In part 1, I tried to help you answer the question, “should I have voice acting in my game?” And for indies that haven’t done it before, that question can be hard to answer.
If you’re still uncertain, I recommend reading my Part 1 article. I explain how to make a quick estimate of the time and money for adding voice acting to your game. There’s even a spreadsheet calculator included that will give you hard numbers to work with.
Are you ready for part two?
In this article, I’ll explain what a casting call is and how to announce one in a way that brings you a solid response. I’ll also talk about a new venue for finding and working with actors that I think is amazing – Discord.
That’s right… it turns out that Discord might be an indie’s single best place to go for voice acting. I am excited to explain that, but first…
Casting Calls… How Do They Even Work?
A casting call is a request for actors to audition.
You announce your casting call on social media.
Voice actors look over your casting information. Some of them decide to audition.
You listen to the auditions and pick the actors that you believe are best suited to voice characters in your game.
You pay the cast actors and they give you precious WAV files.
This article will cover preparing for and announcing your casting call. And future articles in this series will cover all the subsequent activities leading up to actors’ performances going into your game as voiceovers.
By the way, it really is a world of boundless talent out there. Remember, you are hunting for magic!
Casting Call Steps
There are lots of little tasks leading up to the casting call. Let’s give that work some structure…
Finish your script (the document containing all of your character dialogue).
Be ready to pay actors ridiculously fast.
Decide on how actors will give you auditions – email or Discord.
Write your Casting Document, which describes your game, characters, and how actors will audition. (Don’t worry – I’m giving you a template doc for this!)
Post your casting call announcement on social media. This is just an advertisement that follows some conventions.
I’ll go over each step in detail.
Step One: Finish Your Script
You’ll want all of your dialogue written so that you can plan your casting call correctly. If you don’t, then you’re introducing risk of casting poorly and maybe pissing off some folks. It might seem like you can start with a rough idea of your characters and then flesh out the exact dialogue later. But I advise against that for the following reasons:
Your estimate of how much money you’ll need to pay actors depends on the dialogue.
Your script dialogue will be the basis of your part descriptions that entice certain actors to audition. Changing the advertised aspects of a part can make you look disorganized or manipulative.
After actors are cast, you want minimal delay in getting them dialogue to record. If they have to wait a week for you to write their dialogue, you lose momentum and focus.
So yeah… finish the script before doing anything else related to casting.
Screenwriting Software
If individual parts have more than a hundred words of dialogue, I recommend getting them into a screenplay format. It looks like this:
To do this, you can use screenwriting software like Final Draft, WriterDuet, or Celtx. This will let you format scripts in a conventional way that actors are very comfortable reading. When you later send lines for recording to your cast actors, you will ideally send those lines in screenplay format.
Most screenwriting software will also create reports to answer questions like, “which scenes (levels) does this character appear in?” or “how many words are in this character’s dialogue?” It’s a little work to learn the screenplay format. The main advantage is that you’ll get better performances from actors. If you are interested, I explain the reasons for using a screenplay format and some tips on writing interactive dialogue in my screenplay format for interactive dialogue article.
Step Two: Be Ready to Pay Actors
This may sound trivial to you. “Of course, I’m going to pay people!” you say.
No, you don’t understand.
I just got done successfully casting and recording with forty actors. Not one of them flaked. They all had their recordings to me in less than ten days. The closest thing I did to nagging was asking a few people, “when is a comfortable time for you to send me your recordings?”
That is like rolling “six” on dice forty times in a row! To some extent, I just got lucky that the cast actors happened to be such a good group of people.
But I did some things that helped. I pushed to get everything to actors quickly, including payment. I paid upfront, typically within two days after announcing casting decisions.
You don’t want anything slowing the process of working with actors. So that means being ready to pay.With your script finished, you’ll have a word count and number of parts to cast. You can use those to estimate the money you’ll need to pay actors. (See part 1 for an estimation formula you can use.)
How will you pay actors? In 2021, I think most any actor will take PayPal, and it is currently the most universal way. You can offer multiple payment options, (e.g. CashApp, Venmo) if that works for you. I like sticking with one to keep things simple.
If you do use PayPal, I would recommend linking more than one payment method to your account. Here is a list of actual problems I handled during The Godkiller casting in paying forty people:
A linked savings account hit the federally-mandated monthly transaction count limit and stopped working for payments.
A linked Visa card stopped working for unknown reasons, and a week later began working again. Both PayPal and the bank said it was the other party that was responsible.
A linked American Express card could not be used in one specific foreign country. Was it Malaysia? I forget.
If you have 2 or 3 payment methods available inside of PayPal, when one fails in a random way, you just switch to another one. Linked bank accounts seem to be cheapest and most reliable option, but it takes 2-5 days t
