Guild Chat - Episode 81
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Guild Chat - Episode 81
- Title
- Live from Burbank, CA
- Host
- Rubi Bayer
- Guests
- Mike Zadorojny
Tom Abernathy
Eve Eschenbacher
Tommy Callahan
Matthew Mercer
Julie Nathanson - Date
- February 1, 2019
- Official video
- YouTube
The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.
The 81st episode of Guild Chat aired on February 1, 2019. Live from Dave & Dave Recording Studios in Burbank, CA! Learn all about how the Guild Wars 2 narrative team and Blindlight production staff get voicework into the game.
Transcription[edit]
hi tyria and welcome to guild chat live from Dave and Dave recording studios in Burbank I am your host Ruby I'm Mike sinner the game director in Guild Wars 2 we have a whole lot to talk about today the first thing that Mike and I are going to talk about is Guild Wars 2 friendships 2019 we did this last year all through February and we were doing it again this year we want you guys to be a part of this throughout February we're celebrating all of the relationships formed in Tyria all of the friendships all of the other relationships and I know we both have we've made a lot of friends in the years we've been playing two Guild Wars 2 is a very social game we built it as a way to bring a community together and what did we bring a community seriously so this is just a way for us to kind of help celebrate the friends and the relationships that you guys have made along the way whether they're platonic whether the romantic whatever we saw a huge support for this last year it was amazing to read those those stories many of them super touching and it's it was just so much fun last year we won do it again yes so we're starting today we wouldn't hear your stories share those with us on Twitter and Instagram use the hashtag gw2 friendships so we can share those around with the rest of the community and just celebrate all of those awesome relationships made in the game last year we had a pretty cool prize we had a lot of pretty cool prizes so this year we are doing a sweepstakes again if you add the hashtag @gw to give away to your gw2 friendships hash tag you'll be entered in our sweepstakes to win some Guild Wars 2 gems maybe a commission for two in-game characters done by some of our creative partners or a trip for two to Gamescom so you can take your friend to games come with you and we would love to see you there yeah Gamescom is always a fantastic event it's always great to reach out meets the community so if you get a chance to be a participant of that that's super cool and even better so yeah so participate let us know your story share your stories your pictures gw2 friendships and we will just spend February enjoying all of that so all right but why we are down here in Burbank we have had an awesome week we are recording with our voice actors for some upcoming content and this has been an amazing week hasn't it oh it's fantastic when people say hey we work with the best in the business it's it's hard to not believe that when you're working with these talented people we have some very very famous voice actors and actresses who have been with us for the entire journey some of us who started recording even before the game launched so that's like you know 9 plus years of them working with us on this precious almost a decade's worth of recording and every time they come in they bring professionalism they bring amazing kind of creativity to the to the roles and sometimes we'll even make some changes on the fly based on some of the creative just spark and insta they bring to to the performance so it's great this the show's gonna be awesome give you a really good look behind the scenes of how we get from us developing in you know in the studio up in Bellevue to when we come down here and how we do the recording yeah so we're gonna talk about that today if you're a fan of the behind the voice video series we've had on YouTube where we've been talking one-on-one with the actors we've also spent the week making sure that we're gonna be able to continue that through 2019 so look for that coming up right now let's take a quick break and we're going to talk to some of the people behind getting these voices into the game so stick around we'll be right back [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] yeah all right so we're gonna start we gonna go down the line everybody won't introduce themselves okay you know how this works you know how this works you guys okay all right people Tetris in here already My name is Matthew Mercer I'm a voice actor and I'm the voice of the male Norn player character voice over lead I'm Tommy Callahan I'm a producer from blind light and I'm the studio narrative director for ArenaNet all right also huge shout out to blind light and Dave and Dave for their hospitality this week and every recording session they're amazing thank you very much all right well we're going to talk about this is kind of a continuation of a previous guild chat where even I talked about getting the voices from your guys's brains into the game so we're going to talk about what happens in between that process you kind of run us through the narrative and review process a little bit with Tom Selleck so as we're working on the game we've got a deadline in in mind that we're working towards we're running office hours with Tom and the entire narrative team reading the scripts out loud that part of the process basically is we really really strongly since we're writing for spoken word that the scripts as soon as they're at all ready to be shown anybody else should be brought to a group and read out loud so we iterate from that point on with the whole writing team reading scripts sort of going through identifying things that we think can be tightened up made better whatever way and kind of crowdsourcing the fixes and proved to be a really robust process for us then as we get to deadline day we're you know contacting blind late and telling them okay we've got you know a window in mind for recording here's how many people we need to come in here's who we need to come in here's how many lines they have you know and Tommy starts doing the schedule Tetris I need these 25 people with varying schedules for this one-week window go good it's astounding usually happens without between the phone call and the tears schedules for those you know for that for that range so we we also kind of go off of how many lines we're thinking we're gonna have cuz that tells me how much time we want to ask people if they're available for so we we just kind of go back and forth can you come in yes can come at this time I think so okay to come at this time so that's that's the that's the broad scheduling part of it it sounds very easy so how does that get to you that Matthew uh they contact my agency and give me a kind of a general idea of dates they're looking at the schedule sessions I check in with my schedule and see if I'm available and if I ever like cool I'll hold that for this and make sure that nothing else gets booked in that time or I'll be like I already have something in that space and then we'll rearrange until we find a place where it fits in their schedule and then I just excitedly count down the days until I get to come back in here and you know shout angry horn things sexual attention is coming to head [Laughter] all right so what's the what is the lead time look like I mean you get the call from Eve I don't even know how I'm not in on that phone call so I don't even know how far in advance usually it's a couple months in advance to start fleshing out the you know like here's the the window we're looking at and roughly what we're looking at but it really comes down to like the last couple of weeks before that deadline it all comes together it sits and I tell everybody in the office it's not real until we have the scripts but we do get your description earlier than a lot of people do everybody I mean it's factual yeah like the reason that that we do that is because we are well aware of how much chaos can happen at the end of the process trying to organize all this stuff really late and so we want to you know keep as much of that out of the process as we possibly can so we do make an effort to get everything tightened from our end and chip divine light and to that point - even on our end I will say this project is the only game project I work on that is scheduling weeks sometimes months in advance right a lot of times it's like alright this games booking you tomorrow at 9:00 can you make it that's more often than not just how it works out so this is great - like alright we need you two months from now on this Tuesday can you set that aside that's so much better for scheduling it makes things far more it helps that we publish on a fairly regular cadence oh yeah so that sort of helps us to be ahead in the 8-ball in that way because yeah the norm is much more you know people at 7:30 the night before going to back time up but you guys do do a really good job of delivering us things that we can pass on that are like already ready for you know human consumption so we want to make your job as easy as we possibly can for sure the actors as well we do our best to give about a week of buffer time between when we've handed off the scripts and when we start recording and that's for get those actor schedules finalized and getting the scripts actually physically printed onto paper to have here in the studio's getting the files arranged and everything just there's there's last-minute changes and rewrites that do happen but we try and give as much of a buffer as possible just because it's too much chaos if you say okay it's a Friday night at 5:00 p.m. and I'm gonna start writing that script for Monday morning well and there's there's kind of an Invisible Man or persons here in the editor who who doesn't get to sit in the room but needs to know every line that was delivered how it was delivered is that the one that you know Tom and Eve want did Matt do something cooler is there a new line that we're putting in [Laughter] so we have coordinators that we format scripts for as well and they take notes while Matt's doing his thing and then afterwards we upload everything and send it to an editor who makes it all nice and clean so that we can send it back to to even her team and she starts processing it and we put it in the build and we futz with the timing new things around and all I saw and the the localization team shouldn't be ignored and all this because we're in the studio here getting the notes you know when you when you deliver the line slightly different than what's written but so much better we have to take that little change the delivery works better you know and we're not we're not you so we're we're gonna get it as clean as we can but sometimes what you deliver is a little bit better we'll rewrite that we'll pass it off to the localization team to get those those retranslation z' made because while we're recording this week we're getting audio hand backs starting this week and into next week but localization is gonna start the following Monday with their recording we have a very tight turnaround can you talk a little bit about the localized recording I don't personally work on localization recording for ArenaNet but I do work very closely with the localization team because we record in Hamburg Germany and Paris France and somewhere in China I'm not sure which town I don't know where the studio is but we have to get those scripts over to them and they use the English audio files as reference so they listen to the English audio file for you know how loud was this was it protected you know what was the emotion here they use that as a guide for a guide track for their delivery we we want one of things that we realized maybe year year and a half ago was that that we had that half of our players play the game not in english but that we had virtually no visibility into what the what kind of experience they were getting was because we don't speak generally speaking those languages and even if we do we don't have a lot of time to spend sort of you know English right so we've we've we've built the relationship with the localization team to be one that's closer in that period because we want to make sure they have everything they need from what we're doing in English so that they can then go and try to execute it to as high a quality bar as they possibly can and it's not easy from the translation point for it because you know sometimes people will write in lines that in English are sort of puns or other kind of idiomatic terms and phrases they don't translate right and we want the translators to come up with whatever an equivalent kind of joke would be any other language doesn't have to be literal so we have to sort of help them find that stuff and then the directors who record in other countries are all contractors they're not I mean their defenders rather and and so we've just we've really tried to bring the localization team in as close to their team as we can so that they understand and are part of our process and and therefore are not mystified when they're going to try to execute another languages you know yeah and they're great they do amazing work that's actually something had wondered about because I've seen puns here and there in our stuff or very very english-speaking directed things and I had that kind of wonder what we do about that because I don't speak those languages either but it's interesting and it's really good to know that we aim for an equal experience in all language because like you said a lot of our players do you guys a lot of you play in non-english so yeah I appreciate that all right so we talked about getting the script to you guys when does that get to you it gets to me actually I get the scripts in this project in advance which never happens in games most projects no context is so great but because it around so quick or it's just people don't think about it often games you walk in there the first time you're seeing the script is when it's there on the mic stand all right line one go right and so you're kind of it's using your instincts and whatever context you've been able to get from line to line so getting these in advance many go to read through the lines helps you already be prepared for it feel confident in the performance and where the story is going and be able to kind of speed along this session and not let it drag on and end up being you know a pain for all these people working so hard to get to these points you wanna let them down so I'm very appreciative of that but so I get the script about a week or a few days in advance at least so I can go ahead and peruse it then come into the session and that's kind of where we get a chance to actually build it together yeah okay so let's talk about the session because you guys are all in there you're definitely there and that is like this has been going all week all day long can you guys each talk about a little bit about what that's like from your point of view because those are really fun and there's a lot happening and you can fight over who goes first shorter than your experience you guys here all week I'm jumping all around throughout the week but one thing because I've been working on this project for so long and there's you know story updates you know every few months or so it's exciting as I get to come back and see what the next chapter is and as a person who's narrative lis obsessed anyway it allows me the opportunity to be excited for the next chapter and come in but for me it's it's four hours where we get to go in there we get to dig into the story we get to jump through the scripts and sometimes do multiple care a lot of NPCs so we're gonna try the ranges and you know play beyond just you know the the Nord male warrior time so that's a lot of fun for me and and then I get to leave after the four hours and then you get to deal with all the rest of the actors so I for me it's a it's a short sweet condensed experience you guys have to endure the the length and breadth of it yeah well I know these guys have to fly down so it's even longer yeah you're up in Seattle but for me I'm usually hiding back at the offices of blind light and having my coordinators spy on things for me there are any fire if anybody's bleeding then you know I start calling I like to come in as much as possible because there's I mean there's such a dense range so it's also fun for me you know as a casting director to watch what everybody does when they have a few different characters and what they slip into what's fun for them so I don't know it's uh it's a it's a smorgasbord for me I don't I can't speak for their experience though well we I mean we come down on Sunday before the week usually middle of the day we get here in time to have dinner with our directors they also have gotten the scripts ahead of time the reason that we make such an effort to get the scripts ahead of time to the actors and the directors is we want them to have context we don't we know some of the consequences that happen in the situations that not talking about where you walk in you have to do cold read or something I've seen right that's not what we want and we're an ongoing kind of serial anyway right so the actors and other characters and they know what's going on the plot and the directors do too and they and so we just want to get them up to speed in terms of what the full sort of the fullness of more trying to get out of all this is and so we'll have dinner we'll talk about it sometimes will actually watch video playthroughs or the current state of the build for the chat for the episode oh that's the night before and then starting at call time of 8:30 the next morning we are all here getting into play directors getting into place actors arriving at nine o'clock we work straight from nine to six with a with an hour break for lunch if we are fortunate and we have 10 PC characters which in its I mean it can be a difficult thing over the time of the week to sort of stay focused because you have to you have to stay so intensively focused on every line as it's being performed and hearing and thinking about it it's particularly difficult with player characters because after the second or third when your mind starts to go fuzzy yeah right so so maintaining your focus in that room I think is even harder but it's a it's a it's a fairly grueling process but it's also a really satisfying process because because the actors do bring stuff that that we would not have thought of they the weather it's changing lives or is just color to lines that we wrote and the process we had a writer down here this time who it was her first time and in the studio and and and for her as I've seen for every writer it's true for me the first time happened the process of hearing an actor say things that you wrote and give life to it as a character is just mind-blowing it's an incredible experience so we do try to in addition to Eve and me and Marissa who is Eve sort of second and ARMA Constantine who's the near design lead for Guild Wars 2 and Julian Arden who is the story editor for Guild Wars 2 we also tried to have at least some of the actor the writers who work in the episode come down and be in the room for at least part of it or if they can't do that to Skype them in so that they can at least witnessed the process first of all and also if we're getting anything wrong that was sort of what they hoped from it they can tell us we also then during the week we will have early in the week at dinner with Tommy and Beau and levy usually from blend light just to sort of sync on how the first day or two went and are there any significant problems that we need to work out and then one light frequently is nice enough to take all of us out to dinner at some point during the week which is great and really expensive for them particularly week like this where we had everyone here everybody who helps us behind the scenes like the editors in Cuba be invited to the big family dinner for the last episode of the season and it was wonderful but we also had we also tried to get we've been trying to get our team leads the the design team leads down so they can see what the process is like right Lindsey Morocco is the content lead for Guild Wars 2 Mike Z who've already spoken to like like he hasn't been down here like eight years Lindsey had never been there you know everybody wanted to sort of come and be a part of it this time and and so it was a packed room and we were a little worried about whether that would be distracting or difficult for the directors to sort of you know you can be obnoxious directors if you're not careful in your room like that and but everybody mostly behaved themselves in there was a reason as I cuddled down at this end of the hall all week because like I don't want to be in the way so what I'm doing in sitting in the room for all of us we we try and have narrative nvo team representation in the studio because you know narratives bringing the like this is what what the arc is this is what we what we wrote how we what we need but Marissa and myself we're we're listening also for that context you know giving the the the context behind the scenes and also taking all those notes for localization we're the bridge between narratives and localization and just everybody trying to get you know let's make sure we get this tweaked right let's make sure that you know we hit the word right or if we you know we changed it that we have those notes so that localization can turn around and get those in my laptop looks like a mess because I've seriously got the spreadsheet open for my notes on one side the script open on the other side and I'm VPN into the dev client so I can get context if I if I need you somehow aren't connecting your crazy grabbing all of that data I need to keep an eye on any notes any changes that we have because we have a tight turnaround that we need to go through and all the moving pieces helps me I'm so impressed by the level of organization it takes to do that she's a superhero yeah alright and after a you know whatever years of doing like like thank God you don't you hone the process over and over yeah finally you get it to something that sort of works [Laughter] it's both it's perfect alright so with such a huge group both in the recording booth and out of it this might be mostly for you too but why don't you talk a little bit about what it's like working with some of the actors and something that you mentioned was we're hearing the same lines from ten different player characters and I've been watching no it's true and and what is one of the most amazing phenomena was for me when I first arrived and started being a part of this process was for the most part the scripts are the same occasionally we have you know minor racial variants or whatever but but for the most part they're the same but what really surprised me as I watched the different actors come in and do the player characters was that because those actors are all different and what they bring to it is different that each of the PCs is different even though they by and large have the same words they don't necessarily have the same attitude or take about everything and I love that I love the the variation and and and the you know diversity of choice that it gives players I mean it's a really different experience I think playing you know PCs or a female that it is playing PC charm ale I mean it's just a really it's a different thing and that's awesome and as you go through the script I mean you're the you know the the Golden Path is it like 95% of the lines are the same yeah yeah I mean we don't do a whole lot of variants just because we'd have a lot bandwidth to but if you if you ever go on and watch somebody play a different way or character than you normally do there's a big difference yeah that's right it's impressive it's pretty cool yeah but we do I mean I've said for analysis a team we have and I say we I had no part virtually and assembling it so I'm saying it as a as a fanboy basically right we have the best cast in videogames the the level of talent he's not wrong no we have an absolute all-star pantheon of people that we just collected over eight or nine years which is amazing that we get to have all of those actors some of that some of the absolute best voiceover actors I've ever met worked with I arrived it was like oh my god you have this person and this person is I can't believe it this is who I am it's like going in a candy store you know I'm it's fantastic and we're not gonna ask you to speak for 25 people you're absolutely right just chatting with all of the different actors this week and one of the questions that I was asking them when we were running through the interview series was what are some of the other things you've worked on I heard critical role a lot just I mean and they were saying things a lot of them I knew but then you know it was like oh I'm on that TV show nesic what someone else was on this is s which I'm obsessed with right now yep I'm actually glad the camera wasn't on me at that point because like my whole brain just like stripped its gears trying to remember which I remember she told her she was on veep and I'd totally seen the episode I had no idea it was her totally to recognize it yeah I did this and I had to rewind a little bit which helps me on the casting because I have to fill you know as well and okay I've got these people coming in for these named characters I can give this that person this generic and that person this generic because I know their voice and then you don't just do the PC normally early was fun oh yeah crazy ass is because we have these guys coming in but they can give us three voices if we have the time for them to do that in the session so we and it's like we have a repertory company of actors right and we're giving these amazing actors these little bitty butt bit things to do but they bring such creativity and inspiration to them that that's I think a big reason why the whole world feels so great inside the game you know the level of sophistication and just general quality to me I think comes a lot from it's it's so much fun to be able to create in that space like I said it's a joy to play these these main characters through the narrative for the many years they've been doing this now but every one of these little opportunities to throw a little more flavor in the world and kind of flex a little bit are other aspects of our repertoire that we don't have the chance to it's just fun for us because like I said every session is like coming to see old friends again and then we all get to kind of be like whoa wait what is this you're throwing me and you get a describe the character kind of has these quirks like something like this like oh yeah and it's just this cool kind of collaborative creation process all over again yeah I do want to call that because I've noticed it you and a number of other actors it never stops being fascinating to me to see to what your actors jump from like charge and Norn to Asura because the voices are so distinctly different and I don't know how you do it but it's amazing to walk all over the place that's our career path you know we're like we like to be performers like the actors but many of us we focus specifically on voice and finding a dynamic range in that space so we can play all these different personalities and a lot of things that we would never do on camera I'm you know I've done on camera for years but it's always been a very particular type I'm a very particular type and voiceover I get to be demon princes I get to be you know tiny animal tinkerers I get to be you know angelic beings like things if I would never become and so you spend your time in your own little private space probably driving in the freeway or when you're in the shower making silly voices just to see what you can come up with and hopefully when they have the opportunity to tailor that cool idea that you came up with in the spot to one of these characters you guys present before us I hear you ad-lib in the in the studio and I'm always filing it back away we're i rambling psychosis has a positive I have a question that I want to drop to you and you from a viewer what is the what's the technical process like when you're working when like with Sam doing brand like with a Norn or with a char because that needs some work on the backend afterwards so he gives the performance you know right in the booth were there for Sam when he's doing Graham's voice you know he drops his voice down just a little bit from his normal speaking voice because it's Norn but the the processing does the heavy lifting once we get back to the studio we take the audio files that of Sam's finished performance and run them through Nuendo and our processing system or processing paths that our audio director has built so like Noren have a process and English that's run it so that when it comes out the other end [Laughter] it goes from Sam down to Bram yeah Santa Bram you drop down from your normal speaking voice it's still pretty low innocence it's that but when you want the know where to be you nine feet tall yeah I usually go to Sam first it's okay it's fine that is a I think this session last April that I was at one of the things you played play some references for sim and it was post-processing and I remember he just listened to it went Jesus and you know we don't want to strain you guys you don't want to hurt you make you scream too much there are some level of screaming and shouting but we don't want to do it excessively yeah you've done those games so we had we had a different actor and earlier this week for an awakened and you know I played them you know here's what a different actors awakened sounded like with them just you know straight delivery and here's what it sound like process so don't drop your voice to too low you don't have to strain let the processing do the heavy lifting that's awesome oh yeah great work she was awesome one more question I'm kind of like watching a couple of questions coming in over here that's all good how do you convey the amount of emotion needed for like a scene like or eans death hey spoilers part of being an actor and kind of the training is being able to to get really in touch with the different emotional states and being able to and their different techniques to do that whether it be finding moments in your life that you can personally connect to that similar emotion or just sitting in that emotional space long enough where you can access it without needing to be there mentally personally and then I kind of need more that that Avenue and so it's it's having this toolbox of various emotional states and intent and combining it with the context of the scene and the arc that they want to and they explain they want to you know to get through throughout that scene so you can start from a very dark sad place but eventually lead itself to a very you know heroic stalwarts turn around and trying to raise up your troops around you and so for you it's piecing out all the different parts of your toolbox lining them up and keeping that arc in mind while also considering the lines considering who you're performing them to the context of the scene and making it feel real and that comes with just a lot of practice and training it comes with being comfortable in that space and trusting in yourself and trusting in these guys and it's it's you know it's a very scary process at first because it's having to put all this together and then kind of letting it go and see where it takes you yeah and sometimes it's magic sometimes it does not work at all you all go oh let's try it again you know but but that's part of this too is you're trying things out you're you're you know we usually do to spur line as we go through the script and so the first line the first read might be you finding it and kind of getting the words out and then once that first line comes through you're like okay now I really understand where this point of dialogue is going to begin where it's going to end in the beats I want to hit so the second take you can kind of free yourself even more and so it's it is an exploratory process and I know it's a lot of fun it's so so for me to get to get to those points as emotional beats it's just being emotionally available to put yourself in that emotional space and trying to put yourself in that moment and convey it with honesty I think the other thing that has to be called out is how great voiceover actors like Matt are the skills involved in taking what otherwise on camera would be a completely physicalized performance right your body your face all of that and somehow reflecting all of those things but only in your voice is a very we've talked about this before it's a very very specific set of skills and not everybody can do it well and and those who can are astounding to watch thank you it's a but but it is because if you if you push that too far it becomes bad voiceover which you know gaming definitely started in a rough spot many you know back when I grew up and that's it yeah the subtle nuances the raise of an eyebrow the half-cocked grin the the lean you know to a knowing nod to the hand on somebody's shoulder these are all things that on camera are conveyed with subtle facial expressions and physicality you have to have that come through in the voice just enough just enough otherwise it gets a little camping going for but but I mean we can hear that in your voice you can hear it in the final product even though we're not the players aren't seeing that hand on the shoulder that you're doing or that you know cocked eyebrow or that grin you can hear it in your voice and again you do it and I've seen it in every actor this week and I remember seeing it before those those gestures those facial expressions the movement that's all happening just to make it work I guess but it is it's interesting watching how much every actor gets into it yeah well it's it's theater of mind you are you're you're putting yourself at least for me and many actors kind of in a similar space we are imagining ourselves in the scene we're seeing you know the the fields of broken ice before us we see the soldiers walking past with you know solemn expressions we see the old friend who comes to us asking you know what happened are they still alive and so in that moment when they give us the context of the emotional state of that scene and what's happening around us in that space we imagine you know going through those motions and some of us some some people it's a very still experience and it's all imaginary for people like me it's a little more physical and I you know my hands and gestures tend to follow suit and I don't realize it and then I realize you guys have a camera and they're filming it's just it's it's it's a natural instinct xual part of putting yourself in that scene microphone or like your I've had group Accords for animation where it's been a lot of people around us we're doing a fight scene develop like all right so throw a giant swinging punch and I'm like doula and I look over and the person who's sitting next to me is like barely dodged my attack and sorry so Ken it can be detrimental at some point yeah there's been contact made with objects dozen [Laughter] sure I mean we people problem players players that have heard it are familiar yeah it was it was episode 5 episode 4 I don't remember the one where where you showed us the the commander says something and about something exciting yeah it was late I see chalk and microphone you hear like 15 feet away go what endures of this you know we Hannah Barbera exactly it comes to thing and and that was all our audio designers and they did an amazing job doing we liked it so much that now we're looking for more places off mic stuff happens we had a line the line is but he had a line where after the after the delivery of the line he knocked over his water bottle speaking of things that don't go as intended in a good way this is and I'm not asking for like terrible war stories I'm asking for the good like somebody accidentally knocking a water bottle off a stool yeah I'm so it turns out that you'll remember at 2:00 in the morning that's alright amazing things but I would say thankfully I've had no terrible experiences in this project I've had projects but four things have gone interesting me but but everything with the old horses part has been has gone really smoothly we've had a few like this voice didn't work out for this person recast but you know in hearing then you know trying to get that voice going oh they would be perfect for this other thing yeah yeah we've had a few new actors where it's like we bring him in and Cherise booth was one of them we didn't know you know much about her her acting or her voice and we brought her in first some generic voices and we're like oh my gosh she's amazing let's let's bring her in for more stuff and we ended up like writing the character of Zafira just for her we do that that's when I say we have a repertory you know group of actors that's sort of what I mean like we have actors we work with over and over again and we come up with new characters for them that we can tailor to their specific strengths and weaknesses I think that is a recurring good thing that happens on exception really cool another thing I think that happened along the way in the first part of the season with Joko with Nolan North was I think going into Episode one you know we we didn't see joke I was much more not this isn't good but as much more than sort of a very fun film right and but listening to Nolan record the stuff we were doing informed the writing that we were doing and we with him he was so funny doing it in a way we hadn't necessarily planned right we started writing to that so that by the time you got to Episode three like you know I mean we were just going to town with Joe it was it was fantastic and once we once we found that groove and he found that groove and that was the thing that inspired us we just I mean we couldn't you guys sorry the good the good stories that I'm thinking of have still have spoilers stamps on I am there was a slip of the tongue I think yesterday with one of the Asura characters that worked out really it's not anything that could go in game but it was so perfectly funny she's trying to say cogs in the eternal alchemy mm-hmm and it was cogs in the eternal economy and I was like well she's oh man there are so many our audio engineers have a compilation I'm sure somewhere in a harddrive of outtakes that should never see the light of that's that's friend blackmail there as you know we appreciate us that you hold on to that and go exactly Oh God all right well it is getting a little bit late thank you very much for your extra time guys we have one more thing so stick around because Eve has a friend that she's going to bring in and we're going to talk over those yeah think about like the game design community like yeah yeah everybody knows everybody it's the same thing all right you guys stick around we will be right back thanks to all of you for spending some time in this room because it is like a thousand degrees in here this is very well [Music] [Music] all right we are back with Eve and Julie I will let you introduce yourself I'm Julie Nathanson and I have been working on Guild Wars 2 for 117 years okay but really no I think um and I was part of the base game and and part of the process I think pre game for a long time so I would say it's been like nine or ten years yeah so Julie is several of the asura that you will hear running around in the game yes and human and quaggan and originally right Alice and wait hold on the twins the twins thing with khari was really sweet because they they know that we're kind of bessie's so uh so they surprised me and they were like well by the way here's who you're talking to it's Carrie all right so you two have something coming up don't know I'm still trying to jump right there not me talk to the groundhog yeah we're really excited about this after you know after working together for so long we started to what we created obviously a friendship and and a really wonderful communication together and part of the benefit of this is that we've been looking at ways to collaborate and ways for the voice actors and the developers to really strike a collaborative attitude and get more out of the experience creatively for everyone so we're doing a talk at GDC this year the Game Developers Conference in March we're calling it collaborative approaches to great vo performances because of the ways that we've learned to work with each other in the past and I I bring to your working with all of the actors that we have under worst yeah Julie just mentioned with working with uh sorry the the part where you were twins with khari yeah you know being able to say oh by the way the other half of year of this scene is being delivered by curry immediately you were like oh I know that person I know exactly how to play this and that comes out of a collaborative mindset right so so Eve's thinking what can I do to help Julie get into the scene how can I make this feel more seamless I know she's friends with this person she's going to be able to imagine how Carrie is gonna perform the scene and have a sense of it and it immediately grounded the experience and my experience of working with ArenaNet has been collaborative from the beginning and so we we've we've thought about sharing what's worked for us we've thought about how that can also be beneficial to other developers and voice actors really looking at the concept of a collaborative mindset from the beginning of the development process through the audition experience in terms of what sides are sent and how to approach that and then moving into preparation for recording and then in the recording session itself so you know it seems like it's a good time to focus on collaboration yeah considering our human world right now so you know you can get like amazing performances when you treat your actress like like people who are on your team working to make the project great you know it's it's we don't call in the actors and go we pay you to be in here and you just do the stuff for us and get it done it's know we're all here making this art and it is art and we are going to treat you as a collaborator and a partner in this process because what you do is so important to what we do and our words fall flat when your performance can't go in the direction that it needs to go and when that experience is engendered then the voice actor experience is oh there's an open space for my creativity to be here in discussion in attitude and then what we can bring to the table only benefits what you're needing so we've we've been talking about this for a long time and we're excited to to bring it to the fore yeah it's it's an exciting collaboration and it's a really cool process to watch it feed off of itself and like you were saying it's not just you come in here you get paid to do the job you leave one thing that I have noticed is that when the actors are taking a break the directors the riders taking break it's not just everybody goes and sits down everybody's hanging out and having fun and catching up on you know what have you been up to and it's it's such a close-knit team that it really comes through I think in the game we look forward to these sessions I'm always looking forward did you hear me talking about our GW friendships like February 1st is all about our February 2019 the whole month is all about all of the friendships and relationships but we'll extendo months it would be great work so if you're GDC where when is your talk just stand there and just shout our names and we'll probably collaboratively come and talk to you and tell you when we're speaking well thank you guys so much for some time talking about that keep an eye on the GDC website for when scheduling is finalized and if you're heading to GDC definitely stop and talk to these two ladies thanks for having yeah thank you guys both thank you all for hanging out and watching Gil chat and we will see you next time bye guys