It was a cold night in Gotham, sorry it's snow, Yeh I'm just going to give up because
I'm not very good at doing Batman's voice but I did a chance earlier to meet a man who
is.
His name's Roger Craig Smith and he's playing Batman in the new game, Batman: Arkham Origins.
I got a chance to sit down with him and Troy Baker who plays the Joker to find out a little
bit about voice acting.
This is ridiculous.
Now both these guys have tough acts to follow.
Roger assumes the role of Bruce Wayne and his broody alter ego after long time bat voice
Kevin Conroy who played the Dark Knight in the last two Arkham games and Batman the animated
series and Troy has very large clown shoes to fill too as he is literally following in
the footsteps of Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill.
Well at least he doesn't have to make out with his sister in this role.
If anything it's not lost on me the enormous shoes as people have said to kind of step
into and there's no way you can do that.
So I'm not taking over anything from anyone because you can't take away from 20 years
worth of work from someone and what they've set up.
There's no way that I am taking over.
If anything I have the honor of trying to sort of like hopefully come close enough to
fans to go yeh, yeh ok.
"I'm going to find Black Mask."
We wanted to make sure that what we were doing was really dialing who these characters were
and these characters if you're really rooted and understanding who these characters are
and you have a good story then the lines get blurred very easily which is what you want.
You want people to just accept these characters and not have to worry about oh, see Mark Hamill
is actually deeper when he did this and Kevin Conroy actually sounded different because
what you're seeing now is just Batman and Joker and all the different characters that
you meet throughout this game.
"Nice of you to drop in."
There is tonnes of work that goes into making the voice actors completely convincing.
I mean you can't just turn up with a sore throat and suddenly be Batman as Roger explains
there was plenty of talk with Game Director Eric Holmes and Voice Director Amanda Wyatt
to really nail down the bat sound.
I hope you're taking notes Mr. Affleck.
Yeh I relied very heavily on Amanda and Eric which is awesome too because I think my first
choice - if it was up to me - my first choice going in was a Daffy Duck impression and they..
which is a brave choice .. thank God they were there to say that's the wrong choice
to make and they...
No, the reality is we walked in and it's like what are we doing?
What do you have as far as your creative vision on what you want to do?
Especially with someone like, I guess, Eric Holmes I'm not going to be able to walk and
just go ok here's the character I'm going to give you and that's.. no we spent at least
five sessions working on the voice print for this character.
And what about getting into character?
Getting into the right frame of mind to play the absolutely insane clown prince of crime
must be really tough.
I had, just to keep my mind in the right place, I had a copy of the Killing Joker on my iPad
that I would just kind of glance over and there was this one specific panel that I really
really love that I would kind of just look to and really this was about, you've got to
leave it all on the floor and not hold back anything, be willing to look like an idiot,
be willing to throw up while you're doing that laugh and maybe that's the last laugh
you can do that day but that's... you're going to give everything into that line and that
laugh and that performance and I think that was not just my mentality but everybody's
mentality that we're going to bleed for this game.
We're going to sweat for this game and even just the little bit I've seen, I think that
really comes through.
Did you throw up?
Alot.
Wow.
I thought I was the only one.
That's really weird.
That's the secret to voice acting a video game.
Regurgitation - it's a process.
Well there we go now that I know the secret I reckon I can get this Joker laugh down easy.
You ready...
No that's not it.
I'll get it eventually.
I give up.