I assume he’s saying that the past thought up a bright future, and he finds those aspects of the gaming industry (and perhaps their reflection of society) ridiculous.
Which of course is a silly position to take, and completely dismissive of large swaths of the industry, so yeah, I’ll assume drunk.
Horse. Dead. Beating.
And, it looks like we’re done.
No residuals, incidentally.
Seems likely, though nothing is certain till things get signed.
on second thought… :)
The new deal, which must still be approved by the union’s board of directors, calls for “bonus pay” based on the number of sessions a performer works on each game, beginning with a $75 payment on the first session and capping out at $2,100 after 10 sessions worked.
“The new transparency provisions will enhance the bargaining power of our members’ representatives by requiring the companies to disclose the code name of project, its genre, whether the game is based on previously published intellectual property and whether the performer is reprising a prior role,” he said. “Members are also protected by the disclosure of whether they will be required to use unusual terminology, profanity or racial slurs, whether there will be content of a sexual or violent nature and whether stunts will be required.”
These seem like solid wins. One of the big bugaboos was that actors frequently had no idea what they were even auditioning for because publishers insisted on complete secrecy.
I have to ask: stunts?
I believe they were motion captured in some cases, so the voice talent may have to perform things like tumbles and the like during their sessions. Sounds like a lot of crazy shit that they were never aware was part of a project until they showed up for work.
Yup. The line gets really blurry in video games now with many parts actually being “performance actors” instead of just voice. A lot of facial capture and motion capture is required now, and that can sometimes lead to actors jumping around on green screen sets while wearing mocap suits. Because they didn’t know what they were auditioning for, there were cases when someone would sign on to a VO job, only to find out later that there was running and crawling around too.
Yeah, I didn’t realize how much the actors did until I saw the outtakes from the Last of Us performance capture that someone linked in that game’s spoiler thread. Pretty much all the actors are hooked up with performance capture suits and they act out all the scenes you see in the game, including pointing guns at people, rolling on the ground, jumping, etc.
I fully support increased pay for actors who have to spew out technobabble. Whatever they were paying Levar Burton to say that stuff with a straight face, it was not enough.
Oh, I forgot that the “stunt pay” included things like sitting at the mic and screaming and crying for 6 hours to record a million different death VO’s for stuff like Tomb Raider. The vocal stress can lead to the actors having to miss work while their vocal cords recuperate.
The Stefanie Joosten mocap videos are nice to watch.
According to the report, the publishers have agreed to continue to work with SAG-AFTRA on vocal stress, but it isn’t part of the current agreement.
So I’m in the process of trying to hire a voice actor to do some narration on a simple 3 minute explainer video. Normal voice, nothing straining, no yelling. For non-commercial purposes, called an “industry project”. This is the absolute cheapest kind of voice acting you can get, apparently.
Before I tell you the rates, keep in mind I’ve been hiring python programmers to do some coding of fairly complex system for between $25-45 an hour, depending on length of job, complexity, design work needed, etc. This is fairly complex stuff you need lots of experience for and probably higher education too, like a 4 year degree.
The voice actors want $800-1000 an hour. That’s right. An HOUR. They also want more if it will ever been seen publicly or used for any purpose THEY deem to be likely to make money. This is not for dialog writing services, this is just to record lines I came up with. They want to be paid up front for all of this, and have me sign language in a contract that makes me have a one way financial relationship with them FOREVER.
How the heck are they able to get away with this again? Why are these rates so high? I’m downloading text to speech programs as we speak.
Are you using a SAG actor? Why not just get a friend/coworker/family member to do it?
If you want something professional sounding, you have to hire professionals.
To put it another way, think of it as a “job” rather than per hour. If you have like 3 minutes of dialog, the Cost of Job is $800+. Do you think you’re going to get professional work for a grand total of $40? Who is going to work for that? That’s Mechanical Turk territory.
You might hire programmers for $40 an hour but they’re not doing one hour or one days worth of work. No one in their right mind aside from your lawncare people are working for $40-$100 bucks a job.
This makes me laugh.
Just hire professional high quality non SAG voice actors. There are plenty out there. SAG is not the only game in town.
For $800/hr you’d think you’d be getting James Earl Jones to do your voiceovers.
As another joke I was going to suggest you could do what a lot of call centers are doing and outsource to India. But I remembered watching my German mom trying to talk to one of these people and had to LOL instead.
data point: that’s about the same rate my wife got for a video game theme song, though that had folded in the whole public performance part.
Maybe you’re setting your sights too high? If this is a non-commercial work where you’re not likely to make money off it, perhaps hiring SAG talent isn’t the way to go? I mean, if you want to, you’ll probably get very professional work from people who have memorized their lines before they get to the studio (and you’re not paying for that time) but that might be overkill.
Even if a lower rate would be appropriate for your job, it’s taking away time that they could be billing at their normal rate so it’s probably hard for them to give you a discount. I wouldn’t expect to be able to hire the chef de cuisine at a Michelin-starred restaurant to make dinner for my family for $50 even if it’d only take them a half hour.