Game (voice) over: actors turn to video games during the pandemic | Games

The launch of new consoles from Microsoft and Sony has drawn even more attention than usual to the successful AAA segment of the market, where lavishly animated and performed performances are the norm and production budgets can easily exceed those of a Hollywood movie. All of this has increased the demand for voice actors and provided a boon for workers whose other sources of income have dried up.

Not that he was purely motivated by cold economic reality. A lot more actors could play games themselves and consume content and be like, You know what, it’s actually pretty awesome I’d love to do that, says Sam Hughes, a British actor based in Finland. And then some people, who always had an interest but were too busy doing other forms of acting, said: Oh, I can finally get into voice acting properly now.

There are few statistics on the extent of video game dubbing activity. The ONS does not collect data on what actors do, and Equity, the actors’ union, has tried for years to encourage more cooperation and communication between the studios and the union with mixed success.

This is partly because there is no commercial body that we can negotiate with, explains Shannon Sailing, industrial manager of audio, new media and games, but also because it is a new area of ​​work. Were in talks with some of the major UK voice studios, to try to get a collective agreement.

But the scale of what a game is can vary. On the one hand, huge blockbuster productions are actually computer-generated mini-films, and after a 2017 Hollywoods Sag-Aftra union strike, often come with similar levels of protection. For games like 2020s Last of Us Part II, actors star in full motion capture costumes, with a camera trained on their face to capture their expressions for scanning.

Layton’s first role in the game, as De Sardet, the protagonist of 2019’s fantasy role-playing game Greedfall, was bigger than most, but still just a vocal performance. They had me read for the audition, and I think I only read five lines, but it got me a role in a video game. I think we recorded over 100 hours of it. It was pretty intense.

We did it over two years, in blocks of a few weeks, logging maybe four hours a day. Then there would be a three month gap, and then you would have another session. If you’re lucky and I was, they’ve recorded everyone’s lines already, so you can play the roles of the others.

For Hughes, a recent, bulky project stands out as the exact opposite experience. Working on what he simply calls the Spreadsheet Game, he emailed an Excel spreadsheet with 600 lines of dialogue every six months or so. It was a tough job, he laughs. They don’t give you a lot of direction, they get less pay, and it was a bit of a hassle because I basically did the same character twice, once with an American accent and once in English.

Sometimes tedious would be a blessing. Layton remembers a job done as a zombie. They paid me an hour. But an hour of howling is like an eternity in hell on earth. It is so painful, and also, as an actor, your voice is your instrument; its part of your livelihood. I was a bit of a novice when I agreed to do it: I saw the cost of an hour of work and I said to myself: I can do it, that’s good. But you can have permanent voice damage, or something that takes a long time to recover.

It is this risk of damage that Equity tries to protect itself against by pushing for a standard union contract. Other pitfalls can surprise actors as well, Sailing says. There may be a problem that they are not told up front what they are going to say. You could ask people to do sex scenes, like racial slurs, etc., which can put them in a very awkward position.