitely do
not have the patience for it. Fortunately, the guys at Blindlight --
whom we enlisted to help us -- know the game well and they’ve been
through this a million times.

Cool, Shout-out for Blindlight (who are really awesome to work with BTW), but I wish the article had at least mentioned one VO talent by name...

*sigh*

Anywho, the article is a good read, if nothing else then to get a sense of the scale involved in putting these things together.

Yup It's movie big now...

THE GOLDEN COMPASS - VOICE OVER @ IGN