Chris Tester
speaker
144 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Chris Tester’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So in terms of game devs that I admire, I will definitely be shooting my shot and introducing myself and saying, this is my showreel, this is my calling card if you ever need someone like me. You know where I am? Building relationships with casting directors who may be representative of different studios.
So that's about finding out who they are, building a relationship with them so that they know what you can do, what you can't do, what your unique strengths are, whether or not you can record from home, whether or not you're based near a larger city like I'm in London. And it's still advantageous for me in case they want to get someone in last minute.
You know, I've got a in-person job and an in-person audition tomorrow in London town. And that's partly because they want to see you working in a space. Also for them, technically, If everybody is recorded in the same space, it means that everybody will sound the same. They're not like, oh, the noise floor has gone a bit kind of crazy.
And you said you didn't gate this, but you definitely did because you're breathing. You know, all of those kind of things. But what that actually means in terms of the reality is that for a lot of people, it's like, Maybe post on social media to get a bit of a following and a bit of a profile. But otherwise, it's down to your agent to get you the opportunities.
And from that, if you book at one or two of these studios, you might be called in much more. I do that. I have a voiceover agent. But for 99% of my work, I'm doing my own marketing and my own outreach. So that's in-person networking.
kind of a practice type thing that you do you obviously you're a lot more voice orientated so do you have like sequences you work on or is there stuff you do for that to prep for roles or i i mean i used to i used to do a from like three years of drama school training so there was like vocal warm-ups that i became kind of absolutely um enthralled to really using your body as a physical instrument that kind of thing uh which is very important to do
And so there's that and then the physical warm-up kind of aspect as well that goes on top of it as well because it's a full body thing. It's not just the voice. It's much easier to be able to make those kind of choices freely if you're using your whole body.
It's the whole reason that rather than having a very small booth, I made myself a room to thrash around in because it just makes my job easier, a lot easier than if it's a confined thing because the very first recording setups that I built myself from home, I was in a little corner like this and I couldn't really move. And that affects how you can act, just kind of like necessarily.
So there was that. And then from a voice acting perspective, the number one thing that I practice is cold reading. Cold reading, i.e. stuff that I've never read, haven't even scanned before. immediately presenting it myself, pressing record and making sure I don't make mistakes and make choices on the fly. Because most video game scripts are recorded like that.
You do not see the scripts in advance. You do not even get to read ahead. Oh, wow. So it's like, let's do two to three takes of every single line. Let's go. We're on it. So you'll have discussed in advance maybe, okay, so your character is here. You're talking to X, Y, or Z person. You're in the middle of a battlefield. So you've got to shout a little bit.
You know, what's your relationship to that person? Okay, but don't overstay your welcome because time is money and it's already kind of like ticking. So that's part of the craft is like knowing what to ask and what to skip and use your imagination for. But then it's all cold reading. And every time you make a mistake or you mispronounce a word or anything else...
That's on the money of the other person. So you've got to be good at being able to do that as well, technically. And also then as the bonus kind of challenge being like, well, that's great because what I can do is I can take the file and I can put it to the font that I want and I can... No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
All of games, almost all of games for the purposes, the technical purpose of editing... It's going to be on a spreadsheet, which you cannot annotate. So if someone gives you a weird pronunciation of a name, you've got to write it on your body or somewhere if you need to remind it because you can't annotate it as you go or anything else like that.
So it's all about the discipline of being able to take a cold bit of text and immediately kind of give a take on it and know halfway through your first take, what am I going to do with the second take that's going to be different? What little adjustment am I going to make other than going like, I'm going to do it slower? Yeah. I'm going to do it more or less excited.
You know, so it's an interesting and informed take rather than just like, yeah, your first takes are always good and your second takes are always not so good. So yeah, other than that, it's not really that.
And ultimately, it's creative. But it's also the reason why some people will go, well, we'll get an AI to do it. And this is where you frame yourself as like, If you're hiring an actor, then it's because you're interested in their creativity and their choice and what they might bring.
If you're a game dev who literally is like, I know exactly what this sound is that I want, and that's what I want, then you'll use an actor until it becomes cheaper to use an AI to do exactly what it is that you want to do. And I'm not judging you on that one way or the other. If...
If the AI is technically sourced, you know, if it's like sourced legitimately and, you know, with everybody's consent and all of that kind of thing, then sure, go do whatever you want. But that's not what I'm necessarily striving for as an actor is being given line readings is what people would.
say them like this is exactly how you say the line because a lot of directors aren't actors so they'll think it sounds like one thing in their head what actually comes out of their mouths isn't always exactly what they intended so then you're kind of doing almost a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a not particularly good performance in the first place Like, don't get me wrong.
Like if there's a certain intonation that you need, tell me what the intonation is. I'll find my own way to it and we'll try to do it in as fast a time as possible. But yeah, that's where the kind of like the tension lies. It's like, you've got to be free and easy and creative, but at the same time, tick, tick, clock's running.
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