Traditionally, when actors voiced an animated character for a game, they were in a booth, with a music stand for their script, in front of microphone unable to move. They had no visual or audio references and were utterly reliant on the skill of the director for the context of every line. If the objective was a living, nuanced, real performance then the odds for success were wholly dependent on how well prepared and skilled the director was and how skilled the actor was with the method. The proof of effectiveness is on every console.

At the heart of good performance is an actor alive as the character they are playing and utterly connected to the moment they’re in. All else is bad. At the heart of good practice in production is empowering talent to operate at the height of their ability. All else is a loss of what could have been.

Rising from a vision to help (voice) actors perform at their best in games, I ended up designing a production tool-set I call Creative Dialogue Tools (CDT) which evolved to also help game developers with voice asset management, mastering and QA.

At the core of CDT are functions that connect an Excel script to the game's audio and visual assets in real-time. CDT becomes the heart of the recording studio, immersing the actor fully in the game at the very moment of creation. The image below is a CDT screen grab from the script for the demo of the indie game Chicken Police

The no-brainer element of giving actors full audio and visual context does raise quality but it is just the tip of the iceberg. What makes the real difference is the method used when working with context. I call my method Game Immersive Voice Recording or GIVR for short. GIVR is about unlocking the actor. Freeing them to be their creative best.

During my journey developing GIVR/CDT, I found that the method creates conditions that liberate the actor to experience and express new visceral depths in their craft. The closest parallel is when improv is used in filmmaking, as it engages the actor at a similar level.

The framework for GIVR/CDT was designed around a model used for supporting spies working undercover. The logic is that spies are actors, they are completely embedded in the character they play, and every second is lived by the seat of their pants. Undercover has to succeed; the stakes are too high for it not to.

What is interesting about acting in games is that when you have huge complex nonlinear scripts of a hundred thousand words or more, there's little chance for any actor to do the preparation work they would do for stage and screen. So they have to work by the seat of their pants too. This turns out to be the best of news. We know it works because spies do it - with bells on. And the rest of us do it because we're alive. It’s how we all live.

How you take performance to the next level, is by denying the actor advance sight of the script. Just focus on character. Once the actor is 'in', drop them into the game world sight-reading the script. It works. Trust me. I know it goes against the grain. I ate the pudding for the best part of twenty years before the proof got through to me. No advance script is the key.

Rather than going into details of why it works and the details of how to make it work, just watch this video with Debra Wilson. It was shot at Vault 501 in Santa Monica during her introduction to GIVR/CDT.

I went the whole hog with the method. In 2008 I changed the layout of the London studio control room to that of a Mobile Command Unit (MCU) as used to support undercover operations. The engineer moved from central to the side, to work like a recordist on a film set. The director is front and central, closest to the actor and in control of CDT.

The actors were brought on-board with the spy analogy. The language for on-boarding was developed working with the help of acting students at RADA, The Drama Centre and LAMDA in London. My goal was to find keys that unlocked screen and stage actors with no experience with games. I wanted them to fly at their magnificent best.

The second London studio was built on the same MCU model. The talkback button was removed. It became open mic to foster collaborative and honest communications and to ensure distraction-free focus on supporting the actor. I also stopped using microphones on stands, preferring instead to use the head mounted DPA mics as used in theatres. A mic on a stand is a cage that constrains performance. Actors are wild animals, caging them is a tyranny. On the head you get consistent sound and the actor can freely move as the character.

The below video was shot on my phone capturing Alix Wilton Regan in her role as Kerillian in Vermintide II. It illustrates the freedom.

If you play games listen to the performances. You can hear whether an actor is caged or free, you can hear whether the actor is a puppet of the director or fully in the moment.

If you want to find out more, I'm running a best practice roundtable session with game developers and the voice and MOCAP directors JB Blanc and Tom Keegan this Wednesday August 7 2019, 7-10pm. Part of the discussion will heartily unpick this work. If you’d like to come join us, please message me.

The venue is Vault 501 in Santa Monica. The Vault is the first GIVR/CDT studio in the US.

I'm also heading to Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, 20 to 24 August 2019 to share more of the 'under the hood' magic of CDT.

Thanks for reading, Mark Estdale