08.07.08

Heading to Hamburg

Posted in Personal, The Nameless Mod at 01:07 by Jonas

Or: Indiana Jonas and the Quest for Voice Acting.

…okay, just Heading to Hamburg then.

A couple months ago, our prospects for having Trestkon’s lines recorded were… a little bleak. Our original motivation for choosing poor Lawrence as the protagonist of The Nameless Mod, at the risk of his being forever regarded as the source of one of the most gratuitous acts of self-insertion fiction ever, was that he had a lot of time to dedicate on TNM so we reckoned he’d be able to record the many lines the protagonist would doubtlessly have. I mean the player character might have hundreds of lines!

Six years later, the situation is a little different for a couple of reasons. Lawrence now has a girlfriend, a job, and a college education, and our player character ended up with just over 3550 lines of dialogue (a grand total of 34,466 words by last count). It also became apparent during the creation of our first two trailers that while Lawrence is not a bad actor, he is not an actual actor, and our quality standards have increased substantially since 2002.

Enter Jeremiah Costello, professional voice actor and creative director of T-Recs studio, located in Hamburg. For some inexplicable reason (divine intervention?) he contacted us to offer his help with some voice acting, and we got him to record all of Scara’s lines, at which he did an outstanding job. When he heard we were considering releasing TNM without recording Trestkon’s dialogue, he offered to record them on the condition that I come to Hamburg to direct.

So off I go to Hamburg tomorrow (technically), Friday the 8th. I’ll be staying until Sunday evening, sleeping in the studio basement, and hopefully we’ll manage to record all the lines before I leave again. We’ll be using T-Recs’s awesome batch recording tool that I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to talk about, and since Jeremiah’s friend Friedrich has helped me weed out the identical lines so we don’t have to do them twice, we’re down to about 2500 lines. I’ll bring my camera and give you as detailed a report as respecting Jeremiah’s privacy allows early next week.

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