Final Casting
Well the final casting is in, this was extremely difficult and I want to thank you all for your patience. Narrowing down over 500 people to select just 9 was excruciating and I, again, would like to thank everyone for participating;
Narrator - FalonEcho
Sora - Sammysan
Riku - Jake M
Kairi - bellbellbell5
Leon/Squall - SeanGoodrich
Yuffie - Starlight Hope
Cid - DeVonW
Ansem - vlaurent
Maleficent - DidiDoesVoices
--NARRATOR, Now I had to make a few careful considerations when casting the narrator. Though not as prominent in the early chapters, the prose becomes a little problematic. It is clear that english is not the translator’s first language and the wording in certain areas sounds a little unnatural. We have reworded those sections, but didn’t want to tamper with the original text too much, therefore I decided we would need to go with someone who I felt had the greatest experience in this field in order to achieve the most natural sound we can. As can be seen on Falon’s profile her experience is very extensive and my expectation is that she will be able to prevent the translation issues from distracting from the performance.
That said I am sure you will be asking why I asked many of you (even those with no narration experience) to resubmit. Originally experience wasn’t going to be a factor at all in the decision-making process, however I hadn’t anticipated how much (and how many of you) would improve with every subsequent audition. The gap on the frontrunners, whom I didn’t feel needed feedback, was effectively closed. If I was going to narrow down a shortlist to pick from I had to take other factors into consideration.
--SORA, I’m glad this is Kingdom Hearts 1 and not the subsequent books. The male voice, obviously, has an extremely unique sound to it when it’s breaking and it’s incredibly difficult to replicate. I think the vast majority of male applicants that came in for the role couldn’t entirely nail that. Were this project about any of the later games, when Osmont’s voice had matured, this decision would have been agonizingly more difficult. On the female applicant end, I think there were also struggles to replicate that sound, it was always going to be a challenge to get that on-the-verge-of-manhood quality.
A special mention to Alireza Ahrari (a good first audition, but you’d very much benefit from a better mic. A bright future IF you push on from here and close the experience gap on your fellow actors)
--RIKU, I have to be self critical on this one, the line selection was poor. 1st and 3rd lines were very low energy, I didn’t give any of you a chance to have fun with Riku’s arrogant or teasing moments. It left the auditions feeling very flat, with little to no opportunity to show off your range. That said, well done to those of you who made the best of what you were given. There was a lot of animation in Jake M’s voice, keeping the dialogue from becoming too monotone.
--KAIRI, unfortunately this is where I got held up in the casting. Kairi was a very difficult role to cast, 2nd only to Ansem. There were so many of you who captured that Kairi essence and I’d be very interested in having some of you onboard to voice the princesses when we are ready to record the Disney roles.
A special mention to Nubah Punya (so glad to hear you audition again after trying out for Narrator and what you submitted here was a definite improvement. Keep up the hard work.)
--LEON, I was happy with the Leons, a real nice spread in terms of approaches. That said, some of you went with a gruffer sound, which, (whilst I feel many of you pulled off very well) I worry would be too close in sound to Cid. Since not every line has an attribution i.e. X said, Y replied, we need to lean toward making characters sound as different to one another as possible.
--YUFFIE, I was quite lucky to have Yuffie as a character. I mentioned that some of the male applicants for Sora sadly had voices too mature for the role and the same was true of Kairi. Fortunately with Yuffie I felt there was a voice there that was achievable for actresses unable to comfortably hit Kairi’s child-like voice. So I’m glad there were roles suitable for all female voices.
NOTE: I would recommend everyone go over to mezzyxo’s audition and look at how Meg presents her captions. Timestamp your takes, then include your additional notes, then include your discord. Very clean, very slick, leaves a great impression on the director.
--CID, a lot of you went very gruff on Cid, perhaps I didn’t give you much room with his voice description, that said there was still a good selection of auditions in there for me to pick from.
A bulk feedback would be to relax a little, there’d be five or six of you with very painful throats if you had to keep up that voice over a prolonged recording session. The sustainability of the voice you presented did factor into my decision making.
--ANSEM, without a doubt the hardest role to cast. I feel that A LOT of you captured the essence of his character very well in terms of the controlled pacing, arrogance and tone. Like the Narrator role, there were simply too many fantastic submissions and I wasn’t able to draft a shortlist for Ansem, in the end I, again, had to resort to considering additional criteria.
Despite not auditioning for any other role than Ansem, vlaurent still took the time to listen to people going for Narrator, Sora, etc and gave them advice, suggesting tone choices and areas to emphasise certain words in a line. Having someone onboard who, I think, can help get the best out of the other actors would be a great asset to the production.
--MALEFICENT, there were plenty of magnificent Maleficent submissions. It sounds like you all had a lot of fun with this one. Ultimately, as an impressionist-marked role, I had to go with DidiDoesVoices due to her flawless imitation of Eleanor Audley’s portrayal.
I’m sorry to those of you who didn't quite make the cut, I wish I could elaborate more on the auditions that I enjoyed, or give feedback to everyone regarding areas where they may have just fallen short. But, with how quickly interest in this project grew that isn’t feasible. I can only wish you all good luck on your next auditions and we look forward to bringing as many of you onboard as possible to pad out the remaining roles.
Jude
