BUILD | AUDIO PRODUCTION
Talking
Fable III
Charged with capturing the best voice over audio for Fable III, Side had to work to get the best from a number of world famous actors. Production manager Sini Downing takes us through the process from casting to post…
Above: Side production manager Sini Downing
FOLLOWING A successful collaboration on Fable II, Side was delighted to be working once again with Lionhead on the third installment of the series. Brought on board for casting, directing, recording and post of all 470,000 scripted words spoken by almost 200 characters, we knew it was going be another wild ride. Amongst those returning were lead voice director Kate Saxon, Lionhead’s tireless audio producer Georg Backer and myself as production manager. “With Fable III, we wanted to build on the success of Fable II and take it further; make the player feel part of Albion and care about the world, its characters and story,” explains Backer. “We knew that working with the right people from early on – and making them an important part of our creative process was vital to accomplish our vision.” We began back in March 2009 with a preproduction meeting. Side’s creative director Andy Emery met with the Lionhead team to discuss scheduling, budget, key lessons learnt from Fable II’s VO production and early thoughts on casting. Lionhead put together their casting group, including Backer, lead writer Mark Llabres Hill, lead designer Josh Atkins, and lead scripter Alex Skidmore. For each lead character they came up with a list of actors and/or characters from films that had some quality they wanted. From that Side’s casting team began putting together a long list for the potential high profile cast. Our casting mantra is to make sure that the performance a well-known actor, regardless of their profile,
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can bring to a specific character is the right one, and this philosophy meshed well with the way Lionhead approached their potential cast as well. CASTING A SPELL “Our casting decisions were made to ensure we have the best cast for the characters. It wasn’t a marketing thing,” Backer confirms. The long list was narrowed to a short list, with input from Kate Saxon and a final meeting with Peter Molyneux. The cast contained some rather marketing-friendly
With Fable III, we wanted to build on the success of Fable II and take it further; make the player feel part of Albion and care about the world. Georg Backer, Lionhead names, including Sir Ben Kingsley, John Cleese and Simon Pegg, actors who provided wonderful performances as well as gaining a bit of pre-release attention. No one said you can’t have great performances and press. But back in the summer of 2009, we were far from welcoming any Hollywood stars into the studio. August saw Saxon working on staging sessions with the Lionhead team as
the performance/drama director and consultant. The sessions involved actors physically performing scenes which would become core quest scenes in the game. When I’d been preparing to approach agents of the high profile actors I knew that some wouldn’t have had offers from a video game before. Part of my job is to help agents understand game projects, which is especially important when approaching the caliber of actor we were going for. Side worked with Lionhead to create an attractive pitch package. This included a story overview, character biographies, an art book with some lovely early conceptual drawings of characters, costumes and landscapes, and reviews of the previous games from mainstream press. After many calls, emails and negotiation, all the high profile and lead cast were finally on board. Casting for supporting characters began in November with a mix of auditions and clips from our extensive actor database. As Side has recorded the Fable series, casting was well-versed in the mix required, with characters ranging from comic to country, vulnerable to downright nasty. We began recording in December 2009, starting mainly with AI characters. During this time we also began testing actors for the Auroran accent. This required fully directed auditions as there weren’t voice clips for what we needed. SPEAK UP Aurora was a new land in Fable and with a newly–created land comes a new accent. It’s always fun to cast, and try to explain to