FIRE POETS
Audio veteran Adam Chapman on his new voice production studio, Fire Poets, and the threat of AI
Adam Chapman loves his job. His face lights up when he talks about it. Even towards the start of his career in videogame voice production in the early 2000s, when he was required to sift through thousands of lines of dialogue in his role as a sound engineer, his enthusiasm for the task would remain undimmed. “I just never got bored,” he says. “I’d just listen and listen and listen and listen, and I just loved it.”
Chapman worked at Babel Media in Brighton in the mid-2000s, before going on to found the voice production company Liquid Violet in 2011. That was purchased by videogame services company Keywords Studios in 2014, and Chapman remained as director until 2021, when the pandemic prompted him to pause and reflect, just as it did many others. The company’s growth under Keywords inevitably meant more staff and bigger overheads, with a growing focus on money and targets. It made Chapman realise he had been moving farther away from the things he loved most of all.
The realisation prompted him to start afresh in 2023 with Fire Poets, a small, three-person voice production company based in London’s Soho, which has long been a centre for video and audio production. The choice of location was key, Chapman says, since when it comes to holding auditions, even getting people to come to less central areas of London can cause grumbles from actors and agents. “Whereas in Soho they’re not allowed to complain, because everybody should be there,” he says.
On the one hand, Chapman says, agents want a ban on their client’s voice being used to power AI
Chapman’s credits go all the way back to The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion in 2006, and more recently he’s provided voice direction on games such as Elden Ring and Diablo IV. Little has changed in terms of the actual recording process with actors during that time, he says, although he has noticed greater importance being attached to voice production.
Whereas once the voice performance might have only been captured in a single block extremely late in a game’s development, now it’s common for companies to experiment with recording dialogue early on, then to re-record it later, after adjusting and refining different aspects. “Game to game it’s completely different, but we’ll cast really early these days,” Chapman says.
The ‘About’ page for Fire Poets begins ‘A fire ignites through human connection’, and for Chapman it’s regaining this connection that has been the driving force behind the company. He enthuses about working with actors. It’s not good enough to simply tell them to be angry or happy when reading a line, he says – instead, it’s about providing reference points, imagining something that has affected a character, and giving this to the actor to work with.
