Get Your Game On – The VO Conference for Videogame Actors
Los Angeles: November 3, 2023 London: July 1, 2023
I recently attended ‘Get Your Game On Los Angeles 2022'– A voiceover conference focusing exclusively on the videogame industry, run by Rachael Naylor and her team at The Voiceover Network. Dates for next year have already been announced for LA as November 3, 2023. I wanted to reflect on my experiences to let folks know what to expect if they are considering attending either the London or Los Angeles conferences. As it happened, I was a speaker and on a casting panel, but I also experienced the conference as an attendee of both the main day (Friday) and as a workshop attendee. I also decided it was worth the extra to join Tom Keegan’s Acting for Performance Capture weekend workshop.
Here’s my whistle stop tour of Get Your Game On, split into 2 parts.
Part One: The 1-day general conference on Friday. It’s a rapidly moving day with an impressive line-up of industry speakers and panels in the morning and then a choice of breakouts, with a specialist in the afternoon (I attended Andrea Toyias’s breakout) before returning to the main room for a closing session. I knew who the speakers would be but didn’t know the topics they would be speaking about until the day of the conference. There was a huge amount to take in and it was an impressive overview of what it takes to break in, stay working and motivated, in this highly competitive but fast-growing genre.
Part Two: The weekend workshop. There were 3 specialists to choose from and work exclusively with. This year your choices were Tom Keegan, Andrea Toyias and Debra Wilson. Based on the feedback I had, all three worked slightly differently but all had a similar result in mind: To help attendees find a way to represent characters truthfully and authentically. The pace may have slowed down a little for these, but the intensity increased. Tom Keegan most certainly opened my soul and showed me a path I hadn’t travelled down before as an actor. It was interesting to see the other dozen actors in the room, take their performances to another level. In the few days I’ve been back in my studio, I have found myself challenging performance choices and seeking ways to uniquely represent characters to me and to allow the world to see that. I’ve booked a game this week, in which I used his techniques, so it was great to put his advice into real life action.
And that’s the crunch isn’t it, whenever new advice and information is presented? Will what was learned and experienced, enabling growth that will make a real difference and ultimately book more work? I honestly felt like it was. It’s not a requirement to attend both the main day and the two-day workshops but I would recommend it, to get even more out of this one of kind, gaming voiceover experience.
