Voice Actor

Before dabbling with Virtual Stage and deciding to start the “Machines Don’t Cry” project, in the fall of 2005, I had already experimented with animation techniques using a earlier version of Virtual Stage for the animation portion. There, I tried my hand at dubbing my own voice in a few short animated sequences. It sounded really awful. I tried using voice alteration software but it didn’t help. I wanted to make “Machines Don’t Cry” a higher quality film but the characters would need a voice and my own voice will not cut it. With friends and family, I saw a potential for legal squabbling if my film made any money. I released I needed to hire a voice actor.

There was a problem of money. I did some research on professional voice actor rates and I estimated my film would be half an hour in length. There was no way I could justify paying the actors as the cost came out to be about the same as the total cost of the production (about 1000 bucks). I decided to look for professional voice actors that would volunteer.

I ran into a voice acting agency in the internet and asked a point of contact if they had professional actors that could do volunteer work. The answer I received was prompt and friendly. Essentially, I could search the profiles of voice actors in the database and just ask. I put out a request to a few actors and posted a “help wanted” in the same site. Someone on the site saw my ad and it let me to a voice actor with contacts to many more voice actors. I sent in my request for volunteer voice acting work to the contact and within a week, I received maybe half a dozen responses by interested voice actors. I thought I was going to be swamped with more responses after the first wave but it didn’t happened. Most of the respondents provided voice samples and from there, I narrowed it down to three and after getting more information, I ended up with Casey Jones who would do the voice of every character except for the female role.

There were ups and downs in this process. There was a time I could not get a hold of him and he never responded to my e-mails. And then there was a time where he surprised me by asking for pay, even though my e-mails were specific that I was looking for volunteer work. Through the end of production, I never did met Casey face to face, even if we were living in the same state at the time. I never even spoke on the phone with him. Our means of communication was by e-mail. I did get to see what he looked like through his personal and business website. Casey was to provide voice recordings on a CD. All I had to do was provide the script.

I did pay the man after some negotiations. He was worth every penny and I wished I had the resources to pay him more. I was very satisfied with the work he did. I also wished I had found a voice actor for the female role. I ended up using my wife’s voice. I was very focused on finishing the film with no time and money so there was no chance of finding another voice actor.

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Making Animated Sequences For The Film

In the previous post, I described the creation and editing of animated sequences for the 3d models in the Virtual Stage software. These actions are reuseable. Initially, the software came with about 2 dozen ready made animated sequences. One of them was a generic walk that you can loop repeatedly.

For the "Machines Don't Cry" film, I edited as many actions as I could and only created new ones as a last resort. In the end, with approximately 10 characters in the film, the list of unique actions grew to about 210 unique action sequences. What is interesting about this is that the film is dialogue heavy. It is not an action film. I can't speculate if I made an action film of the same length of 40 minutes with the same number of characters would have generated more action sequences. Many of the actions of "Machines Don't Cry" were head or hand gestures to allow the characters more dramatic acting.

Not only are these animated reusable to me but they are also exportable for other Virtual Stage users. If time permits, I will make all of my action sequences available to anybody.

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Making Animated Sequences or Actions in Virtual Stage from Scratch

Disclaimer: All the steps are generalized. Detailed instructions can be found in the tutorials in the Help section of Dakine Wave's VirtualStage software.

When you launch Virtual Stage (version 2 and 3), you will see 4 main buttons on the top left. When you click on the tools button, you will more icon buttons open up (from left to right): Set Manager, Action Repertoire, Voice Coach, Prop Manager, and Actor’s Agency.

The Action Repertoire is the heart of VS’s animation generation. This is where you can create and edit all kinds of animation sequences to your character. With characters that have similar body shapes, you can apply the same animation.

The VS software comes with about 2 dozen animation sequences from hand gestures to walking. The user can make many copies of the given sequences and edit each one to make many variations. If you need a certain animation but it is nowhere close to what is provided, just make one up completely from scratch.

To make a new animation, click on the icon for creating a new action. A character will be selected at random but it can be changed easily with a click of the “Select an alternate character” icon. You will also see a timeline which you can shorten or expand. You can right click on the timeline to create a new keyframe. This keyframe can be moved anywhere in the timeline.

With a new keyframe, you can move the character and its body parts to define a pose in the animation sequence. Add another keyframe to another point in the timeline to create the next movement. Like the Poser software and many other 3d applications like it, there is no need to create a frame by frame sequences. Just create the keyframes and let the software determine how to make the character go to the next keyframe. If the results between keyframes are not what you expect, add another keyframe(s) in between to get the results you need.

The results are automatically saved once you exit out of the action repertoire function.

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Adding New Characters in Virtual Stage

Adding new characters in Virtual Stage in versions 2 and above takes some work. In the previous posts I described how the "Machines Don't Cry" characters were made. You needed to make 14 different morphed heads to create a character exhibiting emotions and mouth movements. The heads must line up perfectly on the model. The body itself must conform to the character specification in terms of body parts: head, neck, 2 shoulders, 2 elbows, 2 wrists, chest, pelvis, 2 hips, 2 knees, 2 ankles, and 2 toe sets. Shoulder is actually the upper arm, elbows are the lower arms, and wrists are the hands.

The Virtual Stage character spec gives examples of the x,y,z coordinates of an example but you can deviate from this to use characters of all shape and sizes. In "Machines Don't Cry", the body shapes do not deviate much. But the 5 year old Emily and Mech 3 deviate as small characters. The hulking Mech 7 deviate as a tall and wide character.

When you open Virtual Stage (version 3 in this example) I will describe how to go about importing your own character using the menu options only. After VS is opened, click on the Cast option. Click New and the New Character box pops up. Click on New Model and give it a name and browse to find the file of the model. Enter the coordinates of the body part's joint. Each part only has one set of coordinates. I used Anim8or to create the models' body and fortunately, the background has a grid in metric. Virtual Stage's coordinates are metric. Unfortunately, there is no way in Anim8or to get a x,y,z coordinate by clicking. The grid is not even numbered.

In Anim8or, I just did my best to estimate where the x,y,z coordinates were. Let's say the model is exactly 7 grid lines tall. This amounts to a height of 7 meters tall. If the model is centered and standing on 0,0,0, the top of his head would be 0,7,0. The joint between his head and neck would be maybe 0,6.3,0. There were smaller divisions like half meter or quarter meter on the grid. With the head joint determined, I entered the coordinates and continued for all eighteen parts. It was work but not painful. I had maybe eight characters needed for the movie. Once complete, hit OK and see if the model appears coorectly in the preview.

The next step is to test the model to see if the joints bend correctly. To do this you need to do a test animation. In the View, menu option, click on Tools, and click on Action Repretoire. Click on the Action Configurator menu option, Options, and Model. Select the model you want to test. On the left are actions. Select one and click on the Blue button with white triangle above the model to play the animation sequence. If the joints don't look right, go back and edit the model's joint position.

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