Behind The Scenes: The Voices of Still Wakes the Deep

Amongst many wonderful remarks, our game is lauded for its exceptional voiceover work. Who better to tell us more about it than the game’s Lead Voice Director, industry veteran Kate Saxon. Kate was the Voice Director for our critically acclaimed 2015 title Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, so we were thrilled to continue our collaboration and thankful she agreed to write a Development Diary all about what a Voice Director does and how the performances behind Still Wakes the Deep came to be. Enjoy, all!

“TCR’s Co-founder, and the person who conceived the project and first led it creatively, the brilliant Dan Pinchbeck, first contacted me about this project back in March 2020, just four days into the first COVID-19 lockdown. We had enjoyed working together on Everybody’s Gone To The Rapture, so I instantly wanted to be involved. Dan wanted to workshop aspects of his new script for an internal demo, and he remembered very much liking Alec Newman as an actor. I had brought Alec in for an audition all those years before on Rapture. While he wasn’t quite the right fit for the role of Stephen in that, Dan agreed with me on how impressive Alec was and thought Caz in Still Wakes The Deep could be the perfect fit. So, over Zoom, Dan, Alec, and I spent some time workshopping Dan’s script, specifically the player character, Caz. This was the first stage of our work on SWTD. Often, the Performance Director is booked quite late in the process of a game’s development, so early work such as this is brilliantly helpful in discovering how a story is best told. Sadly, it’s also fairly unusual.

Day to day, my duties involve bringing the actors into the world of the game, giving performance direction regarding character intentions, tone, emotional truth, and also basic things such as the physical geography of a scene, as this also effects performance. Ultimately, my job is to get inside the heads of the creative team and the developers, understand their intentions and ambitions for the game, and ensure that I bring all of that into the performances. I need to get all the cast on the same page.

Before I explain the SWTD process, it’s useful to go behind the scenes of Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, too. In Rapture, we never see the characters. Instead, we see light trails where they’ve been. Despite that, Dan and I decided I should fully stage every Rapture scene in a TV studio. We didn’t film the actors, but we recorded their voices with boom mics and personal mics, as I do when I direct TV. This has never been done on any other game I’ve directed, and I think I’ve directed around 150 now! Our thinking was that because Rapture is so naturalistic, set in a sleepy Shropshire village, we could… and should… aid the cast to fully immerse themselves in that place, those roads, that church, the homes… by acting out the scenes in full, together. So we rehearsed as I would for a theatre production, blocking (ie choreographing) the action of the scenes. Again, very unusual for games. The actors learned their lines and fully performed all the scenes physically, despite it being for voice only! It was so exciting to be able to bring my work as a Theatre Director into the centre of a video game process. I think it really paid off.

Unfortunately, I’ve never been given real rehearsal time on any other voice game jobs, except for The Chinese Room ones. Whilst there are rehearsals for Performance Capture, voice sessions often lack this luxury. Sometimes I fear there’s a misconception that actors will enter a voice booth, open their mouths, and a final performance comes out. It doesn’t! The best performances require experimentation and time to explore.

So for SWTD, even though much of the production was taking place during peak Covid, we still made sure we rehearsed, even if some of it was in hybrid conditions—some in the studio, some remote. We took the time to interrogate the script and the character choices. Thankfully Neve and Alec (who played Suze and Caz) were able to work with us in person, together in the studio. This was helpful in exploring their marital relationship, allowing us to play scenes in many different ways, in order to get to the heart and the truth of where their relationship was. Some run-throughs were calm and collected; others were painfully emotional. We explored when we wanted the emotions to stay bubbling beneath the surface and when we really wanted them to explode. Shaun Dooley (who so touchingly plays Roy in the game), was also able to be in person with us at the studio, which granted us time for him and Alec to craft their friendship together.

Another joyful part of the process was having fun working with Scottish slang. TCR’s team had researched this carefully (with the project’s latter Creative Director John McCormack being a Glaswegian from the 1970s himself!) and had it all in the script. The actors also brought new ideas to the table. Karen Dunbar (Finlay) was especially adept at bringing juicy tidbits and phrases! Rennick’s every rant is, of course, full of it, and I think Clive had fun being let loose on such a hideous character! Of all the slang phrases in the game, ‘bampot’ remains my favourite (a foolish or obnoxious person).

I was excited to work on SWTD because of the fascinating characters at its heart. Dan’s perceptiveness of human nature and fallibility always shines through in his writing and is a gift for actors. The relationships and emotions are raw and true, and if you manage to pull fantastic actors on board, these complexities—the mess of humanity in all its ugliness and beauty—can be explored. It’s in those moments that I believe we truly relate to fictional characters; when we see our own hidden depths of imagination, fears, and desires in the characters before us. That’s when I get excited to helm a story. When it feels it’s really plummeting those truths that we often hide. I knew that with such a good cast, we’d be able to unearth something that might reach beyond the ’norm’ again.

I’ve been thrilled to see this game has been both emotionally touching and terrifying for many players. It’s also been interesting to see how often reviewers have likened its intense immersion in the horror genre to Alien: Isolation, as I also directed the performance capture and voice for that! I think the art team and all the developers at The Chinese Room have done an amazing job of conjuring a specific period and design that really locates us in that most remote of places, an oil rig. Probably one of the last places on Earth I’d like to be! I loved working on this game.. and can finally let you in on a secret that I’m currently directing TCR’s next very special project… So watch this space!”

Many thanks, everyone, only a few of these Behind The Scenes Development Diaries left for Still Wakes the Deep.
We’re so thankful for everyone’s time playing it, as well as all the wonderful messages and reviews we’ve been getting. We have more plans with Still Wakes the Deep, be sure to follow us on all socials to find out everything as it’s happening:

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