Fan help with voice recording? (crowdsourcing)

[Kimotei]

Hi!

If voice acting is expencice, why not let the fans help out? Im probably not the only middle aged fan with a home recording studio. In fact, its possible to do great recordings with the iphone mic, if you sit inside a clothing closet, or under a duvet in bed.

With a recording app that tells if the signal is to hot or not, it can be done. With the Soundcloud app its even possible to record directly to soundcloud. Tip from gearslutz.com: shape your hand like a cone, or like you are holding a tennis ball, and keep fingers together. Place the iphone standing in your hand. Now this shold create a prety good recording signal. Thr iPhone mic is actually very good! To avoid sound reflections, (reverb) record in a cloathing closet, or under a thick duvet in bed. Might even work to place a thick winter jacket over the head.

To organise it, we could use soundcloud, and people could just upload for you. There should be a list of needed recordings, together with caracter description, etc, and it shold be updated with info about what is not needed anymore.

[GROUNDZERO]

I agree. It would save money and make the game innovative. Voice overs could be voted on and the winners would be in a official patch for the finished game.

[paultakeda]

That would be a fun thing. They put out a call for certain types of voices. A lot of yells, screams of death, etc. We post samples on the board. So we don't inundate, we make the mods work (heh) by them through a series of polls (bracketed?) and send the top four for a given sound to the designers.

Or something.

[Vryheid]

If they ask, I'll volunteer, but I have to assume the devs want to keep as much of this in-house as possible. Allows them to keep everything organized and plot-critical conversations under wraps.

[paultakeda]

If they ask, I'll volunteer, but I have to assume the devs want to keep as much of this in-house as possible. Allows them to keep everything organized and plot-critical conversations under wraps.

That's why I think we're only good for providing screams of death.

[Noble]

I'd so be up for pulling out my voices for Inxile to use for death screams.

[CaptainPatch]

Hmm. Wouldn't this make for a decent Donator reward? "Your voice in Wasteland 2? For a donation of just $___, everyone can hear you speak as a resident of the Wasteland!" Of course, that presupposes that there WILL be voice acting (expensive). And then it would lock them into using some professional voice actors for important NPCs (VERY expensive), so the added revenue from donations wouldn't be anywhere near enough to pay the cost of voice acting. And then there's the inevitable instance when a donator couldn't voice act his way out of a paper bag. (47 takes later...)

Hmm. On second thought, maybe not such a good idea after all.

[SilverSam]

If they ask, I'll volunteer, but I have to assume the devs want to keep as much of this in-house as possible. Allows them to keep everything organized and plot-critical conversations under wraps.

That's why I think we're only good for providing screams of death.

Even if it's for death sounds, i'm in. Also, this can be relevant to translation and localization of the game, because if we can help the project to be more plural, i'm in with all my force

[jonnyO2]

I love this idea - probably because I'm good with recording equipment and with voices (entertaining the kids, these days!) If this happens, I would love to participate. I like the idea of putting out lines that need recorded and having folks vote on which one wins. (It would probably have to be sets of lines for particular characters, but then again I guess that might give away plot elements.)

Fun idea!

[Prometheus]

Yeah, actually, I'd be in too.

I understand that most of us (probably including myself) suck at acting or lines or we don't have the proper equipment, but this could be good.

If the devs want to put out a list of 10 lines or so that people can recite and so on, maybe this could go somewhere.

I don't think this is going to necessarily go anywhere, but maybe with enough support for this idea, there might actually be a decent number of voices among the community to lend to WL2.

[SilverSam]

Yeah, actually, I'd be in too.

I understand that most of us (probably including myself) suck at acting or lines or we don't have the proper equipment, but this could be good.

If the devs want to put out a list of 10 lines or so that people can recite and so on, maybe this could go somewhere.

I don't think this is going to necessarily go anywhere, but maybe with enough support for this idea, there might actually be a decent number of voices among the community to lend to WL2.

Welp the guy in Youtube that has made the Wasteland and Fallout runs has a pretty good voice and many comments suggest him to go for the place of narrator in WL2 (i actually think he has a good voice for that)

But you are right about the thing of acting, because some of us have no or little experience with that, and the 10 line thing is the closest thing that could happen. But better wait and see what happens, because this would save money to the devs and increase the quality of the game somehow

[Tanglebones]

You know what's worse than no voice acting? Voice "acting" done by people who are not professional actors. The sort of high school drama club quality of (over) acting you get tends to make even a well produced game seem shoddy. A lot of games used to get whoever happened to be in the office the day the sound guy wanted to do it to read lines, and the result was universally awful. Amateur voice acting is one aspect of oldschool RPGs that's best left in the past.

Extensive voice acting is expensive, but whatever voice acting needs to be in the game can be done relatively cheaply by hiring actors who are actually actors, but who aren't "stars."

[Prometheus]

Yeah, it could be nice to have some crowdsourcing going on.

Maybe they could leverage a google form or some poll to find out what languages people can speak or the accents they can pull off, etc..

Probably anything like this would have to go through phases where the community and then moderators vet or disqualify contestants.

Maybe if this thing is popular we could even set up our own site, like Voices.com -- but maybe geared towards Wasteland 2 or other indie/kickstarter projects? (Hey, there's an idea for someone entrepreneurial)

[paultakeda]

You know what's worse than no voice acting? Voice "acting" done by people who are not professional actors.

Which is why it should be BGV only. Death screams, crying, etc. And vetted via the community polls first before a top selection is sent to the devs to review.

I'm not pushing this. I'm saying if we do crowdsource this, I'd limit it to what I've described.

[jonnyO2]

Wow Tanglebones...

I just got Kinect Star Wars and I know I can do a better Yoda than the "professional" they paid to do that one...!

I'd agree that you wouldn't want the audio content to go unfiltered / unvetted but to assume there's no talent out there is a bit shortsighted right? I mean, TV shows like America's Got Talent don't feature professionals, right? (Not that I'm a big fan of those shows, but lots of people featured on them have professional-level skills.)

[Sub-Human]

This is still a mass title, guys. Death screams aren't expensive and as for voice acting... I doubt InXile's putting much money into that. After all, their original goal was $1 million - how much lines of voice dialogue would that buy, considering it would be a fully fledged-out game?

[abdiel420]

I'm for it if it is one liners or death screams and as long as they sound good. This could be a way to get a variety of free grunts, screams and shouted battle cries.

[Tanglebones]

Wow Tanglebones...

I just got Kinect Star Wars and I know I can do a better Yoda than the "professional" they paid to do that one...!

I'd agree that you wouldn't want the audio content to go unfiltered / unvetted but to assume there's no talent out there is a bit shortsighted right? I mean, TV shows like America's Got Talent don't feature professionals, right? (Not that I'm a big fan of those shows, but lots of people featured on them have professional-level skills.)

Your counterexample is Star Wars Kinect. I'm not even going to touch that, because Star Wars Kinect is very clearly not a game that was particularly interested in putting out a sterling product.

Sure, the developers could spend their time filtering and vetting hours and hours of awful recordings in the hope that they find the one or two people who are both competent actors and competent with their home studios... but I rather suspect that the hours spent filtering and vetting the dross would eat up whatever was saved by using the amateur talent. Or, they could go with sound professionals, and actual actors who cost money precisely because they've been filtered and vetted out from the unwashed masses.

If you're really super keen on doing your own sound effects, pray for the kickstarter to hit 3 million, and plan on doing your own sound effects mod (also plan on having all of no one download it, because, as I said before, amateur voice acting makes a good product worse).

[Mordul]

While it would be extremely cool to have a professionally made game use amateur voice acting, even a moderately large game can have thousands of lines of dialog. The effort of wrangling enough amateurs would be more expensive than hiring a few professional voice actors. Plus giving that many fans access to elements of the story it practically screams for leaks. While I want backstory and a grounding in the factions I will be encountering, I do not want someone revealing how my party could even POTENTIALLY interact with them.

[Thrin]

I'm all for crowd sourcing this.

For minor NPCs this would work great.

Place like 10 'scripts' out to be recorded. Pick the best recordings. Do it again. It's a quick way to iterate. If there aren't any good ones use a 'professional' resource.

This is a great way to have multiple voices saying common phrases such as, "Hello, how can I help you?" Or "What do you want?" Or death screams.

In terms of licensing / legality they could use a blanket waiver statement that the 'artist' gives up all rights to the recording and it can be used for any purpose in regards to Wasteland 2.