Developer’s Diaries # 13: Voice Over - A Work in ProgressWed, 31 March 2021
In our previous Developer’s Diaries, we told you about all the difficulties our team faces in the Voice Over production for the Strategic Mind series of games. Today, we will let you know more about the current progress in Voice Over production.
Meet the cast - Bob Skinner (UK) doing the part of Bernard MontgomeryWhile it was especially tricky to assemble the cast for the Strategic Mind: Fight for Freedom, since we needed a lot of actors from the US, and especially from the UK. Previously, we had only one person from the UK doing VO work for us, so it is quite tricky to find good fits for all roles, taking accent, age, pitch, and everything else into consideration.
Here is one of the voice actors working with us, who turned out to be a really good fit for Montgomery and even looks a lot like him
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Of course, it is not easy to fit a perfect fit for every character, but we are doing the best we can considering our budget limitations.
Current progress around 50% recorded - 70 hours (14 days) at the studioWe are right in the middle of recording all the characters, and despite the really tight schedule things are looking quite good so far. Although, even at this point, it is apparent that this is shaping up to be the biggest project of the series in terms of VO volume and complexity.
Kyiv city being in the “red zone” due to the pandemics, meaning partial lockdown, with the full closure of all public transport being highly possible, does not help. Still, we are doing all possible efforts to keep everything on track. Trust me, that is not easy: some actors have to leave the country soon, some have just come to Kyiv for a couple of weeks, others cannot record during the workdays, and so on and so forth. Still, we hope everything will go more or less smoothly.
P.S. While we were preparing this very post, we got the news that public transport will only be available to people with special credentials - the workers of key facilities, like power plants or food stores. So, it seems the majority of the team will have to work remotely once again. We were working remotely through the last 6 weeks of Blitzkrieg production last year, so that not something new for us, but we remained in the office for the most part throughout last year. So, here we go again.