Digital actors

One of the things which impresses me immensely is the quality of digital actors in video games. The improvement in quality in just a short couple of years has been incredible and is particularly noticeable when you compare the digital actors in a game like Mass Effect with Mass Effect 2 which only came out a year or two later. However, good as they are, they are still nowhere near as good as a real actor.

The reason I'm talking about this is mainly due to Chuck and Mass Effect 2. Or to be more precise, one of the common links between the two - Yvonne Strahovski. Yvonne plays the role of Sarah Walker in Chuck and is also the face and voice of Miranda Lawson in the video game Mass Effect 2.

In the comments on the last post, I mentioned that I thought Yvonne had done a decent, but not great, job as a voice actress in ME2. However, after posting this, I thought about it a bit more to analyse what exactly I didn't like and I came to a realisation. The problem wasn't that Yvonne's voiceover wasn't good - it was that the digital actor wasn't as good as her own acting ability.

You see, I was actually watching the second season of Chuck at around the same time as I was playing ME2. As one of the main characters in Chuck, Yvonne gets a lot of screentime and I actually think that she is a really good actress. This shines through in Chuck in how she stands, little glances and facial expressions that she has. In my opinion, she has a great ability to show emotion and express herself and her feelings through her body language, facial expression etc.

However, the quality of digital acting (good as it is in ME2) is just not on the same level as a real actor. What this means is that the character of Miranda Lawson in ME2 doesn't come close to showing the same range of emotion and expression that Yvonne is able to pull off. And when you consider that Miranda looks and sounds like Yvonne, I found that I wasn't able to evaluate Miranda as a character without thinking of Sarah Walker.

Which is really unfair to Yvonne's voiceover.

Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I jumped onto YouTube and watched a stack of videos of Miranda Lawson cutscenes. After listening to her voiceover a bit more carefully (and closing my eyes so I wasn't distracted by Miranda's face or ass), I have to revise my original opinion.

Yvonne has done a really good job.