An up-and-coming cartoon voice actor sent me this question and asked that I leave his name out of it…
I was in the audience at one of your Cartoon Voices panels in San Diego, wishing I was established enough to be up there on the stage with the pros. I heard you make a remark that intrigued me and I was wondering if you could elaborate.
I have watched as the industry has transitioned from hand-drawn animation to computer animation and I never imagined that would affect the voice actors. After all, a voice role is a voice role, right? But I heard you say offhandedly that casting voice actors for CGI shows is different from casting them for hand-drawn shows and I can't imagine how. Can you tell me how?
Well, it may seem like a small thing but it does matter. My job in casting is to do the show right with as few actors as we need to pay to come in. As is allowed by the Screen Actors Guild contract, many of those actors will do two or three parts. Some of the actors in the session will be regulars — folks who voice characters who are in every episode. They may double or triple and do "incidentals" (characters unique to each episode) but I will probably also need a few guest actors to do all the incidentals.
Let's say in a scene for one cartoon, I as the writer want to have a two policemen walk in and each say two lines and exit. Piece o' cake. I describe the policemen I want the artists to draw and they draw them. I as the voice director assign the roles to two of the actors in my session. Simple. At least, that's how it was in a hand-drawn show. It was very cheap to bring in a new character so there were a lot of them.
But with CGI animation, every character is a computer model that has to be designed from every possible angle. We need to design them from the back even if you only see them from the front. Someone builds a fully functional computer model and that costs a heap of money. So instead of spending the dough to design two policemen, I have one do it. Right there, there's less for actors to do and if I think small that way throughout, I might need one or two less actors in the session.
Plus, there's this: If you watch a CGI show, you'll notice that if a policeman walks into a scene in one episode, it's usually the same policeman who walked into the last episode. If there's a TV newswoman, it's usually the same TV newswoman. If you look carefully at most crowd scenes, you may notice a lot of "extras" who were major characters in other episodes because each different figure is expensive.
So CGI shows generally have fewer characters per episode…ergo, fewer voice jobs. And the jobs you do have are usually spread around among fewer actors.
Let's say in Show #1, I have that policeman and since guest actor Victor Voiceover is in that episode playing a big role, I have him also do the two lines as the policeman. Then two shows later, I write an episode about a race of Worm People. The big guest role is that of their leader but one scene calls for a policeman to walk in and say a few lines. On a hand-drawn show, it would probably be a different policeman so it wouldn't matter who did his voice and I could hire any actor.
But in the CGI show, it's going to be the same policeman and often the producers want to keep the voices on repeat characters consistent…so I hire Victor to do guest voices on that episode so he can do the policeman's lines. And of course, since he's there and we're paying him, I think, "Hey, Vic would be great as The Leader of the Worm People" so I assign him that role and he also does the three lines as a pizza delivery guy. And then the week after, since we spent all that cash designing Worm People, I bring them back again, which means I bring Victor back again.
And then a few shows later, I build the main storyline about that pizza delivery guy since we spent so much money making his computer model…and that means we bring Victor back yet again. Over the course of thirteen episodes, I might need to book Victor eight times to do guest voices. In a hand-drawn show, I might have had twice as many guest roles and spread them around among a greater number of actors.
There's nothing really different about what the actors do in a CGI show as compared to a cartoon drawn by hand. There's just fewer characters, which means fewer jobs, and a tendency to hire the same folks over and over for guest roles.
