AGDC Podcast: Creating A New Age Of Voiceover In Games

Gamasutra is proud to present the latest free Game Developers Conference recording, part of our regular weekly GDC Radio podcasts, which include both the Tom Kim-presented Gamasutra Podcast show, alongside the best lectures, tutorials, and roundtables from this and previous years' Game Developers Conferences. This week's podcast comes from this year's Austin Game Developers Conference, with a roundtable consisting primarily of voice recording artists DB Cooper and Pat Fraley. Both veterans of traditional and game-related voiceovers, DB Cooper's work has appeared in titles by studios such as Blitz Games. Fraley has appeared in a number of classic LucasArts titles such as Escape From Monkey Island, as well as Armed and Dangerous and is currently recording original sounds and languages for user-created creatures in EA's Spore -- the latter of which he previews over the course of the podcast. For their extensive and entertaining Austin GDC lecture, the two, as well as a number of audience participants, give practical advice for voice actors, audio engineers, script writers, designers and more can do to get the best performances for their games. From the official roundtable description: "This roundtable is for the exchange of ideas between writers, designers & audio people, and voice actors & AFTRA in the interest of learning what game developers need the most from voice talent and what the "perfect-world" deliverables would be from talent and contracts. There will also be discussion about the things game designers and audio directors can expect from voice actors and the union and what changes can be made in their concerted approach to best aid the game design process from the very beginning." Examples of all of the tips and processes covered are given, including how to coach a elegant and graceful performance out of actors who are only recording gun-shot character grunts, screams, and falls. You can now download the Austin GDC lecture, Creating a New Age of VO in Games (.MP3, 70 minutes, 16 MB). In addition, you can subscribe to the GDC Radio podcasts by clicking this link for iTunes. You can manually subscribe to our feed in your favorite RSS reader that supports enclosures by using this URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/GDCRadio.