Quote:Original post by Adraeus If you think voice acting is "easy", try it. Download a cartoon, zero out the sound, record your "easy" voiceover giving a believable personality to one of the characters, and publish it for GDNet denizens to criticize. Voice acting is real acting, and in some cases, voice acting is more difficult than stage and screen acting. Voice acting isn't "just coming in and reading lines". Honestly, if you've never recorded your voice, try voice acting. You'll be surprised to find out how stupid you actually sound. The same goes for musicians. If you think you're a great guitarist, record your playing and enjoy listening to all the mistakes you don't hear when you're not recording yourself.
This sounds like it could be a good GDnet contest. A quite entertaining one at that.
Hmm I should do a clip from an episode of Voltron.
Maybe a given voice actor certainly deserves royalties, but noone is "entitled" to a thing unless it goes in the contract.
But anyway, the 1%, 2%, .5%, whatever it is they want comes out of the bottom line. Someone has to give that money up. Voice actors are skilled people, yes, but when you get down to it, who deserves a royalty more? The guy who studied acting for 10 years and spent 5 hours in the booth, or the guy who studied music, sound, programming, maybe engineering, and spent 20 hours a day for 6 weeks re-writing music and re-recording sound effects, who found the voice actor, wrote their contract, did their recording sessions, cleaned it, dressed it, managed the entire process, maybe organized code and data, general audio team management, etc?
The guys dropping dead from exhaustion, I say, and they have to bite and scratch for a half percent royalty sometimes. I'd like everyone to make the money they really deserve, but when the bottom line comes into play, someone gets it first, and someone doesnt get it at all.
Quote:Original post by Amma I understand the thoughts behind this strike.
Audio can be 50% of a game experience.
Games are usually far from that, which is caused simply by bad actors/underprioritized audio. The actors in those games are already getting their worth.
However, in games where the 50% mark is actually present, I do support the unions. -It's just that I've yet to hear a game that delivered 50% audio. When that happens, I think actors will have earned their roalities.
So the programming, graphics, gameplay, and everything else are only 50%? If you must cut it in half, I'd divide it into art and science. Art is the voices, music, graphic style, level appearance, etc, and science is the coding, balance, financing, marketing, etc.
"Walk not the trodden path, for it has borne it's burden." -John, Flying Monk
I think programmers, artists, musicians/sound people, and business folk rank way higher in the food chain than voice actors.
If anyone should be striking it should probably be the coders...It's arguable that their jobs are the hardest. Not to diminish at allthe importance of artists, businessfolk, and musicians...but I think coders work the longest hours.
You can throw that definition all that you want, but by standard contracts you are NOT the rights holder to anything you provide to the game company. Most sound, music and voice acting is provided as a total rights buy-out, one-time pay. Royalties are then negotiated over top of that fact, so arguing it from the point of copyright just makes it seem even MORE like a tack-on. Like I said, noone is entitled to anything if it isnt in the contract, because standardly, once you're paid at all, it aint yours any more. Hell, I've asked for the rights to use my own stuff in my own demo reel and got told that it was a non-standard clause and would have to be contracted seperately to get those rights -back-.
It doesnt matter how dictionary.com says the world works. If everyone who provides a service is entitled to royalties, then theres a lot of people who have been screwed for decades.
Quote:Original post by krikkit You can throw that definition all that you want, but by standard contracts you are NOT the rights holder to anything you provide to the game company. Most sound, music and voice acting is provided as a total rights buy-out, one-time pay.
Products and/or services provided by a third party belong to the third party unless a rights transfer is signed. This is standard outsourcing. If a client and vendor agree to a transfer of copyright before the vendor completes the work-to-be-transferred, then that is simply a contractual obligation. If no such agreement exists, then by legal default, the third party as the creator of original material remains the copyright holder.
Royalties are only assigned to providers of original property, such as intellectual property (e.g., voices, likenesses, names). Royalties are not assigned to providers of time, such as employees (e.g., programmers, visual artists, producers).
Licensing is usually synonymous with the provision of royalties.
