Voice Actor Adventures
Livejournal is small and intimate enough that I can write here sometimes, so I might do that for little things like this. As mentioned in my last post I’m doing the gaming and writing thing. And I think I also mentioned how I am now also hiring voice actors. We hired an amazing fellow named Luke (NOT a furry, just someone we contacted with a voice we liked) but needed to expand our cast for a female character. So last week I posted an ad on a voice acting website expecting to get a few nibbles. Instead I had to wade through almost sixty applicants.
This past year and especially this past week I have learned so much about voice acting and the hiring process and a good chunk of what the professionals have to deal with. Let me share some of my adventures with you…
Luke is AMAZING. He is a sweet little cinnamon roll too good for this world. I hired him because he was a true bass voice in a sea of tenors. The artist for the comic imagined someone that could sound like Steve Blum and after convincing her that there was no way we could AFFORD him I convinced her to let me find someone who could speak similarly. What we got was an adorable kid who loved producing audio and who had such a deep voice he was perfect for what we wanted. He could also produce amazing music and had great singing chops. My partner and I are pretty certain we burned all of our karma finding this guy but I am so glad we did. An example of what he sounds like can be found in the first half of the animatic here: https://youtu.be/qc20W9GPhxU The second character, the shark dragon, was an ASMR artist I found because if you’re going to voice a villain in an American production you need to hire a British voice actor.
As I mentioned, we hired Luke because he had a deep bass voice. So many people would list that they could be a bass or a baritone in their profile and they would turn out to be a tenor. Some women would even list themselves as bass or ‘adult male’ so they would pop up on as many searches as possible. And he has a great acting ability with little direction needed. If I found out he was the love child of Thurl Ravenscroft I would not be shocked at all.
Working with Luke has also turned me into an audio snob. I’ve had a lot of people send me auditions and because of Luke I now know that having a microphone does not make you a voice actor. Luke has taught me what no soundproofing and no pop filter and generally bad equipment do to audio and how just a few changes can improve it drastically. Luke also showed me simple little hacks to make audio better without having to invest in a soundproof booth like making things amounting to pillow forts and using walk-in closets to help with soundproofing. He also showed me some good quality microphones that were relatively budget conscious (He has said that MXL has not made a microphone that doesn’t sound good to him) and generally shown me how good audio engineering can turn an okay production into an amazing one. I knew a little of this already, but with Luke I really understand.
Of course now that we have made some of the animatics public, we get people who want to voice act. I have learned that if you have friends who want to voice act they will sometimes get vicious if you don’t give them a chance. Because of this I’ve had to take on the policy of not hiring friends, or if I do making it clear that our relationship is professional when it comes to the work and if they deliver me crap then I won’t use it. Even the artist knows that if she does not deliver audio for her own character to my standards I will hire someone else to voice her. It sounds harsh, but after having a lot of friends all but bite my head off for not using them I’ve had to become harsh to preserve those friendships. (And honestly, if someone is willing to kick me to the curb over me not hiring them, they probably weren’t very good friends to begin with.)
We also got someone that contacted us over the very first animatic we did which was a monologue that lasted a couple of minutes. (You can view it here: https://youtu.be/oe_p9AyIasU ) It was about a character named Silver giving people in boot camp a speech to show them what to expect and was subtly meant to show the people on the roleplay side of the forum how to behave. This person seemed really excited over it and told us of his aspirations to be a voice actor which was cool and all and I tried to encourage him… Right up until I realized that what he wanted to do was voice Silver, whom we had already cast; and voice him for that animatic, which we had already done. When we tried explaining that Silver was already cast he backpedaled. So, we asked him to pick another character in the cast to voice, and he told us to pick one for him because he didn't want to pick through them all. Then he told us to find him a good audio editing program. Then he asked us to tell him how to use it, and by the way it needed to work with WinXP. Then and only then did he send me an example of his audio…
I hold the belief that naming something will often help you overcome that thing. Kind of like the ‘Ridiculous' spell in Harry Potter. Turning a bad thing into a goofy thing. So when this person sent me his audio sample, I dubbed him “The Chain Smoking Canadian Eeyore”. He did not try at all to clear his voice before recording, he had no emotion to his voice, and his audio was horrible. It sounded like he was recording through a telephone. When I tried to explain the latter to him he insisted it sounded fine because the microphone was ‘expensive’. So, I made a recording of me speaking through my headset microphone to show what I meant by tinny quality, and then I recorded through my studio microphone to show the counterpoint. He never contacted me again. Some problems take care of themselves. And as an aside, his idea of ‘expensive’ was a microphone that cost a hundred dollars. I explained that my headset cost almost that much and I still wouldn’t record audio for animation on it. Like I said, he never tried to contact me again after that.
So anywho, I needed to hire a voice actress for a character in the comic named Artemis. I went to a voice acting website and posted my ad and got nothing for a few days. I assumed that maybe nobody was interested because I can’t pay market rates (which are about $250 for half an hour, and you pay them that $250 even if they do two minutes of work). But then suddenly I got a DELUGE of requests. I guess it took a little bit for my ad to go live.
And this is where the audio snob kicked in…
Room noise? NOPE.
No pop filter? GOODBYE.
You think a laptop mic is good enough? REJECTED!
I also turned people down for not reading my demo audition line properly. I am sad to say I turned a LOT of people down for not reading my audition properly. My thoughts were that if you can’t read fifteen words right, you’re not going to read a hundred word script right either. And other people were weeded out for not showing any emotion at all and reading it like news copy. I picked the most emotional line from the script and they sounded like they were reading stock numbers.
There was a video in Quantum Break (a video game) about how people needed to hire a new announcer for an in-game TV show and were holding auditions. The video summed up the whole hunting for a voice actor experience pretty well and I now link to it here: https://youtu.be/RxAHZBwP6uY
After everything we still had about a dozen people left over. I let the artist review them as well since she’s going to have to listen to these hundreds of times as she makes the animatic. I wanted a voice capable of showing strength but also tenderness. And I did not want a voice that sounded like it belonged to a teenager. There were several that were close, but we finally decided on someone named Holly. I really liked the website because I could put payment to them in escrow so they KNEW there was money waiting to be released to them, and I had security in the fact that they wouldn't take my money and run. I paid extra for that pleasure, but as I work with Holly more in the future we can probably work up a way for me to pay her directly and circumvent the fees.
The hardest person to turn down was a wonderful woman with a slightly Irish accent, but as the character does not have one I had to turn her down.
One person sent me copy for a sexual wellness clinic instead of their audition. We did not pick her.
So over the past year I have learned how to tell good audio quality from mediocre, and I now know how to hire, and pay, voice actors. I can't afford union rates, but who knows. If we get big enough we might be able to in the future.