How to Keep Voice Actors in Peak Performance Shape

No instrument in a game developer’s toolkit is as delicate as a voice actor’s fine-tuned faculties. While musical equipment can be repaired or exchanged, the same cannot be said for the humans who instill so much life and expression into our characters. 

In Unlock Audio’s voice and implementation studio, Augment & Amplify, we understand just how essential voice and vocal health are to delivering top-notch game audio, and we want to ensure every developer understands how to consistently obtain powerful performances from their voice cast.

This May, I had the pleasure of speaking at the first-ever Our Sonic Landscape game audio convention in Vancouver. In my presentation, called “Our Instruments are Made of Meat,” I shared how to avoid “overcooking” your vocalists when they hit the recording booth. Since these learnings have strong benefits for voice actors and developers alike, I’m eager to continue to share the important takeaways here.

Caring for our voice actors’ wellbeing starts by grounding ourselves in the realization that voice is a full body performance art — not limited to the chest and throat. It demands our whole body, mind and spirit to breathe life into a script, and we as game creators should prioritize all three aspects to help voice actors give us their peak performances toward realizing the best versions of our games imaginable.

Focus on Full Body Health

Vocal performance isn’t isolated in our throats. Such a limited view is like seeing a church organ only for its pipes. But organs are often built directly into the architecture of the building itself, making the church chamber just as much a part of the instrument as the keys or pedals. When we see this in the similar context of a voice actor or vocal performer, we understand that their instrument is their total body which needs great nurture and care to conjure a total performance.

However, unlike the guts and gears of an organ, the inner workings of an actor cannot simply be replaced once broken. Planning session schedules with physical and mental strain in mind can help minimize the toll on an actor’s signature equipment and help sustain their skill across lengthy scripts or numerous roles. 

Here are some important principles to keep in mind for prioritizing vocal health and endurance:

  • Practice proper hydration beginning at least 24 hours in advance
  • Enforce moments of rest and relaxation mid-session
  • Capture harsher vocals after softer, calmer segments
  • Keep high exertion recording sessions short and spread apart

Fuel the Mind

Actors perform their best when they have more material to work with beyond a script. Part of Unlock Audio’s proven formula includes robust worldbuilding documents, character and story guides, and direct communication between the actors and creative leaders. 

Characterization during recording is often a collaborative process, so it helps to prime your actors with the goods to contribute even more dimension to the way their lines add to the game experience. Having the knowledge and agency to push a performance in new directions only deepens your actors’ own investment in the final product. 

But just as it’s important to inspire creativity, it’s also essential to appreciate the difficulty of more emotional or challenging material and be ready to balance the burden. Our recordings for Autopsy Simulator covered some pretty gruesome and psychologically demanding topics, so we prioritized shorter sessions and frequent breaks within our recording timeline.

For more insights into vocal performance enhancement, dive into my earlier summary on other ways to squeeze the most performance out of your voice actors.

Safeguard the Spirit

While information is helpful for getting actors into the right mind of their characters and game worlds, there is also the potential for too much or too little information derailing focus. In these instances, it’s important for audio directors to recognize the risks early, mitigate disruption, and cushion their actors from feeling at fault for a change in plans or direction.

We do our best to confirm a lock on scripts before entering the recording booth, but the nature of creativity still lends itself to edits along the way. Since we often work from live documents, it’s helpful to recognize when real-time changes are impacting the day’s session and either call for a short break until changes are settled or to refocus the session on different material altogether to keep our performers in the zone.

That said, it’s also important to not isolate actors from helpful feedback. The collaborative nature of recording requires clear communication on creative vision and expectations while tempering other emotional pressures. For instance, if a studio partner seems frustrated that the session isn’t producing the results they want, it’s on the voice director, or another voice representative on your audio team, to filter that information in a constructive way to the voice actor and not leave them anxiously on mute wondering what all the heavy discussion is about. 

Sometimes keeping the spirit of the session in line means negotiating some patience while other times it is simply best to redirect the session and revisit material with renewed energy later. 

Great Performances Make Even Greater Games

Being able to share the importance of this holistic vocal mindset with likeminded game audio folks at Our Sonic Landscape was such a great experience.The value of industry events like this really struck a chord when each new presentation found a way to reference presentations that came before. 

My talk on vocal health felt rooted in even more truth because I followed sound designer Andy Niles’ presentation on producing creature vocals, and Megan Frazier perfectly emphasized the ceaseless creativity our roles allow in her talk on incorporating play into everyday audio practice.

When studios and developers value all that it takes for voice actors to give their very best in the booth, together we can prompt the kind of iconic performances that amplify more unforgettable game experiences. 

Connect with Unlock Audio to learn how our Augment & Amplify studio works to support voice and implementation across our other genre-ready sound design studios.