Nowadays videogames, especially the AAA ones, increasingly exploit the motion capture that allows the actors to perform at their best. Combining expressiveness, body movements, and dubbing. Sometimes, however, it is necessary that the actor recite some lines of dialogue “in the old way”, alone, inside a recording room, without having the support of a complete scene. It is made for example for sound effects such as grunts of fatigue and pain, or for individual lines of dialogue that will not be part of real dialogues. The audio sector of Red Dead Redemption 2 was also created this way.
Finding the right feeling is not easy and sometimes the actor risks over-emphasizing a sentence. Well, it also happened with Red Dead Redemption 2. Here are the words of the protagonist’s voice actor.
“Many dialogues related to the horse were pure dubbing. I think I spent two days in the room recording those sentences. Do you know, is Arthur’s horse a mare or a stallion? It’s different. Then there are specific dialogues depending on the four bond levels. […] So we recorded it all. A couple of weeks later, I came back and one of the director’s assistants, Gethin Aldous, said: ‘Rog, we have to do the horse’s lines of dialogue again.’ And I asked, ‘Why?’, To which he replied: ‘Well, I’m a little too intimate. It doesn’t look like you’re talking to a horse’. I replied: ‘What do you mean?’, And then he made me feel them again.”
You can listen to the dialogue and lines dubbed by Roger Clark in the video below to really understand how “intimate and ambiguous” they were.
As you have heard, sometimes even the great actors and voice actors let themselves get carried away. The important thing is that Rockstar Games has reworked these lines. It would have been a bit strange to hear them during the game.
