VA-11 Hall-A Voiceover Project | Behind the Scenes

Posted on by Balance

Start of a Saga

I’ve always wanted to do a voiceover project for the visual novel VA-11 Hall-A. Its story and captivating characters have always held a special place in my heart, and I felt that giving it a literal voice would be the ultimate way for me to show my support for VA-11 Hall-A.

Around Feburary of 2022, I collaborated with friends and fellow content creators I’d befriended, asking if they would be interested in lending their skills/voices to characters for the game. Once I confirmed their interest to join the project, I matched each individual to a role that suited them best. Afterwards, I turned to Twitter to cast auditions for the remaining characters that were yet to be voiced.

While evaluating auditions, I also looked for people who would be able contribute to the project in other ways. While already had video editing skills, I needed someone who could manage the audio aspect of the project. Initially, a friend named Ritzy filled that role, and later, I also enlisted the help of an old friend, Kolezan, to the team.

Although Kolezan was only intended to be an audio assistant, due to my poor planning and Ritzy’s educational commitments, I came to heavily rely on Kolezan and his skills. He ended up being an invaluable advisor of sorts, similar to a first office to his captain.

At long last, when the auditions were complete, I began outlining our approach to the project.

The Setup

The first task was scripting. Thanks to Ember’s assistance (the voice of Virgilio), we were able to extract the VA-11 Hall-A script straight from the game files. However, the scripts included every possible scenario.

Seeing that it would require an insane amount of effort to voice the entire game, I decided instead to voice just one route. This meant I had to manually play the game and record every decision I made so we would have a consistent script. Once I did that, I was able to format the scripts and delete the parts we would not use.

Coming up with a coherent format took me a little while to figure out, but with a little bit of ingenuity, I organized the script that made it easy for actors to read and make references off of. Meanwhile, Kolezan took charge of the audio aspects of the project, detailing his process in his blog at figure.moe. It’s definitely an insightful piece that highlights some of his thoughts towards certain characters such as the Lilim characters.

Considering the scope of the project, proper organization was paramount. I created a Discord server to server as a hub for communication for everyone, including the actors. Additionally, I made a Notion page containing all the project’s information, such as the actors, character roles, and scripts.

The most challenging aspect of this project however was the workflow.

The Workflow

The first part of our workflow involved recording. We would go for group recording sessions, where actors would read their lines during a Discord call in. If someone was unavailable, they’d record their lines solo with multiple takes for us to choose from. If there were changes needed, we’d talk to the actor until we got the desired take.

Once the recordings were complete, Kolezan and Ritzy, the audio engineers, would take over. Ritzy offered insight when they were able to, however, Kolezan and I ended up moving forward too quickly, which ultimately shifted the entirety of audio work to Kolezan.

When I was given the final audio render of the voices and sound effects from Kolezan, it was my turn to work.

I recorded the video in sync with the audio to ensure precise timing. Afterwards, I edited the footage and refined the timing with the recorded lines further. If there was an appropriate time for special effects, I would add them as well.

The Editing

A critical aspect of editing the video were the lip flaps—matching the character mouth movements with the audio. The lip flaps were not 100% accurate due to the limited animations provided for each character. Despite this limitation, syncing mouth movement to the audio was enough to create immersion for the viewers.

Otherwise, the rest of the editing process were minimal to ensure more focus more on the acting. The occasional close-ups and subtle effects were enough to add to the story without detracting from it.

The first few initial episodes presented a few challenges, with timing errors and audio mistakes (such as making the SFX track mono rather than stereo). However, I quickly learned from those mistakes and made sure to properly collaborate with Kolezan.

Episodes with Streaming-Chan took a considerable about of time, both with editing and rendering the video. They were difficult and contained an arduous amount of scenes to edit. It essentially required reconstructing the entire scene. From the background, to the character, even to the text, which was meant to emulate the Nico Nico Douga comments floating across the screen. It was honestly a nightmare to work on. Then when I finally finished editing, rendering would take over an hour vs the usual 20 minutes it took other episodes to render.

So to avoid errors, meticulous attention was needed so I could prevent needing to commit to another hour long renders. Despite the end result being phenomenal, my distaste for Stream-Chan deepened all thanks to the work she demanded out of me.

Over time, Kolezan and I were able to finally develop an efficient workflow. We managed to get a consistent schedule for recording, plan the video, edit the video, have Kolezan quality check the video, and finally scheduling it on YouTube.

The Name

Finally, we needed a name for ourselves! I gave everyone an option to pitch in ideas for names, and after a poll, the actors and staff decided on Balancing Act Studios Entertainment. They figured since I’m the one who created and am directing the project, my name had to be in there. I didn’t care if my name was in there or not, but that’s what they chose!

Shortly after the name was decided on, I went ahead to make a Twitter and YouTube account under those names.

https://www.youtube.com/@balancingactSE

The mishaps

While I was preparing a video to promote the project to Twitter, I mistakenly added the developer and publisher logos in it, inadvertently misleading people to believe it was officially endorsed. Although I deleted the tweet to remedy the situation, I fear this oversight left a negative impression on the developers and the publishers.

During the project, Kimberly la Vallette’s actor, Mishy, had suddenly vanished. There were no warnings beforehand and to this day, it doesn’t seem like anyone knows where she’s gone either. We were able to swiftly replace her with Jinkles, thanks to AkiSmash, which thankfully helped prevent disrupting the project. I just hope Mishy is safe and well.

Missing lines posed another challenge, which caused a little pause in the release schedule. This mistake stemmed from inadequate audio checks from both the actor and me. Turns out that during a break in a group recording session, an actor had forgotten to unpause their recording on Audacity (an open-source audio editor/recorder. Although the final episode didn’t premiere on New Year’s Day as we had hoped as a result, the setbacks served to be valuable lessons for me and Kolezan.

Conclusion

Despite my mistakes, this project, which involved a large number of people, brought me immense pride in the results it produced. As of the this post’s publication, we are still the only ones in YouTube to have a fully voiced VA-11 Hall-A run uploaded!

I’m so honored to have all the actors for the project and love their hard work in voicing the characters.

I’m so thankful to Rin who helped connect me to all the different people I managed to gather for the project.

I’m so grateful to Eden, who used her expertise in the industry to teach me techniques and advise me on how to direct actors.

I’m so indebted to all my friends who cheered me on throughout the project.

I’m eternally thankful to Kolezan, who did so much heavy lifting with processing the audio, checking my work, and generally helping me organize the project. I don’t think I would have been able to do as much as I did if it were not for him.

Most of all, thank you to everyone who had supported me and the group with our endeavors. Whether it be advice from certain professionals, retweeting our tweets, or watching the videos! We would not have done this if it were not for you all. Thank you!!

For now though, we’re on a well-deserved break (especially Kolezan, that crazy man). SO many hours were invested on the project, causing us to be exhausted. I don’t want us to be burned out before we pursue another project, after all! Our next endeavor, Coffee Talk! As a mod! Look forward to that!

This journey was an amazing one, which also encouraged self-reflection. I’ve really come to learn that I need to embrace relying on my peers. Proper planning and collaboration would have led to a flawless voiceover project. Now this experience will serve as fuel for growth and I want to put what I’ve learned to use already.

I’m glad I did this project, as it is now one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve had.

That aside, please do watch the series on YouTube if you have the chance! You can even listen to the episodes as like an audio book! I might be biased, but I think the series is really fun to watch/listen to.

Thank you, kind reader, for your time. Hopefully that was an insightful read!

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