Velvet Fog
Strangers from distant lands, friends of old, welcome! I hope you’ve all been well. Over the past few weeks, we’ve been very busy recording the voice acting for Voodoo Detective (the 2D point-and-click adventure game I won’t shut up about). As we head into the fourth week of recording, I figured it might be a good time to share a little bit about the process. So here we go!
Casting
I have a lot of affection for the old LucasArts adventure games of yore. Monkey Island and Grim Fandango will always reside in the list of my top ten favorite games. To me, they’re like comfortable chairs, the furniture in my head. So when I began to contemplate how to find a casting director for Voodoo Detective, I immediately went back to those games to find out who had served in that capacity. Grim Fandango, in particular, had an astonishingly good voice cast.
As it turns out, a wonderful, friendly, Irish man named Darragh O’Farrell was in charge of casting for those games. So it was he that I reached out to first, and he who became the casting director for Voodoo Detective!
If step one was to hire a casting director, step two was to assemble a “casting package” detailing the various characters we were hoping to find voices for. Each character has a document with their visual design, a description of their personality, and dialogue excerpts from the game showcasing the various emotions that the character will be expected to emote.
Darragh sent the casting package out to various casting agencies and then we waited for auditions to roll in. And roll in they did! As I mentioned in my previous post, we received over nine-hundred fifty auditions for twelve different roles.
In a feat of Herculean effort, Darragh narrowed down that list from nine-hundred fifty to around one hundred auditions. Eric and I then culled the list further to the twelve actors we ended up casting for the game. Eventually, we added a thirteenth actor to tackle a few additional voices. Just for fun, I want to share an audition snippet from our top pick for the voice of Voodoo Detective:
Recording
Once we’d decided on whom to hire, Darragh set up recording sessions with each of the actors over a four week period. We’re about to enter week four, so things are moving right along.
In the past, this kind of recording would have mostly taken place in recording studios. There’d be an audio engineer, myself, Eric, and Darragh situated in one room, and the voice talent stationed in a soundproof recording booth with a microphone.
But instead of the past, we have the pandemic. So rather than meet up in person, we make do with Zoom sessions. Sometimes, the actors will still go into recording studios, but more often than not, voice actors will have their own recording setups at home. Some even have their own soundproof recording booths.
There’s not really all that much to say about the recording process itself. We all have the script. Eric, Darragh, and/or I will give direction to the actor, and the actor will read a line two or three times. Sometimes that’s enough, and sometimes we try again for a different take.
Processing and Mastering
After we have the recordings, we go through and pick our favorite takes. Those takes are then handed over to our sound designer, Julian Kwasneski (another LucasArts veteran), who goes through each sound file to remove noise and normalize volume. I’m not saying we have a demon in our game, but if we did, Julian might also modify the actor’s voice to sound more demonic.
And that’s it! After I have those mastered files, I dump them in the game. And suddenly, where once there was silence, there are beautiful, sonorous voices! Kind of like honey for your ears. Actually, it wasn’t exactly silent before. I had written a program to recite all the lines in the game with a robotic voice. I’m so very glad I don’t have to listen to that anymore.
And that’s all I have to say about that. Until next time, please take care, stay healthy, and live well!
Love,
Eric Fulton