Mass Effect 3 - Jennifer Hale Interview and More

Jennifer Hale - the voice of FemShep, Bastilla and more - has been interviewed at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I'm going to file it under Mass Effect 3, so I can collect a couple of minor other items here.

A snip that exposes why voiceacting is often so bad:

RPS: Obviously intonation is so crucial. So how do directors get around the lack of someone to respond to?

Hale: Sometimes, on extraordinarily rare occasions, you’ll be able to hear the dialogue of the other person. That’s only working with BioWare, because they have a very specific system that allows that to happen. However, working with BioWare I tend to be the first one recording my stuff, so other people work off me, but I’m not always necessarily working off of them. To get around it I read really fast, I read as much as I can, because you don’t usually get the scripts ahead of time, because they’re highly confidential. The producers are given mountains and mountains of work, and it’s extremely difficult to get anyone anything ahead of time, so it’s basically the art of cold-reading and acting on the spot. I’ll ask physically where am I, what’s going on, how much ambient noise, how much battle – just standard acting questions. But you’ve got to hold them all in your head, you’ve also got to know your history with the other person you’re talking to and what you want from them, and then drop into that moment, and let it rip.

In related news, Shamus Young rants about the inevitable choice of pretty blond FemShep and the shoft toward focusing on shooter fans:

The numbers are against us. As studios dump more money into graphics they have to aim their releases wider and wider to have a shot at breaking even. Since the “action shooter” fans vastly outnumber the character & lore buffs, this is simply a matter of attrition through demographics. I’ve been raging against the ridiculous race to make more, shinier pixels for years now, and this is why. This is exactly why.

...and in general Mass Effect stuff, Newsarama has an interview with writer Mac Walters about the comic series.