Video Game Voice Actors (1 Viewer)

[Optimus Prime]

Article from a few years ago. Wonder is things have improved at all
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LOS ANGELES — She woke up with a tickle in her throat. This was worrying for Ashly Burch, who, at 27, is a rising star in the small world of voice actors, best known for her work in video games.

She knew actors who had blown out their voices in the studio. She'd come close herself.

So leaving her house that morning Burch sipped a soothing mix of chai tea and pea milk. "It's nondairy," she said. "Dairy creates mucus, and that's not a good sound."


Now, standing inside a soundproof studio in nearby Santa Monica, Calif., she gave no hint of discomfort as she prepared to record new lines for “Horizon Zero Dawn,” one of the year’s most popular new releases.


“How’s your throat?” the director asked.

“Fine,” she said, as a monitor glowed with her lines.

Voice actors are increasingly on the front line of a transformation taking hold in the entertainment industry as the creativity of Hollywood and the technological innovation of Silicon Valley converge.

Voice, that intimate marker of human emotion, is now seen as essential to the $24.5 billion U.S. video game market, where the hyper-realistic graphics and operatic story lines used in games can be as textured as the best film dramas.

And the best voice actors — their names known to fans and promoted by companies — can become celebrities despite never appearing onscreen.


Yet voice actors in this industry are not treated like actors in television and movies. This led voice actors to go on strike last year against 11 of the largest video game developers over bonus pay and safety issues such as vocal stress.

The bitter labor dispute dragged on for 11 months, making it the longest strike in the history of Hollywood’s largest actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA.

Burch was forced to give up a critically acclaimed role she loved. Gaming fans feared delays for their favorite titles before a tentative deal was reached late last month. A vote by the full union is going on now…….

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-24-billion-video-game-industry-voice-actors-dont-make-enough-to-live-on/2017/10/27/944a0800-98d8-11e7-87fc-c3f7ee4035c9_story.html

 

[Saint_Ward]

Likely, not.

 

[sammymvpknight]

Just got TMNT Shredders Revenge, which is an awesome beat’em up with 6 local multiplayer. Tons of nostalgia. They there able to get the original ninja turtle voice actors.

 

[Optimus Prime]

The English actor who stars in the hit Bayonetta video game series has asked fans not to buy the latest release in the franchise, after revealing that she was offered just $4,000 (£3,500) to reprise the role.

In an emotional series of videos posted to social media, Hellena Taylor, who voiced the title character of Bayonetta,said she had been replaced in the forthcoming third game in the series because she the proposed fee was an “insult”.

“The Bayonetta franchise made an approximated $450m,” Taylor said, “and that’s not including merchandise. As an actor I trained for a total of seven and a half years – three years at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts with voice coach Barbara Berkery, and four and a half years with the legendary Larry Moss in Los Angeles.

“And what did they think this was worth? What did they offer to pay me? The final offer to do the whole game – as a buyout, flat rate – was $4,000. This is an insult to me, the amount of time that I took to work on my talent, and everything that I have given to this game and the fans.

“I am asking the fans to boycott this game and instead spend the money that you would have spent on this game, donate it to charity.”

Neither Nintendo, which is publishing the forthcoming third game in the series, nor Platinum Games which develops the titles, has responded to Taylor’s allegations. In a Twitter post sent shortly after Taylor’s allegations, Hideki Kamiya, the auteur developer behind the series, wrote “sad and deplorable about the attitude of untruth. That’s what all I can tell now.”

Hideki did not respond to a query about whether he was directly disputing Taylor’s claims, but later tweeted implying that he had blocked so many people he was frozen out of his Twitter account…..

Bayonetta actor asks fans to boycott video game over pay row

Hellena Taylor, who voiced title character, says she was offered an ‘insulting’ $4,000 to reprise role

www.theguardian.com

 

[antipop]

always more to the story

 

[antipop]

whoopsie

 

[BreesusSaves]

whoopsie

When you think you're Robert Downey Jr.'s Ironman but you're actually Hellena Who the heck is that? Taylor.

 

[Optimus Prime]

When the epic open-world PlayStation 4 game Red Dead Redemption 2 was developed in 2013, it took 2,200 days to record the 1,200 voices in the game with 700 voice actors, who recited the 500,000 lines of dialogue.

It was a massive feat that is nearly impossible for any other studio to replicate – let alone a games studio smaller than Rockstar Games.

But with advances in artificial intelligence it is becoming easier and easier to recreate human voices to create automated real-time responses, near limitless dialogue options and speech tailored to a user’s unique input. But the technology raises questions about the ethics of synthesising voices.

The Australian software developer Replica Studios rolled out a voice synthesiser platform for games developers in 2019 – a tool used by Australian games developer PlaySide Studios in their game Age of Darkness: Final Stand.

“We would hope that there’d be hundreds, if not thousands of other studios that could dream of building games like [Red Dead Redemption 2] because everyone wants to do that,” Shreyas Nivas, the chief executive of Replica Studios, says.

Recording every line of dialogue individually is “so inefficient from a cost perspective, but also from a time perspective, and you need to have these huge teams”, Nivas says.

Replica has licensed the voices of 120 actors for use in video games, which are capable of up to 1,000 different vocal tones, according to the company.

Nivas says he sees AI voice synthesising as the future, but, as with many AI advances, the practice is fraught with ethical dilemmas.

There are now free online voice synthesiser tools that can be used to mimic celebrities’ or film and TV character voices – often without the permission of those artists. And Bloomberg reported this month that some voice actors were “shocked” to discover their voice being used in content they had not participated in. (They later learned their contract terms had been broad enough to cover such uses.)…….

AI voice synthesising is being hailed as the future of video games – but at what cost?

Tech advances that make it easier to recreate human voices also raise ethical questions about the rights of actors and musicians

www.theguardian.com

 

[antipop]

devs will do anything just to avoid making better games