Breaking stereotypes: Female voice of World of Tanks

Good day.

I work in a company that voices computer games. I want to continue my story about the creation of the author's voice acting for the game World of Tanks. To make it clearer what it is about, and where it comes from, I first recommend that you familiarize yourself with my previous post on this topic.


')
Wiping the rollers , that is, having written down the alternative dubbing for World of Tanks, which quickly began to gain popularity among the players, I began to think in order to do something like that.

By the way.

Official reaction

I am constantly asked about the same question.



Indeed, the work has been done quite a lot, and many people find it somewhat unusual that developers, say, are so deprived of such a popular mod. In addition, there is another question - why all this is necessary for us, the creators of the voice acting.

I reason so. I love war games very much and I am sure that I know how to create a cool sound for them. I like working with actors, I like to write text for them. At the same time, despite the fact that our studio does not suffer from a lack of orders, interesting projects are not caught as often as we would like. Interesting projects, when working on which you are given a blank check - are less common.

World of Tanks, of course, is a super-interesting project, at least for me. But based on my practice, I can say that working with large companies (such as Wargaming.net) often has its own specifics, associated, say, with excessive formalization of processes and a large number of various approvals at different levels. Often, employees of large companies tend to share responsibility with their colleagues, instead of deciding on their own.

The notorious collective intelligence. A familiar situation, yes?

Thus, I am aware that if we had entered into an agreement with Wargaming.net and began to work officially, then most likely my horns and legs would have remained of my ideas, or, at least, the wings would have broken them and feathers of them povydergivali. Even to publish this post, it would be necessary to agree and re-agree it ten times, which I hate to tolerate.

And now, judge for yourself what the situation is: you are working on an interesting project, gaining experience, doing whatever you want, making funny videos that gain more than one and a half million views on youtube, and you get a huge amount of positive feedback. In my opinion, this is great.

So that…

So even better.



Now back to the topic of the post.

In general, since the World of Tanks device allows anyone to create their own modifications, it’s time to fulfill the most secret desires of ourselves and the players, namely, to plant a woman in a tank, well, that is, a beautiful girl, of course.

Instead of the sounds that emit brutal men, we will listen to a ringing commanding girlish voice.

We study the question

When I start working on another project, I try to find out as much information as possible about how to study the issue. Firstly, personally, it just gives me additional inspiration, secondly, it makes the product itself more interesting and multi-faceted, and thirdly, it is simply useful for the brain. As one Russian writer said: "There is no extra knowledge."

Did women fight in tanks in reality?

A woman in war is not a rare phenomenon. The controllers, orderlies, signalers, air defense calculations, snipers, even pilots - a lot of interesting literature has been written about them and films have been shot.

But the stories about the girls tank - one. I think, because being a tanker is a very, very hard physical labor, which is only worth the constant digging of caponiers, or trenches for a tank.



Here you can read about the crew of the heavy tank IS-2, commanded by Alexander Boyko, and her husband served as a driver. And here are a few more stories about tanker girls, among them Aleksandr Roshchupkina, a mechanic-driver of the T-34 medium tank. The story is notable for the fact that it almost to the very end of the war managed to impersonate a guy.

In short, with historical authenticity, we are all OK. Go ahead.

Female voice perception

We are going to listen to a female voice in battle, that is, in an extreme situation. So you need to work out this question before you start work. To do this, for a moment get out of the tank and climb into the plane.

On military and civil aircraft there is a device that forms and issues voice commands, instructions for pilots, or reports the necessary information about flight parameters. This device is called a speech informant, and often it speaks in a female voice.



Why female?

Because, the female voice is more discriminating than the male one on the background of various noises or noises in the cabin (engine noise, in particular) because of its higher tone frequency. In addition, it is believed that a female voice is subjectively perceived by pilots simply because pilots are usually male.

By the way, our pilots call the aunt informer Rita (from the Speech Informer), and the westerners call Betty , or rather Bitching Betty , something like Bitch Betty , apparently for her constant annoying messages.

That's how these two girls sound - our Rita and their Betty.



I would say - they sound, to put it mildly, so-so. Acting is lame on both sides of the ocean, but Betty still wins a few points from Rita at the expense of a more collected voice.

In fairness, it is worth noting that over time, more female dispatchers began to work in aviation, female pilots began to appear, and the uniqueness of the female voice blurred somewhat. Therefore, there are opinions that a male voice can be more authoritative for pilots.

Therefore, informers uncles "work" on a part of the aircraft.



In short, we had a good preparatory work - it's time to get into the tank again and finally take on the voice acting.

Katyusha

The game does not need to dig trenches for a tank, you do not need to carry heavy fuel canisters, all you need to do is have fun and have fun. Therefore, we will have fun in full.

I decided that the commander of our tank would be a girl, senior lieutenant Ekaterina Tamantseva. There we will immediately kill four birds with one stone - both unusual, and pleasant, and aesthetically pleasing, and fun.

But first you need to choose this very voice.

There is no doubt, of course, Ekaterina Monastyrskaya is a clever, beautiful woman with a beautiful rich velvety timbre.



Now choose a name. Quite possibly, the mod will become popular, and then a well-chosen name will come in handy.

It did not take long to think here, the name appeared almost immediately. Firstly, my spouse is named Katya, secondly the actress is named Katya, thirdly, Katyusha is probably the most female name associated with the war.

Unlike the previous voice acting, where all the crew members speak, in this one only Katyusha communicates with the player, she also speaks to the crew. For example: "It seems the radio operator has been hurt by a splinter!", Or "Attached armor loading!".

Therefore, in order to be a bit atmospheric, I came up with the names and the rest of the crew. Rather, borrowed them from the remarkable front-line story "In war as in war", which was written by Viktor Kurochkin.



The driver was Grishka Shcherbak, the gunner Mikhail Domashek, the loader Osip Biankina, only the radio operator remained a radio operator. Maybe then we'll call him sometime too.

Now Katya could turn to them by name, and not only by her position, for example: "Shcherbak, get out of the levers and get out of the tank while you are intact!".

Next, it was necessary to adapt the text for Katyusha, because initially it was written for the male crew. It took a day or two, because the table with the phrases is gigantic, and it takes time to go through it all.



It is clear that mainly changes in the text concerned endings, because our language is strongly tied up in childbirth. The gender of the object changes - the whole sentence changes. If there were English, I wouldn’t have to change anything at all - this language is completely unisex.



When everything was ready, it's time to get to the studio and record it all.

Nothing could be more interesting than working with an actor on the text, which he himself invented. Your verbal discoveries, jokes become real right before your eyes. To write down a text already created by someone, a lesson is much more boring.



Our main senior sound designer Andrei Burmistrov with a steadic was noted in the photo. Sometimes you have to combine several specialties.

I always try to shoot interesting recordings on several cameras. With a certain approach, the seemingly mediocre process of voice recording on a microphone can look quite interesting, the main thing is not to delay the timing of the video.



Now it's time to see how it all was in motion.

This video instantly became very popular and quickly spread to most thematic sites and groups in social networks. The image of the girl commander of the tank, which we created, was in demand among the players.



Returning from the studio, we processed the recorded material with the previously selected radio effect, selected successful doubles and posted a new dubbing on the official World of Tanks forum. To date, there have already accumulated more than forty pages, mostly positive comments from fans of tank battles.

Thank you for your attention, to new posts!