Voice Acting Tips?

[Andrettin]

Hello,

I am currently working on a remake of the mainline campaign "An Orcish Incursion" and decided to try my hand at voice-acting the story narration:

The first encounter with the newcomers went less well than either side might have wished.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/173 ... rsion2.wav

Any suggestions on how I could improve my voice-acting?

[zookeeper]

Technical quality aside, the articulation doesn't sound very natural or relaxed; it sounds like you need to put a lot of effort into articulating each word, which makes it sound unnecessarily tense.

[ancestral]

The stress on the words appears to maybe be a tad much. Normalizing the volume could help, but it’s so hard to judge such a low quality and short audio sample. I’d be interested to hear some more recordings.

[Andrettin]

Technical quality aside, the articulation doesn't sound very natural or relaxed; it sounds like you need to put a lot of effort into articulating each word, which makes it sound unnecessarily tense.

The stress on the words appears to maybe be a tad much. Normalizing the volume could help, but it’s so hard to judge such a low quality and short audio sample. I’d be interested to hear some more recordings.

Thanks for the comments! I will try to not put so much stress on certain words. I was trying to go for a style similar to that of the mission briefings in Warcraft 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpEXhNjEeHY

[West]

I have three great tips that will save you a lot of time:

1. Don't even attempt it if you don't have any experience with (voice) acting. You have? Great, move on to...

2. Make sure you are 100% fluent in the language used, including dialects and other nuances. You are? Cool, then...

3. Get some decent stuff to record yourself. No, a $20 headset into the onboard sound card does not qualify.

[Heindal]

Its not so bad, from what I've heard. One still hears the german accent however and there wasn't enough emotion and timbre in your voice.

You can train your voice with several tricks, but there is also literature about that topic. I've read "stimmtraining" by patric p. kutscher (its german so it should fit) who shows some ways how to train your voice.

But here some advice by a free radiomod: Seperate your text into single sentences and record them. Try to make them perfect and ask others (native speakers) for their oppinion! Record over and over again and take many shots. Get in touch with native speakers and speak with them to train your english. Singing and speaking are similiar. You could try to get into a free choir and try to develop your voice there. I've been lucky and got free professional voice training by the chief of choir over years, which would have cost me a fortune elsewhere.

And West from a professional side, you might be right. But Andrettin is just trying to "pimp" his scenario and we don't all own top notch equipment, nor the money to buy it.

[West]

And West from a professional side, you might be right. But Andrettin is just trying to "pimp" his scenario and we don't all own top notch equipment, nor the money to buy it.

That's the whole point, if you can't make a voice recording that sounds at least somewhat professional, then text is always preferable. I'm not saying this from some audio elitist standpoint, I'm saying this as a gamer: even well recorded bad voice acting ruins the gameplay experience. Badly recorded bad voice acting is obviously even worse. Everyone might not be as picky as me of course. But yeah, you got to start somewhere I guess...

There are cheap USB condenser mics designed for podcasting that would probably work great for a project like this. That way one could at least get the immediate quality hurdles out of the way and focus on what the voice actually sounds like.

Sorry for the negativity Andrettin, it's just that this topic comes up every now and again and the general consensus I think is "don't, unless you're planning to get REALLY serious about it".

[Andrettin]

Heindal, thanks for your comments! I don't know how I ended up speaking English with a German accent, since (although I'm living in Austria) my mother language is Portuguese. Maybe I'm being assimilated already The training tips seem good, I think I will try that.

West, there's no need to excuse yourself for the negativity, I appreciate your comments quite a bit. I think it is important to be realistic about the quality, and it seems to me that negativity is only problematic if it is expressed in a hostile manner. What you said makes a lot of sense to me, and as a player bad voice acting usually puts me off a great deal as well, so it would probably be best if I didn't use voice-acted sounds, at least for now.