In Alphabetical Order

 

              Once, I worked for a video game company as a scriptwriter. In the process for making a game, the director wanted to change voice actors. We had already recorded all the voices. Then he decided to find a new voice actor and have us rerecord just his voices. The director didn’t participate in the recording. When he listened to the recorded voices, he was surprised.

              “What the heck? He was the best actor at the audition. But his acting is not good. How can he become a bad actor like this?”

              I also listened to his voice acting. I used to be a stage actor. I also thought his acting was unnatural, but I didn’t feel he was a bad actor. It was not an issue of good or bad acting. I suspected he didn’t have enough information for acting out the scenes.

              I asked the director, “Let me see the script the voice actor worked on.”

              I read the script. Then I solved the mystery. The script got rid of the lines of the other voice actors. Only his lines had been printed out. Furthermore, the lines had been printed out in alphabetical order. The first line was “A!” The second line was “Aa!” Dear friends, most of you are theater people. Most of you can understand what kind of mistake the company did.

              The company had already recorded the other voice actors’ voices. So they had assumed the new actor needed a script with just his lines. It looked efficient. Furthermore, they had printed out the lines in alphabetical order. It was simply a mistake. I don’t know anyone who would write a script in Excel in the theater world, but some video game scriptwriters write their scripts in Excel because it is easy to process with other software. Excel has a function that arranges everything in alphabetical order. Someone who worked for our company had accidentally used that function.

              Actors are not machines that pronounce written letters. They deeply read the situations of the stories, their co-actors’ lines, and their relations. They synthesize this information and act out their reactions. Actors can’t read even the shortest lines without another actor’s lines. Actors “give” lines to other actors. Actors “accept” lines from other actors. This is fundamental knowledge about acting.

              The people who worked for the video game company didn’t have acting experience. They didn’t know this simple fundamental lesson. Even if they had already recorded the other actors’ voices, they should have printed out the other actors’ lines on his script, or they should have let him listen to the other voice actors’ voices. Arranging his lines in alphabetic order was just ridiculous. Actors are not psychics.

              The voice actor should have said, “This script doesn’t make any sense. I can’t act with such a script,” but I guess it was too difficult for him to say. Only a famous or experienced voice actor could say that. The young voice actor needed to try his best without the essential information for acting. Pathetic!

              Now I’ve left theater. I’ve always felt that most Japanese people don’t know about acting. Many people fall for the “Hey, it me!” scam in Japan. I believe the reason why must be the lack of fundamental knowledge about acting. People easily believe in cheap acting by frauds. People have to study acting as part of their compulsory education.

Picture by Nature