2010 voice acting practice

[IskatuMesk]

Basically I haven't done any voicing at all since The Great Destroyer back in late 2008/early 2009, and The Great Destroyer was the first voice I had done in almost a year in that period. Needless to say, I nearly totally abandoned voice acting.

But Oracle still wanted me to voice some minor roles so I decided to start practicing again.

This demo contains three samples - the first is a very generic Undead voice but using some basic dialogue. The second is a conceptual response set for the Tiamat from Armageddon Onslaught, about 25% of the responses. The third is a non-canon dialogue chunk from Xul`Amon, originating from my novel. As I lost all of my scifi deluxe presets from upgrading to windows 7 (they don't pass over with the other presets in the text files), I have been trying to rebuild that amazing preset I had before but have failed miserably. So this is kind of a placeholder.

As my anxiety attacks and brain damage become more and more severe, I stumble over speech much more. This is not production-level quality, it's scrap-level practice but I'm deciding to post it to get some feedback. I didn't really do much cleanup so there's a few pops and some clangs in the background.

This is the first time I've ever released voiced dialogue to the public outside of the Vile Eggression campaign.

The dialogue was thought up totally on the fly as usual.

IskatuMesk - 2010 quarter 1 Voice Acting practice

(might take a little while for the video to fully process, it JUST came up at the time of this posting and the quality will be ass)

Previous voice acting demos -

10 year demo - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxyLRQqHr_s
ITAS UD demo - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LFDhGkPges
Voice of the Destroyer - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrndqaWXOZ4

[Visions of Khas]

I've been interested in doing voice work, but don't have any real experience under my belt save for a few animatics. This is my impression.

I like the first set best, and that's probably because it contains the least amount of distortion. The other reels rely heavily on flanger and reverberation effects, I think.

When delivering speech, I prefer to place my self in the character's position and imagine I'm speaking directly to the intended audience. This seems pretty silly and I mean no offence by it. =P It just comes out more naturally. Feel the diolag. But there's a clear difference between: 1.) Reading from a script, 2.) Speaking from memorized dialog, and 3.) Natural speech. I try to put it somewhere between 2 and 3; just enough to be believable, and hold back enough to inject drama, characterization, etc. Hopefully that makes some level of sense.

[IskatuMesk]

I think that I've achieved the character for what I was intending pretty well. I never write dialogue nor scripts, I always voice from my head and envision myself in that position. I like to think that the diction is very strong for what I was aiming for.

As for the edits - I voice largely villainous characters that tend to fall into the category of either aliens or demons. Xul`Amon's voice is envisioned as being torn between "beauty" (from the genetics of what is basically Gods), and a grating distortion produced by immense psionic overhead.

The Undead voices and Xy`Kranasha in general rely heavily on effects as they don't really sound anything like people. Undead are insane spirits and the Xy`Kranasha are the children of Xul`Amon, but with considerably less "God" genetics in them, their voices are generally conceptualized as being impossible to understand but for the sake of unit responses are voice acted in English and just heavily flanged.

Ironically my voicing for human characters is weak to the point of being unusable.

/e

Obviously the diction and lines weren't voiced as well as I liked, it was just practice. But I know well of what you are talking about. My process for voicing is very deep and psychological. These were not so fine-tuned, I haven't voiced in ages and suffer from severe mental problems, so these were more an attempt to get back on track. When I make another practice run I'll post it and hopefully I'll be able to show you what I mean.