3 Tips for Casting Video Game Voice-Over Recordings

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One of the hardest parts of video game voice-over production is casting – assigning which voiceover talents will play which characters. How hard is it? Imagine having a game with 550 characters. Each one of these characters has a distinct personality and very specific voice requirements. Your budget allows for 60 VO talents – believe it or not, this is actually pretty good for a video game. How do you even start casting? How do you make sure that you don’t miscast a talent – and end up having to recast? If this process seems daunting, that’s because it often can be. But there are ways to make it more manageable.

This post will give you the 3 tips essential to a successful casting of localized video game voice over recordings.

[Average read time: 5 minutes]

Video games are a big deal, bigger every day

It’s somewhat of an industry cliché at this point, but worth repeating – video games are displacing passive entertainment likes movies and TV shows in terms of user engagement. The industry is growing so strongly that Amazon, which has recently ventured into original programming with stunning success, is making  a major push into video games with Amazon Game Studios. It makes sense that a leader in media development is joining this thriving industry– after all, who wouldn’t want a piece of the $100 billion in revenue that video gaming brings in?

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Two trends in the industry have solidified in the last decade. First, games have gone global, with same-day releases in multiple markets. Localizing from English has always been key to global success, but we’re also now seeing a lot of work into English, as other countries’ video game industries have matured. South Korea and Brazil are particularly strong in this area. Second, games – especially massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) – have become much more complex, with large worlds and hundreds or even thousands of characters. These two trends mean that there’s much more demand for video game localization, and that it is now much more complex.

Managing the casting

So how do you manage your voiceover casting? The first step is to hire an experienced video games localization voice over producer like JBI Studios. Yes, this is a plug for our services, but it’s also the truth. It’s crucial to have an experienced VO director and project manager leading the casting and production process. This core production team will make sure that the casting is done thoroughly, with proven, professional talents. It will also keep the production on time, on scope, and ensure high-quality performances.

With this team in place, you can move on to the casting phase. There are two main goals during casting. To analyze them, let’s look at the scenario from above – 60 voice-over talents to cover 550 characters. Ideally, you want to assign the best talent possible for each character – the one who has the acting ability and voice range to really nail the recording. But you also have to manage talent usage – for example, if two characters talk with each other extensively throughout the game, having the same talent play them can cause issues, even if that talent is the best fit for both. These three tips address this issue of talent management, and give you the tools to interface with your localization production team.

Note that this advice can work for both games going from English to other targets, as well as from other languages to English.

1. Think about who talks to whom in your game.

One of the rules of thumb of casting voice over talents for narrative content – video games, movie & TV show lip-sync dubbing, even e-Learning scenarios – is to maximize voice separation. Voice talents will almost always have to play multiple characters in these kinds of content. Ideally, you want talents to voice characters that are as far apart as possible from one another in the content. In a movie, it’s safe to have a talent play two gruff 60-year-old male characters if they are small parts, and one appears at the beginning of the movie, and the other at the end. For starters, the talent can change his voice and performance slightly for each character. But more importantly, viewers are probably not going to be able to remember the first voice too much when they hear the second one, since they’ve just watched almost an hour of content – meaning that they won’t be able to tell that it’s the same actor. The opposite is likewise true – having the same talent play similar characters who talk to each other extensively can lead to issues, since no matter how well the talent defines each character, there’s a chance that players and viewers may catch on that it’s the same voice.

Therefore, start your casting prep by segmenting your characters by worlds, locales, game chapters, or anything else that may separate them from one another. If your game has multiple separate worlds, or specific groups of characters that interact with each other, make sure to note that as a field in the scripts – one that can be sorted by your PM and director. For example, if our sample game with 550 characters has three distinct worlds with minimal interaction between them, then you have built-in voice separation. That means that you can strategize casting each world separately – using the 60 talents to cover about 190 characters, or roughly 3-4 characters per world per talent. That segmentation makes casting much more manageable right off the bat.

The inverse is true – it’s key to identify characters that spend a lot of time together. For example, characters who are sidekicks, or who have game-long rivalries, or who “live” near each other, should be voiced whenever possible by different talents. There are ways to communicate this to the studio – for example, as notes in the character bios, or by adding records of when characters appear in the games, or even “geographic” location within a specific world.

They key is to get a sense of voice separation – who talks with whom, and who would never interact with whom – and pass that info to the studio early on.

2. Focus on the main characters.

Most games have a core group of main characters. They may be avatars that the players can use to travel through the game. Or they can be main opponents to the players. These characters generally have three things in common – a larger number of lines, a wider range of performance (often including lines dubbed to sophisticated animations), and a longer “life-span” in the video game’s worlds, which translates into more interactions– talking, basically – with other characters. Most games have 30-40 core characters, but that can range widely from one game to another.

Casting should focus on these characters first. In our scenario, the ideal would be to assign one unique talent to each one of the core characters, and to cast as closely to the talent’s resting voice, so that they don’t have to strain too much in their acting. This leads to better overall performances and maximizes voice separation, so it’s crucial to do this first in the casting. For this reason, it’s key for developers to identify their core characters and flag them for the project manager and video games director.

3. Provide all character and audio references available.

This is anything that the project manager and director can use to narrow down the casting. For starters, providing the original VO file is key – they provide a baseline for the character voices, though localization can sometimes mean altering them to cast more closely to the expectations of a specific locale. This also includes character bios, any group or “ethnic” background (for example, if you have tribes in your world), and especially any character screen shots or portraits. The latter are useful not just to the video game directors when casting, but also to the voice talents – seeing those portraits in the studio can really help them visualize a performance and give it depth.

Make sure that this information is easily accessible as well – for example, if you send reference audio files, label them with the character name or the exact file name in the script. (This is true for all audio translation services, of course.) Likewise, make sure that any data on characters is in table format and sortable, since casting will require sorting characters by world, gender, age, voice profile, group, and any other factors you provide.

Bonus tip: Allow for pick-ups

Ultimately, providing these three elements – a sense of voice/world separation, a main character breakdown, and full bios/ref files – is the single best thing that a video game developer can do to ensure that the localized recordings integrate seamlessly into the game, and to avoid the dreaded pick-up. But even then, it’s very difficult to get everything right the first time around, and video games almost always require additional recordings once all of the audio has been recorded, especially if characters or worlds get added on. Remember, a video game can have tens of thousands of small audio files – the game in the scenario above would have about 15,000 distinct VO audio files. There’s a very good chance that a line doesn’t get into the script, that a gender reference is wrong, that something gets mistranslated, or even that the performance is off, especially if there isn’t a situational reference for it in the script.

There are a literally thousands of chances for something to go wrong. While the vast majority of issues can be avoided through good preparation, it’s always wise to build a pick-ups round into your recordings. Planning for a pick-ups round before the main recordings allow you to line-item these costs up front, when they’re more manageable as a relatively small part of the overall budget. It also allows you to include them in your project timeline, and strategize how to record them – for example, by keeping in mind that you may be able to shift casting to make the pick-up sessions as cost-effective as possible. As with all elements of voiceover production and localization, planning for all contingencies is the key to keeping costs manageable, delivering on time, and ensuring a high-quality, engaging final product.