Well, I mentioned on my Facebook at around 1:00 am that I had recorded some lines for a Half Life 2 mod. I really enjoyed the character and thought the lines turned out really well. I woke up this morning to find that the mod leader really enjoyed the lines, but they weren't quite crazy enough.
This is something all actors will inevitably have to deal with and believe me when I say it takes practice. Criticism, constructive or otherwise, is always hard, especially if a director doesn't give you much, well, direction. (Man, look at how many commas that sentence had!) But, the director is the director and more crazy just means it can end up being more ridiculous, psychotic, and more fun.
So, shortly I'll be going back through the lines trying to make them even crazier. We'll see how that goes.
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Now time for the first, or second?, advice column. I know there are a lot of topics I wanted to touch on and this isn't even on the list, but it came up in a discussion last night and I think it's a great place to start. The idea of NPCs.
In a lot of voice acting, you get what you pay for. Even if you have Mark Hammil or Billy West, they still might not give the best performance if they're underpaid or if the lines aren't super well written. The specific example I'm thinking of is a genre not EVER known for its voice overs. What is that? RTSs or Real Time Strategy games. This would include everything from Diablo II to StarCraft and Command and Conquer. Hell, you might even make a case for Civilization.
Some of the voice over work is all right, but the vast majority is simply atrocious. Why is that? Well, a couple of reasons. One I'll call the NPC Rule and come back to. The other is the idea that several deaths is a tragedy, but a million is a statistic. Characters get lost in the shuffle. This leads, psychologically speaking, to the NPC Rule for writers and voice actors.
In D&D, NPCs are defined as Non-Player Characters, anyone the player cannot control from Hitler to Mess Hall Cook IV. The problem is, unless there's a certain amount of investment in the character's game future (as there would be with Hitler), there won't be development or personality added to this particular character. This one of the things that causes bad voice acting. If your character will never interact with the player for more than two lines, it's likely you're willing to let yourself underdevelop the character's personalities, goals, etc.
This is a problem in both acting and everyday life. When someone cuts you off on the highway, your immediate response is probably to think "what a jack@$$," but what if he or she is rushing someone to an emergency room or just got back from a business trip and wants to make it to their child's birthday party? We almost never think about that. We're so wrapped up in our own world that we typically only think WE are the real person and no one else is.
This is where the NPC Rule comes in for acting. That mess hall cook's lines will come across flat when you decide he's not a real person. When you decide he is limited to the scope of his two lines and nothing brought him to this point and nothing will carry him out of this point. He will be perpetually stuck in the ether of bad voice acting and in limbo in that mess hall. Can you think of a worse fate than that? Sure he's not technically real, but good voice acting can make a game and I bet money you can think of examples where bad voice acting has nearly destroyed one.
So, off my soap box, what am I talking about? What's the bottom line? Develop any character, no matter how small or insignificant, because in that character's eyes, he has come to this point from somewhere. Something brought him here and he expects to go somewhere else after this, even if you know it isn't true. So bring any and every character to life. They have a past and they believe they have a future (unless they're suicidal, but that's fun, too). Bring realism to your work and add depth, even if it isn't there. That will change you from an average voice actor into a phenomenal one.
No character is truly an NPC
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