Laura Michet's Blog

Working with VO as an indie

Skin Deep was the first Blendo game with full VO. It has VO because it's a FPS stealth game, which really benefits from providing the player with contextual information over audio. You can find indie stealth games which have zero dialogue in them, but they're all definitely choosing to communicate information about stealth state and other mechanics through the medium of audio. We chose to do that with dialogue.

I'd worked previously with the VO record process at other studios. From the beginning of the project, I wanted us to do a union VO record with SAG-AFTRA. My experience at other studios was that working with the union was likely to get us extremely accomplished pros who are great at finding and keeping a voice through main records and pickups. Because it was Brendon's first time doing VO, I wanted the experience to be completely painless for him, and going with the union seemed like the best way to achieve that.

I previously blogged about the benefits of working with the union here.

You should desperately, desperately want to be on a VO team with people for whom this work is routine. If you are a game developer working on typical 3-5 year long projects, you probably record VO intermittently. You may go two or more years without recording a real actor - your team may use text-to-speech for temp audio, or you may record scratch VO with team member amateurs instead. VO records will be a very stressful time for you. Suddenly, you will find yourself in a mad rush to choose performers and book times, and your calendar will be swallowed up by VO sessions lasting possibly up to four hours long. You will need to keep yourself focused on work for much longer stretches of time than you might usually do. You may feel lost, and probably a little overwhelmed, and will feel a great pressure to live up to the expectations of a large number of friendly strangers you've only just met. If you want this experience to go by smoothly, it really is such a relief to work with people who do this all the time.

We got precisely what we wanted from working with the union on Skin Deep. In fact, during our very first record of the process, Samia Mounts - who played Nina - pulled off the most lines I'd ever seen anyone do in a single session. They found Nina's voice immediately and absolutely nailed her personality. Brendon told me after that first session: Wow, recording VO is so much fun!! It's so easy!! VO is not always anywhere close to easy... but after finding ourselves guided with a steady hand, his worries about the process evaporated so quickly.

I recommend looking at SAG even if you're a project on the smaller side. The union has different contracts appropriate for different sizes of project. When we did the calculation to see whether working with the union would really be more expensive than going around them, we found that the cost of working under the union contract appropriate for Skin Deep was not meaningfully more expensive than it would have been to skip the union.

The VO cast for Skin Deep was:

We owe these folks so much!!! A huge reason why the genre pastiche comes across so quickly and firmly is that all our actors were able to nail the kind of over-the-top comedy we were asking for. In particular, we were utterly delighted by Samia's Nina at every turn. We knew that we had to fully commit to the bit with this weirdo character, and we couldn't have done it without a perfect Nina voice.

#game_development #my_games #skin_deep