huzaifa_ahmed wrote:TheBlackPaladin wrote:huzaifa_ahmed wrote:I figure promos pay way better.
They do. Like, not even close.
To dubbing or voicing a game? (Noticing it's the same, it's kinda unfair that anime doesnt get that but at least it shows J-games are a success)
I heard that for recording a JRPG dub, if often takes dozens of hours, & easily weeks of recording. Considering union wage is $825/day, you'd rack up low 10,000s easily, right? FF12 took eight weeks. Presuming the main actors (Nolan North, Keith Ferguson, Kari Wahlgren etc) came in 2-3 days a week, & Matt Mercer mentioned similar for Star Ocean 4 (dubbed non-union, but similar length is my point).
I know that even after/if PerformanceMatters goes through, any royalties will be very limited, but surely promos dont do
that much? You know, it feels a tad unfair in that regard, seeing that Kevin Michael Richardson did a Pokémon WB commercial, but would laugh in anger if the actual show's audition got to him. Plus they took away the comercials from the main VA's. Different topic tho.
Well, OK, allow me to rephrase ever-so-slightly. They almost always do. Like, almost always not even close.
The thing with promos is, while they have a lower base rate than video games do, the networks like to record a ton of them so they have different options, and actors get paid even for the promos that don't end up airing. On top of that, union rules are that if previously-recorded promo VO is attached to a promo with even the slightest difference in visuals, the voice actor has to get paid as though they voiced new promos. As such, while video games have a higher base rate, the money earned from promos adds up far, far more quickly the vast majority of the time. A promo voice actor could end up recording just one promo script and a few different tags ("tag" meaning the one-liner that's said at the very end, like, "Coming up next," or, "Tonight at 8," etc.), but if that one script and the few different tags are attached to multiple promos with different visual clips--even if those promos aren't necessarily aired--the voice actor could theoretically walk out of a booth they were in for only eight minutes...having just earned a $5,500 paycheck. If the network decides to re-use all those promos with different visuals, they'd get an additional $5,500 paycheck for no additional time in the booth.
For that matter, that's just a day's work...during the height of the production for the promos, they're working five days a week. Not every day is a $5,500-day, sometimes the networks will just want one quick new promo that earns the actor only a few hundred bucks, but they're usually making about $1-2K a day, five days a week,
for just one show. Even a show that gets cancelled in its first season could easily net a voice actor something in the $50K range. As such, you can imagine how financially well off the voice actors doing promos for multiple shows are. That's just for specific shows, too...if the voice actor is the "imaging voice" (the official voice of the network itself, not just a specific show), that's a multi-year, multi-million dollar contract. For this reason, promos are some of the most coveted jobs in the whole VO biz.
To make the same amount of money from video games, even if the Performance Matters movement succeeds, would take much longer. Never mind that video games are also vocally stressful, whereas promos are not, so voice actors don't have to worry about being unable to work after a promo session (which is why sometimes a voice actor can only do one video game session a week and--if their agent is good--on a Friday so they have the weekend to recover their voice). Big difference from promo voice actors who often end up working 3-5 days a week for just one show. The only way an actor would make more voicing a game than doing promos for a show would be if the show in question was cancelled very, very quickly, and the video game in question had piles and piles of dialogue.
