Here is Part 2/2 of our interview with voice actor David Dixon (see Part 1 here)!
6. You recently started more voice acting work with series such as A Couple of Cuckoos and Dragon Goes House Hunting (both available on Crunchyroll). What are the differences for you in voice work for already completed animation versus recording lines for a game as it is being created?
Ah yeah *laugh.* Dubbing anime is a whole lot of fun, but it’s a whole new ball game. Dubbing is also called ADR, Automated Dialogue Replacement. In most of my career I’ve done prelay recording. That’s where you’re basically doing the recording and then the character is animated or even at times created from the ground up after the recording session.
With ADR it’s flipped and different. You’re having to match lip flaps of the character from an existing performer in another language. What complicates things further is that you can go in with a read of line and it can be great, it can be awesome, the director is laughing, everyone’s having a good time, but it doesn’t match the lip flaps because it’s too long or it’s too short. When you run into that, you have to change it. Either your changing up your performance, the timing, where you’re choosing to breathe, or you’re having to take out some words, putting in some alts.
I would say you’re kind of in a box. It’s not necessarily bad, it’s different. It can really train your live performance skills and make your acting choices a lot more solid. Am I going with voicing this line this way? Am I sure? Yeah I’m sure! Great, all right, let’s go, let’s hit the ground running! It’s an interesting challenge. I think everyone who does voice acting should at least try ADR once. It’s pretty cool. It just really makes you appreciate things a lot more because it’s a completely different experience and it’s a good challenge. I think it just strengthens you up.
7. Is there a character you’ve voiced that you feel is most like yourself?
Yeah, there’s a few of that take bits of me. I try and put a bit of myself into every performance, but even then on the flip side there’s just some characters that I’m like, “Oh hey this is a bit of me, cool!” In particular there’s a game called Jenny LeClue. I play a boisterous friendly character named Dean Strausberry. He’s a jolly man. He’s got a few focused interests. He’s thoughtful about what comes next in life. I’ve had some sobering moments where I’m wondering what’s coming next in my life, my career. In the Dean’s case, he was wondering about post-retirement life. In my case, ages ago, I was wondering what’s coming after school. I’m done with this forevermore, what’s next?
Recently, I have been wanting to push further in acting. I’ve been thinking about wanting to eventually try mocap, do on camera acting, things like that. His whole reflective arc of his character I relate to that because I’ve gone through that a couple times. As you get older you think about things of a lot more weights. Not necessarily in a bad way, but sometimes you’re just like, “Look, I’ve done something something for over a decade, I’ve been in school for all this time, I want to try something different. I’ve been in this job for X many years; I want to change careers.” It’s nice to have a character that kind of echoes that.
There’s another character in a game called The Journey Down. It’s a three-part series by Skygoblin Games in that I’m playing a character named Kito and he really closely matches my real personality. He’s very upbeat, laughing a lot and just trying to be positive and friendly, and sometimes he can crackwise a bit when things are kind of weird like, “What are you doing, come on man.” *Laugh* That’s another character that I feel is really close to who I really am.
8. What game are you currently enjoying?
Oh, ah… In terms of games I have been so busy these days unfortunately I haven’t played as much as I’d like to. So as a result I have a huge backlog of Steam games, but I have been able to carve out some time for Street Fighter 6. It’s a load of fun.
9. What recent roles are you excited about?
I definitely can’t wait for people to hear my newest take on Arken (Serafina’s Saga: Awakened) and see where the story goes. It’s really solid.
I recently joined up on a web original show called Murder Drones and that has been incredibly fun. It’s been a lot of rewarding experiences in the recording booth. It’s funny, it’s surprisingly emotional, there is some real fun surprises in store. My character, Khan, has a very interesting arc. I really can’t wait for the people at home to see that.
I have a few things that I can’t talk about right now. They are coming down the pipeline, but I also did get on a show called Bakugan, so take a look for that. You can find this show currently on Netflix and Disney XD. I play a character named Bruiser. He’s a big lug and he’s a lot of fun. Really happy with that role and I really hope you guys have fun with it.
10. What do you love about Street Fighter?
What do I love about Street Fighter? I’m glad you asked. Way back in the 90s me and my sister picked up the game in Blockbuster and we were amazed. The subtitle for the the original version of Street Fighter 2 is The World Warrior and that international aspect is what wowed us. At the time we didn’t know a lot about the rest of the world so when we first got to Dhalsim it was pretty cool. It was eye-opening. We got to see a brown man as a playable character in a location we had never experienced. From then on the different stages, character designs, music and aesthetic, all of those things tied to various cultures that kept us invested. It was just really cool to see. I knew nothing about India at the time so it was cool to see. Dhalsim’s stage, the music, getting to know that and fast forward decades later and my friends have frequently gotten together and we’ve watched Bollywood movies. There’s some amazing stuff there. It’s really cool to see things outside of the Hollywood perspective, highly recommend it.
It was just so refreshing to just see one game have all these different locations. As a kid I never knew anything about Thailand. I never knew that was a place and so it’s really cool to see. I know this is a video game, I know it’s not the most realistic depiction of certain things, but opening up the door to me to say, hey this is Thailand, this is one of their proud martial arts, Muay Thai. I’m like, oh that’s really cool.
It’s been decades and I just keep coming back to the Street Fighter world and it just keeps giving me different things to just eat up. It’s really awesome to just see how they just interpret characters and ideas from across the globe. They haven’t lost their step. They still are doing an amazing job. Early I mentioned Street Fighter 6. It’s really cool to see what they’ve been doing with some of the characters there.
I also got to go on about this, I am a lore nerd. I love lore in books, comic books, TV shows, and it’s in Street Fighter as well. In the early days of the internet, like 97, 98 for me, I found various people who found the supplementary material that was exclusive to Japan and people translated it. It opened up a whole bunch of doors on character motivations, relationships, etc. Since then more stuff has been made available to a global audience but it is really cool just how jumping in you learn more about what makes up this world.
Fighting games sometimes get the rep that they have no story, compared to in this case visual novels, RPGs. There’s so much story that you can get from just playing, but fighting games that’s not always an option. The issue is that a lot of people say there’s no story because in-game there’s a limited amount of time to be focused on the amount of characters. In Street Fighter’s case a lot of the lore was outside of the books. It was packaged in books, with interviews with the devs and the artists, and other materials outside of the game. Sometimes even due to budgetary constraints extra dialogue and interactions were left out of the games entirely. English-speaking regions would only be getting a small percentage of what was in the game originally in Japan.
So yeah it’s cool to find out stuff. It’s like, okay, they’re fighting, but why? Once you find out why, what if they do outside oh hey who’s friends with who, who’s related to so and so? It’s like, oh hey, Guile and Ken, two characters that in the old days didn’t really interact much, they are brother-in-laws because Ken’s wife and Guile’s wife they are sisters. So little interesting things you can find out when you look around with Street Fighter, but I’ll shut up about it now.
Bonus Question. What should the world know about alpacas?
Ooh, alpacas! Okay: alpacas are brilliant animals that are smaller than llamas, but several times more magnificent.
Thanks for your time and thanks for listening to me blab on about stuff. *Laugh* I hope you all enjoyed. Take care!
