Lights. Camera. Controller: inside the world of video game voice acting

About 15 years ago, Julie Thompson says she started to see a shift in the video games industry: a surge in games that were no longer just about  mechanics and gameplay, but games that were driven by story..

With huge leaps in the level of processing power available to game designers, there was a rapid shift towards narrative design, with players increasingly demanding storytelling be a key facet of their experience. Alongside that demand came a need for professional voice actors.

"You had all of these games that really told a story that allowed the player to really immerse themselves," says Thompson. "In order to bring these characters to life, you have all these voices."

Thompson is an agent with SBV Talent, setting actors up with video game makers as well as other interactive media, including educational tools and speaking toys. She says many actors are surprised to learn how much work their is in the gaming industry.

One Canadian actor who was an early adopter of video games — and now holds the Guinness World Record as the most prolific video game voice actress — is Jennifer Hale.

A native of Happy Valley-Goose Bay, NL, Hale got her start in voiceover work while living in the American South. A local Alabama recording studio offered her a "valley girl" voice role for a commercial for $35 — a sum that blew the then-teenaged Hale away, and prompted her to dive deeper into the industry.

"I immediately went, you know what? This came naturally to me," Hale said. "These people are really nice over here. I'm going to ask them every single thing they know, and I'm going to work really hard."

Eventually, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting full-time. There, she landed the lead voice role in the animated series Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego, a spinoff of the popular Carmen Sandiego video game series. That role, in turn, led Hale to try video game work. 

Hale — who is best known for her work as Commander Shepard in the Mass Effect series — says that coming from the world of animation, video game voice work required a lot of changes to her process.

"In animation, a session is a four-hour radio play where there's lots of [actors] and you share the load," she says. "In a game session, it's a four-hour one-person show. Everything is out of context. It was 95 percent what we call cold reading. You don't see the script ahead of time. You just jump in."

That said, Hale says video game voice work has changed and professionalized a lot since those early days. While working on Carmen Sandiego, the design team had her reciting country names free of context. Now, games have voice directors, who work alongside voice actors and the recording engineers, helping guide the performance.

"It's a huge piece of the voice acting equation in any game and one of the least credited in the public eye," says Hale. "I think teams are starting to really value them, and I think the public should know how incredible these people are."

Angela Bottis is one of those directors. She worked on Ubisoft Toronto's Starlink: Battle for Atlas, and now works as a casting director for the studio. Bottis says that there are a few key things she looks for in a voice actor. 

"In my opinion, a good voice actor is someone who has put in the time to refine their vocal skills, while immersing themselves fully in the character and the world," says Bottis. "They can genuinely evoke emotion and make me believe the character they're portraying."

Advancements in technology are allowing companies to capture even more realistic performances. Motion capture technology can now capture facial expressions as well as body movements, so voice actors can also be called on to perform physically as well.

"Physicality and facial expressions are key, as overly subdued movements may not translate well in the animation," says Bottis. "It's reminiscent of theatre."

Prior to voicing Aiden Pearce, the lead character in the blockbuster 2014 video game Watch Dogs, Toronto-based actor Noam Jenkins was best known at the time for his role in the Canadian police drama Rookie Blue. He says that when he signed on to do the game, he didn't really understand the scale of the production.

"I knew they had contracted me for a certain amount of work, so I knew I was going to be doing a certain amount of work for this period of time," says Jenkins. "Then I showed up and they brought me into the Ubisoft building in Montreal. There were these huge mock-ups of Aiden Pearce. And then they were like: 'You're that guy.' That's when it dawned on me."

An average playthrough of Watch Dogs is estimated to take just under 20 hours, but a player can expect to spend as much as 60 hours to complete everything the game has to offer. That meant a lot of work for Jenkins, who — in addition to recording hundreds of lines — also had to provide so-called "barks" for Aiden Pearce, consisting of grunts, panting, and other noises for the physical activity the character goes through.

"A big part of your job is to be able to mark the architecture or the arc of your story," says Jenkins. "Because you're doing things out of sequence, you're able to take it and go okay, we're right here in the arc. That is invaluable, so that you can really create this sort of nuanced journey of your character."

Actor Cara Gee has had the unique experience of playing the same role both on television and in a video game. Gee's character of Drummer was a break-out fan favourite on Amazon's The Expanse. Originally intended as a relatively minor character, the producers loved Gee's performance so much that they expanded the role. Drummer became so popular that Telltale Games decided to centre their video game adaptation of The Expanse, bringing Gee back to reprise the role. 

"When we're on set, you've got the green screens," says Gee. "You use your imagination to fill in so much. And then in the video game, you take that a step further because you're in this blank white room with things with motion capture balls attached."

She credits her background as a stage actor for giving her a whole body awareness that made slipping into the motion capture suit and the voice acting world familiar. That said, the production was not without its challenges.

Gee had her second child during production of the game, which mirrored her TV experience, when  she had her first child during the fifth season of The Expanse. In filming the series, they found ways to hide Gee's baby bump with camera angles or outfits, while in the motion capture studio, they simply hid her pregnancy by not marking her stomach with capture dots.

Low-tech solutions in a high-tech environment like that were common, Gee said, with the production having a very DIY, theatrical feel to it. At times, the team might emulate "zero-G" by simply raising an actor up on a blanket, with the motion capture simply editing out the people hoisting the actor up.

But in that mix of new and old technology, it's an exciting frontier for actors, Gee says.

"There are so many different branches of possibilities. The choose-your-own-adventure aspect of it. I think that that story is why video games are completely on par with other storytelling mediums. It's another way to tell a story and to involve people in a story in a really unique and interesting way."