Hey NMA dudes. I was a member here for many a years in the long ago, but for the most part I've just lurked around here. I mean, I guess I say that so you don't immediately look at my registration date and think it was all to advertise my podcast. It isn't; it's just that getting some actors together for this project was the impetus to re-register (old one lost long ago).
I've always appreciated how NMA stood up against the -- well, seemingly the entire fucking Internet when it came to defending the merits of classic Fallout and pointing out the narrative and atmospheric missteps in the newer games. People don't seems to get why I think the classic game was the best and everything after was kind of...interesting attempts. I mean, I really love Fallout 2, and I enjoyed Tactics, and everyone seems to hate Brotherhood of Steel but I thought it was a fine, brainless hack 'n slash and so over the top that I don't think...it's hard to take something seriously that doesn't take itself seriously.
But anyway, my girlfriend and I are doing a project that requires a great deal of help. I know, I know... "my girlfriend and I..." projects are almost always a trainwreck. But we set up the podcast about a year ago and we're still doing it, so at least this isn't just some fleeting idea. Oh, I guess I should tell you what the podcast is.
It's called The Spoony Bard's Aural Theatre. It is a podcast in which we adapt retro video games (or at least video games that don't already have voice acting) into a serialized radio drama, like something you'd have gathered around the radio back in the 50s to enjoy as a family or whatever families did back then. All the dialogue performed is EXACTLY as it appeared in the game, even if it is bad, or goofy, or just a poor localization. This is obviously a kind of nostalgia project -- nostalgia, I think, is what drives 95% of this. The first game we did was Final Fantasy IV. Actually, as I write this, we've still got one or two episodes to go until that season is finished. Which is why I'm coming to you now! Season 1 was kind of a test season, a proof of concept, and though it had a rocky start and is kind of awkward considering I'm voicing like 17 people in it, it did work, and it's pretty cool, if I do say so. It's the kind of podcast I really wish existed...and since it didn't, uh, well, it does now.
The moment Girlfriend and I started working on this podcast, I had two games immediately in mind I wanted to do: Fallout 1 and Planescape: Torment. These two games were amongst my all time favorites for most of my life. Originally for Season 2 we were going to do a Shin Megami Tensei game but since Girlfriend is writing the script for FFIV and also is an actress and doing a lot of acty stuff, it gave me the opportunity to start on what was going to be a future project, Fallout 1.
Well, what happened is I got really, really into this game and this project and so in the course of a month I played through the game, took over 4,000 screenshots and wrote a 100,000 page script, which I anticipate will span about eleven or twelve episodes.
Now here's where I need you guys. I have about 138 characters that need voice work. About 20 of them are already voiced in-game, so that's that, and I'll narrate this story and my partner will voice the role of the protagonist so that in effect gets rid of a full 2/3 of the dialogue. But there's still about 1,000 lines that need to be covered. We have a lot of friends in the theatre down here, and some fans from the first season were eager to contribute, so that's fantastic, but there's still a huge amount of roles that are sitting empty. I suspect that given enough time I can find people in real life to help out, but I kind of also want this to be online within a month, so I'm trying to toss a big net out. And anyway, I definitely wanted to reach out to NMA people, the most hardest of hardcore Fallout fans.
Fallout!
The way we've been doing this is, someone picks generally one or two big roles and a handful of supporting ones (for instance, you might voice, say, Ian, who has like 40 lines in the game, and then you also voice Raider 02 who has eight lines but they're all variations of "I'll kill you to death!", Mutant 05 and Kyle the Mechanic who has maybe five lines.)
The Script
Okay, let's see if I don't entirely derail this train of thought.
The script itself is a little rough, but it's accurate. The Narrator lines are the only lines I've actually created; everything else is directly from the game itself. But the narration is subject to some alteration; you can ignore that, generally, since I'll be narrating it. But all those characters (besides the main character, Natalia and other characters already voiced in the game, and also a few that have already been selected by some helpful folks online and some people we know in real life) need someone to voice them. Here is the script, which I hope is easily accessible on Google Docs. I suck at the Google Docs and this computer seems to have a seizure when I try and use it so please tell me if I've really screwed it up.
The SCRIPT: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...dit?usp=sharing
This is the entire game as I played through it, using one of the premade characters as the protagonist and trying to play it as best I can as a charismatic unarmed-combat expert naive Vault Dweller who pickpockets. I tried to talk to every notable NPC and perform every side quest that was interesting and didn't require me to go way out of my way for no reason to do. I wanted it to be believable that the main character might risk her neck to help out these people for reasons other than experience. I pretty much did every single quest in the game -- some quests are locked, depending on how you play, and since I was playing as not a raging psychopath there were certain raging psychopath quests that were unavailable. I tried to get as much dialogue out of everyone as possible, especially really interesting people like Set. Set is a ghoul in Necropolis who kind of talks in this jargon-laden beatnik freeverse, but unfortunately, I sort of screwed up my interactions with him. To get his full dialogue tree you have to do somethings before you do other things, or maybe after -- well, anyway, I didn't get it, so I had to kinda sorta cheat by digging through the dialogue files and stitching together my own tree. His dialogue is all accurate, but if you're a REAL hardcore Fallout fan, you may read/listen to that segment and say, "Hey, now Set wouldn't have said that if the water pump was already fixed!" But the average person I don't think would notice it. Nothing he says contradicts anything. So there's only a little bit of script doctoring to force certain interactions that SHOULD have been available but wasn't. Alas. Also, since a lot of the cut content is still there in the underlying code, I did lift a few dialogue lines that aren't actually in the game that you play -- not without a fan-patch, anyway, which I didn't use but I'm kind of kicking myself for it and when we do Fallout 2 I'm definitely going to.
The script is a bit overbearing, especially if you're deciding what role you might want to do, and studying the role you have picked. There is an easy way to do this; simply create a temporary filter.
If you select the entire spreadsheet (ctrl+a) and click on DATA > FILTER VIEWS > CREATE NEW TEMPORARY FILTER, it'll create handy little dropdown icons on the first row. You want to select Column B since that's where all the names are, and it'll let you indicate which roles are shown and which aren't. If you were to, say, be voicing The Master (which you won't, probably; it's already voiced and already pretty fucking creepy and awesome) then you would do so as indicated. You can view the ID # on the first column, which helps understand where in the script these lines fall. For The Master, all his dialogue is in one scene, but some characters have dialogue in the 1st, 5th, 8th and 10th episodes, so if you were to be doing the voice work for one of these characters it becomes essential to know where it is, especially in relation to whoever else is talking (which is probably just the protagonist; this game doesn't have very many three-way conversations) so you don't sound like someone reading from a translation or something.
Most important, when voicing a character is to UNDERSTAND THE CONTEXT. As I scrutinize the dialogue in this game it becomes very clear to me that different characters were written by different people with different styles of writing and varying degrees of English proficiency. I've tried to keep the script as true to the characters as possible, but there were times when I had to alter punctuation because a poorly placed comma can drastically change the way a conversation goes. I can't think of any specific example right now, and there were only a few changes, but I did have to more than once alter a dialogue ever so slightly so that it followed the demeanor of the character. That doesn't mean the dialogue is fixed...sometimes there is dialogue that is just awful and there's no excuse for it and no way to avoid it. For instance, there is one part where the main character can speak with a scribe in the Brotherhood of Steel. The dialogue exchange goes fine for most of it, but at one point you're given the line, "So you read books and stuff? That must mean you're smart!" or something like that. This is a stupid thing to say, it's entirely out of character, my INT is high enough that it's not alternative stupid-text, AND there's no other way to progress the dialogue except for telling them goodbye. Well, anyway, my point is, if you're going to voice 18 lines of a character, make sure you read what's going on AROUND the character, too.
AND if you're voicing multiple characters, try to avoid picking two characters that are in the same scene unless you're confident in being able to create distinct voices for multiple people. It would be awkward to talk to a shop owner played by John Nomutantsallowed and then speak to the guard and have him sound exactly the same. This isn't Elder Scrolls, am i rite? You don't have to be Mel Blanc with a thousand different voices, either; if you like, you can just use your own voice! It's really up to you, but try and use discretion.
YOU MUST HAVE AN OKAY MICROPHONE! You don't have to own a recording studio, but your microphone needs to be better than some XBox Call of Duty headset. You don't need to edit it; I can do all that. But there are some things I can't edit, like the raspy muffled underwater sound of a shitty mic.
I guess that's it for now. If you want an idea of what the goal of this is, you can check out our first season at thespoonybardpodcast.com. The first season is a bit rough, since it's just two of us, but you can get the idea. The primary reason for this thread is to start assigning roles. I hope to in one month have the first episode prepared; once the voice acting is all done, then all that's required of me is to do a lot of editing, which means half the job will be finished and then I can just release these episodes for the next ten weeks while we figure out what the next game is going to be (uh, for anyone interested in contributing your voice to THAT game, the next one will likely be Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devel Saga (which I know nothing about) followed by the SNES game Shadowrun.
SO IN THIS THREAD Just reserve what role(s) you want. If you're eager to contribute, feel free to sign up for multiple roles. If you want to do a unique, character voice, you can, sure! Look, our standards for voice acting isn't super high. If you're incredibly terrible, then I might have to make a judgment call, but I suspect if you're willing to join our little thing here then you're at least confident enough in your own voice acting ability and so therefore I am as well. OH and I REALLY need people to voice some throwaway roles, like characters with only one line, or characters like, say, Raider Male 2 or whatever, who might have five lines of dialogue, four of which are "I'll get you!" but it's important -- VITAL -- that someone takes these roles. If you do get a role that has five or six of the same line, please voice each one uniquely. By that I mean, Raider 04's lines might be "You shouldn't have come here." "Die!" "Ouch!" "Die!" "You shouldn't have come here." "Ouch!" I could just reuse the one recording, but I'd rather not do it that way.
SOME of these roles are currently being negotiated with in real life with real actors from the community theater. Nothing is really set in stone, and if you don't get the role you like perhaps I can work with you to find another.
HERE is the Dropbox thing. When you're ready to upload the .wav or .mp3 or .zip or however you want to record your lines, just name the file(s) after the character you're voicing and upload it: https://www.dropbox.com/request/L4awPINe30EEBit2sDdY
Some podcast stuff:
iTunes | Website | RSS
Social etc:
Twitter | Facebook
You can email me privately at calvinredburn@gmail.com or at thespoonybardpodcast@gmail.com where Girlfriend might answer instead. She's not a major Fallout fan, but she's not dumb or anything.
Oh, and uh, you know...if you WANT to actually listen to the podcast, that'd be great, too. Or tell people about it. Write an iTunes review. Well, whatever. Anyway, that's all for now. Phew.
Oh: Oh, damn. I forgot. One other thing. This is based on Fallout 1, and so...based on the lore, the only reasonable way someone might have an accent is if they're from Vault 15, which (later lore, I guess) experimented with various cultures. Which is shy Shady Sands is run by an Indian when the rest of the known world is Caucasian and a handful of black people. So...what I'm saying is, unless you can fake an American accent really well, we probably can't use your voice.
I've always appreciated how NMA stood up against the -- well, seemingly the entire fucking Internet when it came to defending the merits of classic Fallout and pointing out the narrative and atmospheric missteps in the newer games. People don't seems to get why I think the classic game was the best and everything after was kind of...interesting attempts. I mean, I really love Fallout 2, and I enjoyed Tactics, and everyone seems to hate Brotherhood of Steel but I thought it was a fine, brainless hack 'n slash and so over the top that I don't think...it's hard to take something seriously that doesn't take itself seriously.
But anyway, my girlfriend and I are doing a project that requires a great deal of help. I know, I know... "my girlfriend and I..." projects are almost always a trainwreck. But we set up the podcast about a year ago and we're still doing it, so at least this isn't just some fleeting idea. Oh, I guess I should tell you what the podcast is.
It's called The Spoony Bard's Aural Theatre. It is a podcast in which we adapt retro video games (or at least video games that don't already have voice acting) into a serialized radio drama, like something you'd have gathered around the radio back in the 50s to enjoy as a family or whatever families did back then. All the dialogue performed is EXACTLY as it appeared in the game, even if it is bad, or goofy, or just a poor localization. This is obviously a kind of nostalgia project -- nostalgia, I think, is what drives 95% of this. The first game we did was Final Fantasy IV. Actually, as I write this, we've still got one or two episodes to go until that season is finished. Which is why I'm coming to you now! Season 1 was kind of a test season, a proof of concept, and though it had a rocky start and is kind of awkward considering I'm voicing like 17 people in it, it did work, and it's pretty cool, if I do say so. It's the kind of podcast I really wish existed...and since it didn't, uh, well, it does now.
The moment Girlfriend and I started working on this podcast, I had two games immediately in mind I wanted to do: Fallout 1 and Planescape: Torment. These two games were amongst my all time favorites for most of my life. Originally for Season 2 we were going to do a Shin Megami Tensei game but since Girlfriend is writing the script for FFIV and also is an actress and doing a lot of acty stuff, it gave me the opportunity to start on what was going to be a future project, Fallout 1.
Well, what happened is I got really, really into this game and this project and so in the course of a month I played through the game, took over 4,000 screenshots and wrote a 100,000 page script, which I anticipate will span about eleven or twelve episodes.
Now here's where I need you guys. I have about 138 characters that need voice work. About 20 of them are already voiced in-game, so that's that, and I'll narrate this story and my partner will voice the role of the protagonist so that in effect gets rid of a full 2/3 of the dialogue. But there's still about 1,000 lines that need to be covered. We have a lot of friends in the theatre down here, and some fans from the first season were eager to contribute, so that's fantastic, but there's still a huge amount of roles that are sitting empty. I suspect that given enough time I can find people in real life to help out, but I kind of also want this to be online within a month, so I'm trying to toss a big net out. And anyway, I definitely wanted to reach out to NMA people, the most hardest of hardcore Fallout fans.
Fallout!
The way we've been doing this is, someone picks generally one or two big roles and a handful of supporting ones (for instance, you might voice, say, Ian, who has like 40 lines in the game, and then you also voice Raider 02 who has eight lines but they're all variations of "I'll kill you to death!", Mutant 05 and Kyle the Mechanic who has maybe five lines.)
The Script
Okay, let's see if I don't entirely derail this train of thought.
The script itself is a little rough, but it's accurate. The Narrator lines are the only lines I've actually created; everything else is directly from the game itself. But the narration is subject to some alteration; you can ignore that, generally, since I'll be narrating it. But all those characters (besides the main character, Natalia and other characters already voiced in the game, and also a few that have already been selected by some helpful folks online and some people we know in real life) need someone to voice them. Here is the script, which I hope is easily accessible on Google Docs. I suck at the Google Docs and this computer seems to have a seizure when I try and use it so please tell me if I've really screwed it up.
The SCRIPT: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...dit?usp=sharing
This is the entire game as I played through it, using one of the premade characters as the protagonist and trying to play it as best I can as a charismatic unarmed-combat expert naive Vault Dweller who pickpockets. I tried to talk to every notable NPC and perform every side quest that was interesting and didn't require me to go way out of my way for no reason to do. I wanted it to be believable that the main character might risk her neck to help out these people for reasons other than experience. I pretty much did every single quest in the game -- some quests are locked, depending on how you play, and since I was playing as not a raging psychopath there were certain raging psychopath quests that were unavailable. I tried to get as much dialogue out of everyone as possible, especially really interesting people like Set. Set is a ghoul in Necropolis who kind of talks in this jargon-laden beatnik freeverse, but unfortunately, I sort of screwed up my interactions with him. To get his full dialogue tree you have to do somethings before you do other things, or maybe after -- well, anyway, I didn't get it, so I had to kinda sorta cheat by digging through the dialogue files and stitching together my own tree. His dialogue is all accurate, but if you're a REAL hardcore Fallout fan, you may read/listen to that segment and say, "Hey, now Set wouldn't have said that if the water pump was already fixed!" But the average person I don't think would notice it. Nothing he says contradicts anything. So there's only a little bit of script doctoring to force certain interactions that SHOULD have been available but wasn't. Alas. Also, since a lot of the cut content is still there in the underlying code, I did lift a few dialogue lines that aren't actually in the game that you play -- not without a fan-patch, anyway, which I didn't use but I'm kind of kicking myself for it and when we do Fallout 2 I'm definitely going to.
The script is a bit overbearing, especially if you're deciding what role you might want to do, and studying the role you have picked. There is an easy way to do this; simply create a temporary filter.
If you select the entire spreadsheet (ctrl+a) and click on DATA > FILTER VIEWS > CREATE NEW TEMPORARY FILTER, it'll create handy little dropdown icons on the first row. You want to select Column B since that's where all the names are, and it'll let you indicate which roles are shown and which aren't. If you were to, say, be voicing The Master (which you won't, probably; it's already voiced and already pretty fucking creepy and awesome) then you would do so as indicated. You can view the ID # on the first column, which helps understand where in the script these lines fall. For The Master, all his dialogue is in one scene, but some characters have dialogue in the 1st, 5th, 8th and 10th episodes, so if you were to be doing the voice work for one of these characters it becomes essential to know where it is, especially in relation to whoever else is talking (which is probably just the protagonist; this game doesn't have very many three-way conversations) so you don't sound like someone reading from a translation or something.
Most important, when voicing a character is to UNDERSTAND THE CONTEXT. As I scrutinize the dialogue in this game it becomes very clear to me that different characters were written by different people with different styles of writing and varying degrees of English proficiency. I've tried to keep the script as true to the characters as possible, but there were times when I had to alter punctuation because a poorly placed comma can drastically change the way a conversation goes. I can't think of any specific example right now, and there were only a few changes, but I did have to more than once alter a dialogue ever so slightly so that it followed the demeanor of the character. That doesn't mean the dialogue is fixed...sometimes there is dialogue that is just awful and there's no excuse for it and no way to avoid it. For instance, there is one part where the main character can speak with a scribe in the Brotherhood of Steel. The dialogue exchange goes fine for most of it, but at one point you're given the line, "So you read books and stuff? That must mean you're smart!" or something like that. This is a stupid thing to say, it's entirely out of character, my INT is high enough that it's not alternative stupid-text, AND there's no other way to progress the dialogue except for telling them goodbye. Well, anyway, my point is, if you're going to voice 18 lines of a character, make sure you read what's going on AROUND the character, too.
AND if you're voicing multiple characters, try to avoid picking two characters that are in the same scene unless you're confident in being able to create distinct voices for multiple people. It would be awkward to talk to a shop owner played by John Nomutantsallowed and then speak to the guard and have him sound exactly the same. This isn't Elder Scrolls, am i rite? You don't have to be Mel Blanc with a thousand different voices, either; if you like, you can just use your own voice! It's really up to you, but try and use discretion.
YOU MUST HAVE AN OKAY MICROPHONE! You don't have to own a recording studio, but your microphone needs to be better than some XBox Call of Duty headset. You don't need to edit it; I can do all that. But there are some things I can't edit, like the raspy muffled underwater sound of a shitty mic.
I guess that's it for now. If you want an idea of what the goal of this is, you can check out our first season at thespoonybardpodcast.com. The first season is a bit rough, since it's just two of us, but you can get the idea. The primary reason for this thread is to start assigning roles. I hope to in one month have the first episode prepared; once the voice acting is all done, then all that's required of me is to do a lot of editing, which means half the job will be finished and then I can just release these episodes for the next ten weeks while we figure out what the next game is going to be (uh, for anyone interested in contributing your voice to THAT game, the next one will likely be Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devel Saga (which I know nothing about) followed by the SNES game Shadowrun.
SO IN THIS THREAD Just reserve what role(s) you want. If you're eager to contribute, feel free to sign up for multiple roles. If you want to do a unique, character voice, you can, sure! Look, our standards for voice acting isn't super high. If you're incredibly terrible, then I might have to make a judgment call, but I suspect if you're willing to join our little thing here then you're at least confident enough in your own voice acting ability and so therefore I am as well. OH and I REALLY need people to voice some throwaway roles, like characters with only one line, or characters like, say, Raider Male 2 or whatever, who might have five lines of dialogue, four of which are "I'll get you!" but it's important -- VITAL -- that someone takes these roles. If you do get a role that has five or six of the same line, please voice each one uniquely. By that I mean, Raider 04's lines might be "You shouldn't have come here." "Die!" "Ouch!" "Die!" "You shouldn't have come here." "Ouch!" I could just reuse the one recording, but I'd rather not do it that way.
SOME of these roles are currently being negotiated with in real life with real actors from the community theater. Nothing is really set in stone, and if you don't get the role you like perhaps I can work with you to find another.
HERE is the Dropbox thing. When you're ready to upload the .wav or .mp3 or .zip or however you want to record your lines, just name the file(s) after the character you're voicing and upload it: https://www.dropbox.com/request/L4awPINe30EEBit2sDdY
Some podcast stuff:
iTunes | Website | RSS
Social etc:
Twitter | Facebook
You can email me privately at calvinredburn@gmail.com or at thespoonybardpodcast@gmail.com where Girlfriend might answer instead. She's not a major Fallout fan, but she's not dumb or anything.
Oh, and uh, you know...if you WANT to actually listen to the podcast, that'd be great, too. Or tell people about it. Write an iTunes review. Well, whatever. Anyway, that's all for now. Phew.
Oh: Oh, damn. I forgot. One other thing. This is based on Fallout 1, and so...based on the lore, the only reasonable way someone might have an accent is if they're from Vault 15, which (later lore, I guess) experimented with various cultures. Which is shy Shady Sands is run by an Indian when the rest of the known world is Caucasian and a handful of black people. So...what I'm saying is, unless you can fake an American accent really well, we probably can't use your voice.
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