notesdontmatter

Audio Arts – Week 12 – Game Audio Design (4) - Voice Acting

To give all an exhibition of my personal voice acting skills, I have created a comprehensive list of assets, which mirror the ‘Game Masters’ voice information pointers in the menu screen and during game play. The purpose of these non-character voice-overs is for providing statistical game information (some of this is for multiplayer modes, depicting team position information, but I will not be creating assets for that side of game play), vocal reinforcement of onscreen information, and for general in-game encouragement of the human player.


The existing assets for this group in the Open Arena files were quite dry, and in the normal pitch register of human speech. The actual reproduction of these files during the game is quite different with some obvious pitch shifting and reverberation applied to the files on playback. With this in mind, I have tried to be restrained in my application of these two effects and failed. That being said the quality of the ‘raw’ assets is not so over the top that they won’t fit in the final product without a little tweaking, so I have kept all relevant Cubase and Pro-tools files for this purpose.

The original files were processed in Pro-tools initially with a little help from the Eventide harmoniser. I have gone for a semi-synthesised quality for the voice over feature as it is an ‘unseen’ feature of the game and could potentially be the voice of a machine. Some more processing was executed in Plogue to further enhance the obscure qualities of the vocal takes, mainly via the KT granulator and a stereo flanger.

I hold no reservations regarding choosing myself as the “voice over guy” as people have mentioned in the past that my spoken voice is quite versatile and interesting. All the same, it was once again an educational experience when actually trying to record my voice in the studio, and the asset list is becoming insane..

Click here to link to this week’s MP3s and my updated assets register.


Reference:

Haines, Christian. “Audio Arts – Week 12 – Game Audio Design (4) - Voice Acting.” Lecture presented at Tutorial Room 408, Level 4, Schultz Building, University of Adelaide, 23rd of October, 2007.

posted by David J Dowling @ 8:10 PM