Interview: New Generation Pictures and Street Fighter IV
Page 3
by Zac Bertschy,
Which characters did you find the hardest to cast?
TJ: There were some, I'd say… Seth. There was a long time between CAPCOM and I where we were figuring out what that character was going to sound like, because he's pretty much the baddest of the bad.
JK: We had a lot of candidates for every role… I think we picked the best ones, but the point was we had a lot of good talent, and since it was a video game and not really a long-term project, we had a larger talent pool to work with.
Now, you've all worked on a lot of video games… is this one special? Is this a moment?
ALL: Yeah.
JK: I'd say this is the biggest event our company's ever done, in terms of video games. We've worked on a lot of really nice games, really Epic Games, but this is like being part of history.
LB: There are titles where you grow up saying “I wish I could be in that!”
TW: Or that you never even thought you could be in that.
LB: And you're just stoked when it comes up that you can even audition for it. And you can't necessarily share your roles in anime with everyone – not everyone knows what those characters are…
I was going to say, you've all worked on projects both big and small, some more known than others, but this is definitely mainstream.
LB: Yeah, all of a sudden you have street cred with your friends. Like they know you're a voice actor, but when you say “oh, I was in this title!” and they know who that is…
TJ: Yeah, everyone knows Street Fighter.
JK: It was really a tremendous honor for us to do this game for CAPCOM. When we apply for the project, we're not told what it is – we get an idea of how many lines, and characters, and that's it. When I found out what it was, I was like, “Wow!”. I've worked on some big games – some Final Fantasy titles – and when I got those, I was struck by how awesome that was. This is like a once every ten years experience, like seeing Hailey's Comet.
TJ: It's amazing; I'm so excited to have worked on this.
So Travis, how did you approach your character?
TW: Guile… as far as I was concerned is one of the biggest badasses in videogame history. After being extremely excited about it, I immediately felt a sense of duty – I had to live up to the greatness of the character. We talked at length about what we wanted him to be – he's a man of extreme honor, military pride, and has a kind of steel edge to him. It's a lot of fun to play. There's a whole lot of badassness going on.
Laura, did you feel that same pressure, since it's such an iconic character?
LB: Oh yeah. I was totally worried that I wasn't doing it justice somehow. Taliesin kept reiterating that it was what everyone wanted, and it was fine… I wanted it to be perfect! And it was hard, since so many of her attacks are in another language.
Is there an accent?
LB: No, she sounds pretty American – the creators felt it'd just be better not to have a little accent in there.
TJ: Certain characters are really defined by where they come from, but with Chun-Li they felt it would be a little distracting, since she's so much more a cop than anything else.
So how tough was it to do Blanka?
TJ: Oh, geez. I'd do it literally in the free time I had, very slowly, kind of piecemeal. It was weird, because in my head – even though he talks in Street Fighter II, he's got the text – I don't know what that's supposed to sound like. I was at a complete loss, one of the few times where I had no idea.
We auditioned a bunch of people – any time I felt I had something to contribute, I'd audition for the character. I didn't actually expect to be cast, but apparently they liked what I submitted for Blanka. The sounds he makes are very specific – they're not random, they're based on a specific animal, the animals he mimics. So I did all those jungle animals, and gave them the sounds, and they were like “oh, you noticed!” and that was good.
Some of the other characters in Street Fighter are.. let's say they have a definite ethnicity to them. How difficult was it to walk that line… like you didn't call up Hank Azaria and ask him to voice Dhalsim…
TJ: [joking] You don't know I didn't!
That's true! That's an assumption on my part. But how tough was it?
TJ: Well, all these characters are iconic, they all have a place in the story, and a lot of it was finding out what was interesting about that character beyond the obvious. We really reached into their backstory to determine what they should sound like. So like, he has an accent, but we stayed away from obvious silly accents… Dhalsim for instance has a very clean, slightly British Indian accent, and it gives him sort of a “dark sage” feel.
Honestly, we were really serious about this – I can go down every line, every character and tell you why it sounds like that. Nothing was taken for granted, nothing was chosen randomly. Everything was very carefully selected, and for me, personally, I'm really happy with how it turned out.
Every iteration of Street Fighter – be it the various anime series, or that awful American cartoon – has a different voice for these characters. There's really no “vocal legacy” for these characters that's consistent, outside of the little sound bites or the Japanese you hear in the games. So you're sort of creating a new “vocal legacy” here, at least in English. So when they do the fifth one…
TJ: Oh, absolutely. We wanted to create something where this is now what these characters sound like in English, and these people are the voices of these characters, and it becomes part of the whole legacy of it.
JK: We put our hearts into everything we do, and we really hope people enjoy it. We're all fans of the series.
TJ: There were some, I'd say… Seth. There was a long time between CAPCOM and I where we were figuring out what that character was going to sound like, because he's pretty much the baddest of the bad.
JK: We had a lot of candidates for every role… I think we picked the best ones, but the point was we had a lot of good talent, and since it was a video game and not really a long-term project, we had a larger talent pool to work with.
Now, you've all worked on a lot of video games… is this one special? Is this a moment?
ALL: Yeah.
JK: I'd say this is the biggest event our company's ever done, in terms of video games. We've worked on a lot of really nice games, really Epic Games, but this is like being part of history.
LB: There are titles where you grow up saying “I wish I could be in that!”
TW: Or that you never even thought you could be in that.LB: And you're just stoked when it comes up that you can even audition for it. And you can't necessarily share your roles in anime with everyone – not everyone knows what those characters are…
I was going to say, you've all worked on projects both big and small, some more known than others, but this is definitely mainstream.
LB: Yeah, all of a sudden you have street cred with your friends. Like they know you're a voice actor, but when you say “oh, I was in this title!” and they know who that is…
TJ: Yeah, everyone knows Street Fighter.
JK: It was really a tremendous honor for us to do this game for CAPCOM. When we apply for the project, we're not told what it is – we get an idea of how many lines, and characters, and that's it. When I found out what it was, I was like, “Wow!”. I've worked on some big games – some Final Fantasy titles – and when I got those, I was struck by how awesome that was. This is like a once every ten years experience, like seeing Hailey's Comet.
TJ: It's amazing; I'm so excited to have worked on this.
So Travis, how did you approach your character?
TW: Guile… as far as I was concerned is one of the biggest badasses in videogame history. After being extremely excited about it, I immediately felt a sense of duty – I had to live up to the greatness of the character. We talked at length about what we wanted him to be – he's a man of extreme honor, military pride, and has a kind of steel edge to him. It's a lot of fun to play. There's a whole lot of badassness going on.
Laura, did you feel that same pressure, since it's such an iconic character?
LB: Oh yeah. I was totally worried that I wasn't doing it justice somehow. Taliesin kept reiterating that it was what everyone wanted, and it was fine… I wanted it to be perfect! And it was hard, since so many of her attacks are in another language.
Is there an accent?
LB: No, she sounds pretty American – the creators felt it'd just be better not to have a little accent in there.
TJ: Certain characters are really defined by where they come from, but with Chun-Li they felt it would be a little distracting, since she's so much more a cop than anything else.
So how tough was it to do Blanka?
TJ: Oh, geez. I'd do it literally in the free time I had, very slowly, kind of piecemeal. It was weird, because in my head – even though he talks in Street Fighter II, he's got the text – I don't know what that's supposed to sound like. I was at a complete loss, one of the few times where I had no idea.
We auditioned a bunch of people – any time I felt I had something to contribute, I'd audition for the character. I didn't actually expect to be cast, but apparently they liked what I submitted for Blanka. The sounds he makes are very specific – they're not random, they're based on a specific animal, the animals he mimics. So I did all those jungle animals, and gave them the sounds, and they were like “oh, you noticed!” and that was good.
Some of the other characters in Street Fighter are.. let's say they have a definite ethnicity to them. How difficult was it to walk that line… like you didn't call up Hank Azaria and ask him to voice Dhalsim…
TJ: [joking] You don't know I didn't!
That's true! That's an assumption on my part. But how tough was it?
TJ: Well, all these characters are iconic, they all have a place in the story, and a lot of it was finding out what was interesting about that character beyond the obvious. We really reached into their backstory to determine what they should sound like. So like, he has an accent, but we stayed away from obvious silly accents… Dhalsim for instance has a very clean, slightly British Indian accent, and it gives him sort of a “dark sage” feel.Honestly, we were really serious about this – I can go down every line, every character and tell you why it sounds like that. Nothing was taken for granted, nothing was chosen randomly. Everything was very carefully selected, and for me, personally, I'm really happy with how it turned out.
Every iteration of Street Fighter – be it the various anime series, or that awful American cartoon – has a different voice for these characters. There's really no “vocal legacy” for these characters that's consistent, outside of the little sound bites or the Japanese you hear in the games. So you're sort of creating a new “vocal legacy” here, at least in English. So when they do the fifth one…
TJ: Oh, absolutely. We wanted to create something where this is now what these characters sound like in English, and these people are the voices of these characters, and it becomes part of the whole legacy of it.
JK: We put our hearts into everything we do, and we really hope people enjoy it. We're all fans of the series.
Thanks to New Generation Pictures and CAPCOM Entertainment; Street Fighter IV Special Edition is on shelves now for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.
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