Training the Voices in My Head, by Wes Johnson

CommentAugust 28th, 2011 14:18

Fresh off voice actor’s week, Wes Johnson, revered for his work in the Elder Scrolls franchise, decided to share his experience and thoughts with us on recording for both Morrowind and Oblivion. Detailing the passion Bethesda have in their aim to deliver something extraordinary, Wes gives us a rare, but fascinating glimpse into the creation of Elder Scrolls titles.

“You sleep rather soundly for a murderer”

Immersion. The best video games have it, taking you out of the day to day world and surrounding your senses with an alternate reality that seems so real and vital that you sometimes revisit it in dreams. We live in a time where gaming technology is rapidly catching up to our imaginations, and I have been lucky enough to help populate some of the better RPG worlds ever created. Voicing the Elder Scrolls series, as well as Fallout 3 and other games hasn’t just been an honor for me, it’s been an ever evolving experience.

I had voiced a few games when I was lucky enough to be chosen to voice a few characters in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, but I hadn’t played anything as deeply immersive as this game would prove to be. The sessions were done with Todd Howard in Washington, D.C., in the studios known as Absolute Pitch. Todd and I worked with a great engineer named Chip Ellinghaus, and I couldn’t have know just how much these two men and their projects would shape my future. It was an interesting experience, voicing the Bretons, Orcs and various gods and demons for Morrowind, but I hadn’t played a full RPG yet, and treated this session like many of the voice sessions I had done in the past. I was to discover that voicing for radio, commercials, TV, film or even cartoons was a completely different experience than voicing for a video game.

Imagine someone handing you a stack of scripts as thick as a graphic novel, or in some cases as thick as a phonebook. On each of these pages are twenty to thirty lines, each with a only a few words to describe how your character is feeling. Your lifeline to this world is held by the voice director, and sometimes the writer if they attend the session. In many cases, you’re given a brief description of who this character is, and how they fit in this world. In my earliest experiences before Bethesda, I never saw a photo or character design before sitting in a small booth in front of an expensive microphone. The only preparation was a bottle of water nearby, a few minutes to look at a script and then you dive into the character. Skills in character building on the fly after years of improv comedy come in handy. A four hour session later you leave the booth, and in many cases, the character behind.

From the start, working with Bethesda Softworks was different. Todd was incredibly passionate about this new project Morrowind. He showed me some of the early character designs, describing what the world would be like. We even took a break and had a quick bite at a place near the studio. Yet for all his impassioned descriptions of this world, I really didn’t grasp the enormity of what we were doing at Absolute Pitch that day. Not until I actually PLAYED THE GAME. From the moment I installed Morrowind on my PC, I was hooked. “Ah yes, we’ve been expecting you,” I said to myself in what was to be a very long journey into the world of Tamriel. As I answered the questions of this fellow Socucius Ergalla, something interesting happened; I became so absorbed into the world, that I stopped paying attention to the fact that I had voiced the character. Surely, at first I was listening as an actor, to see if inflections matched the action, and if it worked well in the environment, but as I played on in Morrowind, I started to see the character I was PLAYING as ME, and the characters I had voiced as just inhabitants of the world. If talking to yourself is considered a problem, well, I had one. 300 to 400 hours later, I was not only addicted to Morrowind and RPG’s, but I had gotten my brother Rick, several friends, and my sons hooked as well. But it was more than just a role playing game to me. It was the best acting course I could have ever taken in video game acting. I would dream of traveling on giant flea like creatures, and running through the air in a special, magical pair of boots. And I knew most of all that the real magic in video gaming was the complete and total immersion that can come from marrying a player’s imagination to the cyber sandbox of masterpiece RPG.

When I was asked back to Bethesda to audition for Oblivion, I met the new Audio Director Mark Lampert. For our audition, Mark was all business. He made it clear that Bethesda wasn’t looking for a reprisal of the voices I had used in Morrowind, but something completely different. He asked me not to create a character voice like the Bretons, but to do something more natural, yet forceful. It was in that audition session that we laid down the groundwork for Oblivion’s Imperial Guards. The actual recording sessions, once again were at Absolute Pitch. But this time, I entered into them with a completely different mindset. From the moment I sat in the recording booth, I went somewhere else in my mind. The booth around me became Tamriel. I saw the world of Morrowind around, and felt the weight of the armor upon me as I BECAME the Imperial Guards. I could feel the weight of steel as I thrust with swords, and the agony of dying beneath them. I imagined the small, cramped, hot storerooms of the city as I bargained with customers. I imagined the riotous clamor of a bloodthirsty gladiators arena when I announced their battles. At every step of the way, Mark was there guiding me with pronunciations, motivations, and character suggestions. My job was immersion, and I was sinking into it deeply.

Then we came upon a dark, dark character. Mark paused for a moment. “Maybe you could make this one a little different,” he said, and told me a bit about this character named Lucien Lachance. “This guy is a bit darker than the regular Imperial.” I loved it, and after a few minutes trying a few voice variations, I hit upon a voice that dripped with malevolence. “That’s the one!” Mark said, and the next few hours were some of my favorites ever in a booth for Bethesda. Mark said I twisted and moved like Joe Cocker, with my eyes rolling back in my head as I delivered Lucien’s lines. Truthfully, I did go somewhere else, much deeper than I had previously while playing other characters. Then, after finishing Lucien’s lines, I moved on, having no clue what a difference his separate characterization would be in a sea of Imperial voices. As it turned out, different was a very good thing for Lucien, as his storyline proved very popular. A major reason for that was the excellent writing by Emil Pagliarulo, who is a very talented and twisted fellow (in all the best ways). Of course, when reading the lines, I had no idea what Lucien’s fate would be. I was as surprised as anyone when actually playing the game.

After the success of Oblivion, I was asked back to voice the expansions, Knights of the Nine and Shivering Isles. The operative word was variety, and after Lucien, creating something different and memorable was a real challenge. Moving between Absolute Pitch and the new in house studios at Bethesda, I would explore Holy Knights, Mad Prophets, Suicidal denizens, Cruel Torcherers, and more. It was great fun, but nothing was more joyful than the last character I voiced in Oblivion, the Madgod himself, Sheogorath. After spending the week leading up to the session greedily devouring every bit of Billy Connelly I could get my hands on, I created a schizophrenic back and forth Irish/Scottish accent for the fellow. Mischievous, deranged and sometimes wildly dangerous, Sheogorath was a delight to play as he had no boundaries. It was the cherry on top of a game that started as one race of Imperials for me, and grew into an exercise in creating markedly different souls to bring a story and world to life. The lessons I learned with Morrowind and Oblivion is that if you are going to create something in a sandbox, PLAY in a sandbox first. I put in over 500 hours of play into Oblivion over the years, only closing the gates and finishing the main quests when I had fully explored to my hearts content.

My time in the Imperial City helped my obsession for immersion when voicing characters for Fallout 3. I had played Fallout and Fallout 2 shortly after Morrowind, and eagerly re-explored them before creating a new, angrier breed of mutants for the East Coast. I spent so many hours wandering the wastelands with the intelligent Super Mutant Fawkes that my wife almost had me legally declared missing. But I was easy to find, sitting in front of a big screen, yelling at my mutant self to shut the hell up and to stop killing everybody before I could get a chance. Schizophrenic, indeed. For the Fallout 3 expansion Broken Steel, Mark Lampert asked me to play a character named Squire Bigsley. Since I hadn’t really used it on any character so far, he asked me to perform Bigsley closer to my own natural voice. I did, although Bigsley was a very disgruntled, completely lethargic version of me. Yet even from that session, I learned something new to take with me into my next voice acting adventure.

As I said to the guys here at TGL, if I could work on video games every day of my life, I’d be a happy man. Hell, I AM a happy man. I have a great family, and I get to do what I love for a living. All I hope is that when 11-11-11 rolls around, both you and I are so immersed in a game called Skyrim, that we pay no mind when running across a character voiced by the man behind the curtain. We just see, and hear, THE CHARACTER. That will make me very happy. Very happy indeed