EPTSome various voice work from 2012. I was practicing unedited and lightly edited voices a lot during that year.
I did the Immortal, Scout, Marauder, Reporter, and the trailer narrator for this project, while the vast majority of voice acting in this project.
Voice acting is something of a sacred art, but also something of a overestimated skillset. Anyone can act. But not everyone can embrace new characters. I'm mentally challenged, and I have absolutely no social contact in person, so even everyday speech is extremely challenging for me. Tripping over words, stuttering, stalling, forgetting words, mixing up words, and other speech disorders commonly plague me and make my work very difficult.
Between the last 3 years, when I started public commentary for various games including Starcraft 2, I had only voice acting experience but not real broadcast experience. The end results were nearly entirely negative, but I learned a lot in the process. I dropped commentary and picked up Let's Plays, where I've found my niche as a highly politically incorrect albeit technical caster with a strange habit of breaking games unbelievably easily.
Today, I'm working on a grand scale independent movie project which I will, once again, largely be voice acting myself. Between this project and Salvation I have learned a great deal about speechcraft and, indeed, my voice itself still evolves and changes. I'm 25 years old and I'm only today really learning the nuances of talking.
When I voice act one of my own characters, I'm becoming the embodiment of an entity who is part of a world that is a part of who I am. The universe of my writing is my life's work. Project Retribution, my independent movie/machinima, will be the magnum opus of my life's work, since the chances of finishing the actual writing are less than zero. Portraying the characters is more than just acting for me. It's living the dreams.
Portraying other people's characters, aka taking requests, is a lot more challenging. Becoming someone else's entity, based entirely on their descriptions, is a process of throughput. My Protoss voice acting really cannot compare to my stronger edited voices, like Xul`Amon and the Fear, from Black Sun. But, even so, if I wanted to I could enter the industry with my skillset. I have had a few monetary offers, which I've turned down for obvious reasons explained in earlier blogs. Most business offers seemed focus on my mediocre 3d work for some reason, though.
It could be many years before I pierce the heights of tier 1 acting, however, and I likely won't be able to call myself professional until I meet mortality. My skills, all being self-taught, have many limitations. Breathing is a tough thing to figure out on your own, and running out of breath on slower voices is a common problem for me. Accents are also tough business, and naturally shifting the pitch and age of my voice is challenging. However, compared to my 2003 work, my Salvation takes I felt are fairly strong, while my newer demos (above) are even stronger.
Identifying marginal improvements between years of acting when it's all solo work can be tough. Most of my Brood War work was unit responses, while most of my newer stuff is dialogue or narration. It helps having some degree of writing experience, so I can write fairly strong dialogue, and I know how it'll sound in my head. This, of course, sets distance between my work and other people's dialogue. I can't imagine their diction when they are the ones who created it. I can only make a bunch of takes and hope one of them hits it.
I don't take requests often. Too many people, like admins at sc2mapster, have plainly wasted my time having me do voices for conceptual projects doomed to fail. 99% of the time people ask me I say no. However, sometimes you might catch my voice in the strangest of areas - like Black Omega: We've Found Her, in which I voice acted some side characters and a cinematic, though I don't think they've released that stuff yet.
Project Retribution is a huge narrative with a few present-tense scenes and a lot of battle chatter. It will be my first real foray into a major length narrative with some unique emotional attachment. I really hope I can pull it off, because the production will be leaning heavily on my audio work since my video work will be lacking. I will literally become the voice the stars - everything from soldiers to the narrator to god-like entities and elemental effigies. Through my words my world will live. It will be the finest hour of my life.
This is what I live for. To bring my dreams to life. Voice acting is just one of my ways of doing just that. I'm not the best, but unlike my graphics skills, I have faith I can rise to the challenge. When Retribution's script is finalized and the final voice acting takes are beginning, I will enter a solemn state of mind. My already heightened communion with my world's mechanisms will ascend to a point where general speech will become entirely unreasonable for me. I will breathe, sleep, move in the very motion of my dreams. I will become more than just an actor embodying my characters. I will become the characters themselves, learning to assume their very gate and prose as physical entities. Then, and only then, can I make motion the mechanism of their creation.
