Specific Fixes for Writers, Directors and Actors

There’s a feeling I’m trying to avoid. It’s the one you get staring at the game script, or at the actor in the VO booth/on the MoCap stage or being the VO/MoCap actor and knowing it’s not quite working but not knowing how to fix it.

Anything, anything to avoid the hapless command to just repeat until good: “Do it again, but…better. Less bad. More…good?”

People have been in this, or similar predicaments before. Some have tried to formulate ways out of this pickle, particularly Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt with their Oblique Strategies (proper link here, and examples here). Their oblique strategies tend to be gnomic, and seem to be more use for musical composition and production than writing and performing. Stuff like…

• Use an old idea.

• Only one element of each kind.

• What to increase? What to reduce?

• Are there sections? Consider transitions.

I want something more specific (hence “Specific Fixes”), but it all boils down to the same issue: if you’re stuck, what can you change?

The key to a better script and performance, for me, is specificity. If you’re short on time (and everyone always is, somehow) you end up with general purpose direction of general purpose performances of general purpose lines, and they never pop. They’re flat, empty, dramatically inert. That’s not how we involve people emotionally, or convince them to stick around for our precious themes. What we want is not just “here’s the sort of thing somebody might say” but “yeah, that’s what this person in this situation would say right now”.

So I’m going to start looking at specific fixes I’ve found helpful as a games writer/director/occasional actor, for VO and MoCap and Performance Capture. Provisos apply: other people have been doing this longer than me and at a higher level; I have much more to learn about this than teach. I can’t provide an exhaustive taxonomy of every aspect of writing, direction and performance, just a list of things you can try changing up to get better results.

There are lots of areas to look at and lots of kinds of fix. Some are about technique, some emotion, some context and some intent. I want to focus on approaches that work equally well for writers, directors and performers, because why the hell not? In the general spirit of sharing craft and process, here’s some stuff that seems useful.

First up, let’s look at rhythm.