Work on the author dubbed World of Tanks

Good day.

I work in the studio, which is engaged in dubbing computer games. I want to talk about how we worked on dubbing World of Tanks.


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Of course, many people like to chop at WoT, I myself spent a lot of time and money buying new tanks and premium shells. The game is cool, no doubt.

But chasing my tanks, self-propelled guns and self-propelled guns, I always asked myself one question.

And surely many of you asked yourself the same question: “Did the voice of World of Tanks really record like this?”



I do not know whether or not, but it sounds exactly strange, as if written on wax rollers, somewhere in the 1920s. Personally, I immediately recall the recording of the voice of my favorite poet - Mayakovsky.



But technically improving the quality of the recording is only half the story. In addition to the wax rollers, the problem of World of Tanks dubbing is that it is monotonous and boring. What is the interest to listen to the same thing?

Caterpillar is damaged, probability of stall is increased.
Caterpillar is damaged, probability of stall is increased.
Caterpillar is damaged, probability of stall is increased.
Caterpillar is damaged, probability of stall is increased.

Hit
Hit
Hit
Hit

Or so.


As if riding not on tanks, but on some old robots.

Monotonous and boring dubbing is not everything. It is not realistic. No one will tell you " The caterpillar is damaged, the probability of failure is increased" in real combat. Most likely, the driver simply curses after hitting his forehead on the armor from abruptly stopping the tank. And believe, with each new incident, the crew of the tank will report information in completely different ways.

Commander, caterpillar shot down!
Yo, caterpillar!
Allow me to fix the truck!
Lieutenant, we trahranachi truck!
Gusyanka blew off!
In the mouth of the steamer! Now we are a target!

I can continue for a long time. The main thing is just to imagine yourself on the site of the driver in a combat situation. Cultural driver. Well, in moderation.

Sorry, we cannot use foul language, because why should we limit our audience? And how many interesting options are floating away ... Oh, the great and mighty Russian language ...



In general, it would be cool - if tankers commented on each game event in different ways. And how is this lacking in World of Tanks. This was the course of my thoughts.

But it’s easy to criticize, anyone can criticize, so I decided to act.



I wrote it in Wargaming.net and suggested doing it, then I wrote it again. Then, I guessed that anyone could write letters, you need to make a presentation in which you can try to state your idea as clearly and clearly as possible.

Then he waited for an answer.

Then he waited.

Then I went to the game forum, went through it properly, and realized that the game device allows users to create their own modifications - and this is already very much to begin with. At this stage, I must say that I have already worked more than one - just our forum, the sound designer Sergey Eybog, began to help the forum and explore all the technical aspects.



It went more fun, because so I could focus entirely on the creative component of fashion - the text.

I created a giant table, with 45 columns. He titled the columns with game events and began to invent crew phrases for each event. It turned out something like this.



We can say that the table goes beyond the horizon.


I immediately decided that for the first version of the mod you only need to record the commander, who will take the rap for everyone else - to report to the player about everything that happens in the tank and beyond.

Of course, the text was immediately put into roles - to write down the gunner, loader, driver and radio operator, but this increased the already impressive amount of work, so we decided to add the above-named comrades gradually in the next versions of the mod.

Who will be the commander of the tank? There was almost no doubt - of course the wonderful St. Petersburg actor Mikhail Khrustalev. He and I went to the studio, where we recorded all these 45 columns with 20-30 replicas in each.

The process looked like this:



We spent a few hours in the studio, and at the output we received one single audio file, which contained all the phrases.

This file, which was a huge sound "sausage", from which it was necessary to first remove the unsuccessful doubles, and then "cut" successful, to get 500-600 individual phrases.



"Cut" replicas, that is, to find the right phrases and save them in separate sound files - that is still fun! Perhaps this is the most unpleasant of all the work on dubbing.

Almost all studio sound designers have already connected here, so it’s boring, routine, but painstaking and obligatory work was done relatively quickly.

Yes, and night work is not a hindrance, as you know.


The next step was the choice of the radio effect, which will be processed replica commander.

My task was to create such an effect that it seemed to be, but at the same time did not particularly interfere. Still, we live in the modern world, where there is no need to deal with the total reconstruction of the sound of those years. Enough of the easy effect of talking on a mobile phone.

Before choosing the desired effect, we tried the options 20.

Then I mounted a small video in which I talked about our voice acting and showed how it works.



Another demo recorded in the game.


And ... Everything was ready to finalize the voice acting and put it on the official game forum, which I did .

Player reviews began to appear immediately, and almost all of them were positive. The cool game has found, in my opinion, adequate voicing, and my idea at least a little to improve World of Tanks came to life.

Thank you for your attention, I hope you were interested.