2 réponses à ce sujet

[ok go]

No offense, but being French I found the Orlesian accents funny, you could tell those weren't their real accents.  I know its a resource issue but anyone feel the same about accents?

[David Gaider]

We tend to use actors who actually possess that accent, whenever we can get away with it.



My experience is that, whether the accent is genuine or not, there will be people who think it's fake/annoying/whatever. I don't know how many people appeared to declare our "fake" English accents were outlandish, despite the fact we recorded in the UK extensively.



So... whatever.

[Lukas Kristjanson]

Onyx Jaguar wrote...

Shouldn't they be using made up accents

Good point, actually. In a setting that is not based on Earth, the ideal situation would be to have everyone speaking accents that arose from the unique cultural influences and environments of their fictional world. This is more common in novels because you can assume it, and in some movies because realistically only 1-10 one-off characters are using it (and usually only a hero, mentor, and traitor ).

It's simply hard to get right. Lame excuse, I know, but it takes a linguist’s expertise to understand how language emerges. We actually had a linguist do initial work on Jade (Tho Fan) and Origins (elven, qunari), but that was more about grammar structure, not so much instructing how it sprang from the void. And frankly, I don’t know if that effort was truly useful beyond the incredibly obscure bullet point it gave us. I have a post on that somewhere.

But the bigger factor is that it’s just not feasible to maintain several completely unique accents for the number of actors we have in the number of countries we record, across multiple projects of this length. Compare, for example, the concerns in this thread about the consistency of even fairly common accents. And we hit enough of a roadblock with phrases in qunari, elven, asari, whatever. It’s full-stop in the recording booth as everyone phonetically paces through it, then attempts to mimic the tone intended. Can't they learn it? We do repeatedly use some actors, but we aren't their only gig. Most we get for a day or two, but even if they come back repeatedly for a major character the sessions are sometimes weeks apart, and maybe Zevran is doing King Lear down the street 5 nights a week (so to speak). Or maybe we suddenly need to fill a session and someone gets a new smaller role out of the blue as an alt. Hard to get consistent results or good acting if the actor has to focus on an unfamiliar accent they’ve never or rarely used (which is also why you don't ask for French or whatever from someone not already familiar with it). We have a library of recorded examples of all our languages and phrases to compare against, but it's time consuming to get into a voice and recording studios are all about billing time.

I believe our efforts are better spent defining the various peoples through their common cultural standpoints. Flavor that with a recognizable base such as a known accent and the package becomes a better background for making the characters who are the exceptions pop out. And as an added bonus, the head of audio doesn't swear at you as much.

Modifié par Lukas Kristjanson, 20 novembre 2010 - 04:08 .