General advice for acquiring / working with voice actors.

[TheLastMariner]

Hello, all.

I'm currently developing a quest mod for Fallout 4 and am at a stage where some characters have all of their dialogue lines, so I was hoping to get some general advice for acquiring and working with voice actors, as well as best practices for implementing the voiced lines within the Creation Kit.

Things I'd appreciate more info on are:

- The best places to get hold of voice actors (who preferably understand that they'd be volunteering.)

- How to format the in-game dialogue lines for voice actors. (E.g. Do I write a traditional script, and if so how does that work if the conversations branch off? How much context do voice actors need?)

- Ways of efficiently implementing voice files in the creation kit.

- Any other general advice in regards to voicing dialogue for mods.

Thanks!

[werr92]

Glad someone has finally raised this question. The voice acting for a mod turns out to be for many of us the hardest button to button.

 

Recording voiceover for your game/plugin is one of that kind of things you work on when the whole project is nearing the completion. That way you have all dialogue entries already created and you can arrange the voice recordings in a much more comfortable and easy-to-implement way for you, the mod author.

 

First of all, you need to divide everything your characters are going to say into specific separate roles. How do you do that? Well, if you pay attention, there is a button named "Export Quest Dialogue" and "Export Dialogue for Specific Voices" ('Quest Tab' in Quest). It extracts the lines for you in the format of .txt file, game directory. Next step is to open it using Excel and clean it up from the rubbish. I normally tend to leave there a column that represents Topic ID for a line, a filename if you wish (that's not for a voice actor, but for you to name accordingly the lines you get after an actor voices them, and you do the editing and cutting). Then I go with the actual response text and the next one column is for any notes I find necessary. oh, and I leave the "Emotion" or so-called facial animation expression (such as Anger 25, Neutral 100, Happy 80). And... I cut the rest of the crap.

 

At this point my goal is to have as little info in Role.xlsx file as necessary for an actor to comprehend, while still being informative for me enough to work with when I recieve an audio file itself and do the editing and stuff. "How much context do voice actors need?" The answer to your question would be: the more insight you're capable of providing - the better for you. Otherwise, you will suffer from the consequences when a voice actor is yelling on the top of his lungs while his character is supposed to be talking to himself or whispering things. BUT do not expect people to dive into your project main story or understanding the whole plot twist to act effectively. Because nobody would do that, people want to have some fun doing voice acting and not to get the second unpaid job. So focus on the most noticable aspects and make the most important yet clear notes, then form a picture of a character to an actor and then be so kind - get out of the way and let him do the job!

 

The majority of amater voice actors don't know what format to record in, how to edit the recording and so on... So don't expect them to do so. Remember, you don't want to overcomplicate things for them. Ask them to send you all lines in one or a couple of files (one recording session) and do the post-production with cutting and naming the resulted lines by yourself. If you don't know how to do it - learn it, it's not that big of a deal, or find someone who would do this long and boring process for you.

 

After you got all the voice lines lying in the proper directories (wave, 16bit, 44.1kHz, mono), you can go ahead and generate .lip files and then convert everything into .fuz. Once again, it is very convenient to have all of the lines voiced at the final stage of development, because now you can generate lips for all of them in one run. That being the implementation.

 

Speaking of the places you can go to in search for VAs, try to open your project page on Casting Call, or post a topic here, or find someone here and send them a pm, or consider looking up in "The Voice Actors of Nexus" thread, or... plenty of other ways.

 

 

That seems to be it, but I'm curious what others've got to say about it.

Edited May 9, 2018 by werr92

[Thuggysmurf]

Stuff I've learned from screwing it up on previous mods:

 

To efficiently implement the player dialogue, you need a tool like this:

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/24309/

 

Formatting for voice actors: Lots of ways to do it. I've switched to putting each quest in it's own word document, list out all the player and NPC dialogues, quest stages, etc. Then color code each role, and say, "all your lines are in red".

 

Finding voice actors: depends. I prefer recruiting Nexus users where possible because they love the game and tend to come up with creative ideas and dialogue. They also will have no problem with weird pronunciations like "Prydwen" because they've already heard it in game.

 

Downside of that is at least 80% (95%?) of available Nexus voice actors are male, so if you need more than a few female voice actors, you might have to use Casting Call. The mod I'm currently working on is 80/20 female/male on voice actors rather than the usual 20/80, and to do that, only one of the female voice actors is on Nexus.

 

Other: Like Werr said, don't make voice actors edit anything. But ask them if they'll do 2-3 takes of each line. Then apply normalization (-4db usually, or -2db for certain combat lines), noise reduction, and all editing on your end using Audacity, Wave Pad, or something like that.

 

Other 2: To the extent you can use terminals or notes to provide certain non-essential context, do that instead of voice lines, and leave the highlights for the voiced dialogue. It's ten times more efficient to implement text vs. voice. Gotta have voiced characters, because that's what brings it all to life, but just use it where it counts.

 

Other 3: The override file name button in Creation Kit will save a lot of time, on one-liner dialogues, and avoid needing to include multiple voice files of the same line. Or the "shared info" method works too.

 

Other 4: To generate the lip sync, don't do it manually. Use this:

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/20728/

 

I will stop rambling now...