Hello there guys and girls, welcome to another tutorial that many of you might have always needed and wished for on this channel. I m basing this on the many questions I still get about the topic. If you haven t guessed it yet, you are pretty ignorant because the title and thumbnail clearly tell you that this video is about creating dialogue scenes in GTA V. We re talking about using custom lines and voices for your cinematics here. Of course there are many cinematics that work well without much dialogue, be it through voice overs or just pure visual storytelling. That can be very cool, but if you want to show a somewhat complex plot, you re probably gonna need some chit chat between your characters. While I have shown some of my techniques here and there, there is no comprehensive guide on that in existence yet. Today I will show you my process front to back, which might be very different from how other creators do it. But they can go eat a double decker dick donut, because I work very meticulously when it comes to perfectly timing the spoken lines with the mouth movements, and I kinda take pride in the results that I can achieve. And you will achieve that, too, after watching the four steps of creating convincing dialogue in GTA V, which are as follows: Setting up the shot, finding and recording speech events, capturing it all in Rockstar Editor and finally editing and timing the dialogue. During all of those phases, I will present to you common mistakes that I see a lot and that I want you to avoid. Towards the end I ll show you some advanced stuff that you ll only get with an IQ of over 9.000, with IQ standing for incredible quackness. One more thing. If you want exclusive streams and hours of bonus footage for all my machinima, support me on Patreon. It is a lot of work to make such tutorials! Sigh…let s just start. Okay?
1. Setting up the Shot
First of all, you will have to position your characters in the scene as you want them. For simplicity s sake, we re gonna do all these basic examples with just two characters, which I have spawned already. How convenient. The first common mistake you see a lot is that the characters are just standing there like school kids at their first recital. It looks bland. Instead, you can just apply some different animations that suit the scene. It s always best to do this through a task sequence, then picking play animation and finally selecting an animation from the list.
I have already prepared this by saving a couple of animations in my favorites list. If that was too fast for you, please check out my in-depth task sequence tutorial for more details. It will help you no matter what your experience level is. Now I ve applied a standing animation to the first ped. He s not gonna do any other movements for now. How about we let the other actor sit in a chair? Just add the play animation task again and pick a sitting animation. In those cases, you might wanna go for a base animation first. But there are others that add more variety. To not have too much repetition of the same movement, you can then just add two more play animation tasks and use those variations a b c or whatever how many there are here. When you look at this animation sequence, this looks much more natural and convincing.
Now I just have to place this dude at the correct position so he actually sits in the chair. If you see a small interruption of the animation it might be because you forgot to set the task to keep running after allocated time here. This will smoothen the transitions. Also I think the third animation is not playing fully so I will tinker with the timing by adding a few seconds. Here s common mistake number two: Those two people are not looking at each other at all.
This becomes evident especially when they are not on the same eye level like in this example. Of course it can also be useful to have a character purposely avoid eye contact, for instance by submissively looking down on the ground, but only if it fits the story you re telling. So don t let them stare into the void like that. Instead, use the task keep looking at entity on both these characters. Just select the other ped as a target to look at, check the box to keep the task running in parallel and set the duration to a second or so. It s best to have this task at the start of the sequence, so just move it up with the arrow keys. Of course you can also use it in the middle of a sequence if the character should look the other one in the eyes later in the conversation.
Another thing to consider now is setting a different mood in the ped options. Sure, this is not really representative of the variety of human emotions, and it often looks comical, but often it can support the underlying tone of the speech. Nasty talk, angry face. Friendly chat, happy face. These facial expressions look differently on all characters.
Now that both characters have made eye contact and perform individual animations, you can move on to the next step.
2. Finding & Recording Speech
To make the character s mouths move I like using the speech events provided by the game. If you go to ped options | speech player you will find hundreds of different characters who each have dozens of soundbytes you can trigger. Pay attention to the abbreviations at the start to know what kind of character it might be. The a stands for ambient, then in the middle you got f or m for female or male and the third letter indicates the age with y for young, m for middle aged and o for old. Since we re using our own custom dialogue, it doesn t matter what the peds are saying, only the duration and pacing are interesting. With these ambient characters you will often find an entry called chat_state that contains pretty long monologues. Of course you could also use those lines to create dialogue, but in my opinion that will often sound like gibberish. If you ve ever listened to ambient characters talking you know what I mean. As reactions to your main characters, though, these ambient speech events may work nicely.
Here s the third common mistake, at least in my opinion: Do not use the lip movement feature in Scene Director or that specific mod by Jedijosh. Bro, I totally love you, and I appreciate everything you ve done for the machinima and GTA V community as a whole, but I can t really recommend the lip movement mod. While it is totally awesome that you can choose the duration of the speech by holding the hotkey as long as you need, the mouth snaps shut most of the time when you let go of the key. If that happens multiple times in short succession, it looks kinda robotic and uncanney. Potentially also the current animation is cancelled like demonstrated here. That is why I don t like using that method, but hey, I ve seen some well-made examples by other creators as well. But, you know…double decker dick donut.
By the way, the more I repeat this, the more the picture of the double decker dick donut manifests in your brain. To get back on topic: Some of those speech events automatically trigger certain gestures. This opens up some cool potential for variety in your dialogue. This also works combined with the animations you ve chosen. All you have to do is to set the animation flag in the task sequence from loop to secondary task loop. I ll restart the sequence for the changes to take effect. Then you can try and play different soundbites results may vary but you ll definitely get some individual animations going on. The possibilities are endless with this.
If you don t want any gestures, you can also find dialogue options that don t do that. I like using the stewardess far down on the list here, but surely there are other examples in the list. This character also has some very short soundbytes which are cool for reactions like when a character says yeah or sure or whatevs. But how do you determine which of these speech events to trigger during recording? Well, here s common mistake number four: Not having a script or at least the lines of dialogue written down before you go into GTA V. Only if you have the final lines the characters are saying you will be able to match those with the mouth movements in the game while recording a scene. In this example, I want the character to say two small lines with a pause in between. So I will look for a speech event that is short for the first part, this one might fit quite well, and another medium long one for the second part of the line. An important thing to understand here is that these speech events often contain more than one variation. Menyoo cycles through those and remembers the last position for each of those events individually. So if I stop after playing this one, the next time the following entry will be triggered. And that s how I get the duration to match with both lines in my script. It s easier if you say the line to yourself to hear if it matches. Try speaking slower or faster as well if it matches the situation. And here s the final example for the : You know…I really shoulda kept my bitcoins in 2010…fork. If that works for you, just cycle through the speech events again to reset them to the one sample you need. Start the recording and always wait three seconds before doing anything. On a real movie set the camera starts rolling before the director yells action. Then play your speech events. Then you wait another three seconds towards the end and stop the recording. This gives you more footage to work with at the start of each clip, and I ll explain later why this is important. Rinse and repeat these steps for the other characters in the scene. Right now on screen you see another one of my techniques, which is just spamming random speech events. I hate to admit it but this has worked for me quite often in the past, because you can do so many things during post production. You will notice that you don t have to be all that precise with the timing, unless you want to create very long monologues. I will continue this train of thought in chapters four and six. Let s move on to editing the recorded dialogue in Rockstar Editor.
3. Capturing in Rockstar Editor
Now that you have recorded your footage there s also some things that you have to pay attention to in Rockstar Editor when positioning the camera. First of all, you need to pay attention to the 180 degree rule, or else you ll be making common mistake number five. Just imagine a direct line between two characters having a dialogue, and you ll have to stay on either side of the line for the entire time. That way the viewer will always have character 1 on the left of the screen and character 2 on the right or the other way around. This applies for any distance you are showing the dialogue, no matter if you do a long shot, a medium shot, over the shoulder or close ups. The direction the characters look at doesn t change. There are exceptions that allow you to break this rule, but that would lead a little too far for this tutorial. For this demonstration, I will use some classic over the shoulder angles so that both characters are visible. Let’s start with the first clip, which has only character 1 speaking. The camera will be placed just behind character 2 so that he s at the right or left side of the screen. Then of course zoom in a little bit, add some depth of field and focus on the speaking character. Since we wanna use our own dialogue, we can also just mute the speech audio for the very first marker. Find the start of the speech and check if the angle works. But do not move the first marker right to the start of the dialogue – remember that we need those extra seconds for the editing later. Same goes for the end marker. For efficiency this clip has multiple different lines and variations that I can use for the entire dialogue, thereby it is also much longer than the one clip we ve just recorded. The advantage: all the dialogue clips of this character will have the same angle and you don t have to redo the camera settings for each individual line they say. Now let s move on to the next clip of character two speaking. I ve prepared a little something here already. It is basically the same thing the other way around. What I like about it is that you can clearly see that the guy is looking the other dude in the eyes, and not just anywhere. And with that this project is ready to be exported. Now, I know many of you are using the Extended Video Export mod to achieve higher video quality. If you are now worried that your PC will never stop rendering because of those lengthy dialogue clips and the extra seconds at the start and end, here s a pro tip to avoid common mistake number six: Deactivate the motion blur for the dialogue scenes. It is not needed in this case and will reduce the export time a lot. But this only applies if your characters are stationary should the actors sit in a moving vehicle and you want the sweet motion blur in the background, then you will have to accept the long rendering times.
4. Editing and Timing
I have now loaded the exported clips into Premiere Pro and prepared a couple of examples. You can do the same stuff in any other quality editing tool, I can recommend DaVinci Resolve if you need free software for your projects. Before we start, just a little pro tip again. I know I just showed you to deactivate the dialogue audio in Rockstar Editor. This is only useful if you intend on keeping any of the in game sounds. If you will delete all the audio from GTA V anyway, you can also keep the dialogue audio active. This helps you identify the bits where there is dialogue to match it to your script more easily. As you can see on the left the waveforms in the audio track quickly show me where the character was speaking, whereas in the right example I have to manually go through the timeline to find the right bits. Okay, now: Common mistake number seven, which I see a lot, is that you always show the character that is speaking for as long as he or she is speaking. Even if you time your speech events perfectly with the script this might look very boring and bland in the final film except maybe in comedic context where the shots switch really fast. Let me demonstrate this with our exported clips. This is our dialogue from the script with alternating shots. A much better way of doing this is by using so-called J-cuts and L-cuts. This basically means that the audio overlaps at the start or end of an individual shot. So in this case character 1 is done speaking and character 2 starts while still visible from the back. That s a J-Cut, visualized in the timeline. Since the mouth can t be seen, you can put any length of dialogue there. The same goes the other way around, when character 1 is still speaking and you already cut to character 2 in the middle of it, with him just listening and reacting. Which is an L-cut. That’s what those extra seconds in the footage are useful for! These two methods allow you to match your voice acting easily to the recorded footage, even when the timing of the lines you played in GTA V is not perfect with your script. This is how I do it all the time. So with the use of J-cuts and L-cuts let me demonstrate the improved version of the dialogue. Did you notice something else? Through the use of this method I was able to reduce the number of cuts made from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 to 6 cuts on the second version. This means that it will be less distracting for the viewer. At the same time that same portion of dialogue got more than one second shorter as well because I was more free in the timing when placing my audio bits. Also, let me show you some examples from my machinima where I utilized the technique, just so you get a more polished look at the final result instead of this bland tutorial stage. Another method of perfectly syncing the mouth movements with the voice acting is to slow down or speed up the footage. I usually export my GTA V clips with 60 frames per second, even though my final videos always have 30 fps to make it look cinematic instead of like a gameplay trailer. But why export at 60 fps then? Well, this gives me the unique chance of slowing down my footage by up to50% without making it look choppy. This also means that if you slow down the footage to 5% in Rockstar Editor and slow it down by another 50% in post production, you can achieve a super slow-motion of 2.5% of the original gameplay speed. But that s not where I was going with this. Slowing down a 60 fps clip puts me into the unique position to time my dialogue scenes much better. I can just slow down a clip if the voice line I recorded is too long. Oftentimes all it needs is to slow a clip down by 5% which is barely noticeable. In Premiere I like using the Rate Stretch tool that allows me to just grab the end of a clip and lengthen it to the desired duration of my speech audio on the track below. This way I can match it more easily, which is especially useful if your voice actors delivered the lines slightly differently or slower than you anticipated and you can t just make them re-do it all over again. An even more intricate way of doing this are time ramps. In this example I have a pause between two lines, and I don t want to make a cut between the two. But I ve noticed that while the second line matches nicely, the first mouth movement takes too long for my dialogue audio. If I want it to be shorter I can right click a clip and open up the view for time remapping. By holding CTRL and clicking into this white line here, I can add markers and then drag those little handles around. Grabbing this line and moving it up or down you can already see there are little ramps there, hence the name. Moving it down will make this part slower, moving it up will make it play faster, indicated by the percentage value. This way I can manipulate the dialogue footage to suit the recorded lines a little better. Of course the clip will become shorter so you have to move around the other lines as well. To make the transition from higher replay speed to regular speed a little smoother, you can make the time ramp a little longer. And now the lines fit perfectly. This saves you the hassle of re-recording lines or re-recording the scene altogether. The only problem could be that if an animation with a lot of movement is playing during the dialogue, the difference in replay speed might be more apparent. So always use these effects sensitively.
5. Advanced Techniques
Now that you know the basic techniques, let me show you some more advanced stuff. In our little example the camera angles in Rockstar Editor were pretty basic, just two simple over the shoulder shots. Depending on how long the conversation lasts, this will become boring and you should spice it up a little with some long shots, close ups or even dutch angles if you re that kind of filmmaker. Bear in mind that the camera angle should always support the message of the spoken words or emotions in the scene, so a close up symbolizes something personal or intense. Here s our example from earlier again but improved with a little more variety, also with some music and color grading for the final finish. Let s say that instead of having a dialogue where the characters face each other you want them to sit next to each other and talk on a bench. You can still cut between the two in
Creating Engaging Dialogue in GTA V: A 4-Step Tutorial
Step 1: Know Your Character
When writing dialogue for GTA V, it’s essential to have a deep understanding of your character. Consider their background, motivations, and personality traits. Are they a hardened criminal, a loyal friend, or a cunning mastermind? By staying true to your character’s core traits, you can create dialogue that feels authentic and compelling.
Step 2: Use Realistic Language
One of the keys to creating convincing dialogue in GTA V is using language that feels natural and realistic. Avoid cliches, overused phrases, and unrealistic dialogue that can pull players out of the immersive experience. Instead, focus on using language that reflects the world of GTA V while also staying true to your character’s unique voice.
Step 3: Show, Don’t Tell
To create engaging dialogue in GTA V, it’s essential to show, not tell. Instead of having characters directly state their emotions or motivations, consider how you can convey this information through their actions, reactions, and body language. By showing rather than telling, you can create dialogue that feels dynamic and layered.
Step 4: Add Depth and Subtext
Finally, to create convincing dialogue in GTA V, consider adding depth and subtext to your conversations. Think about what lies beneath the surface of your character’s words – their hidden agendas, insecurities, or conflicting emotions. By adding layers of meaning to your dialogue, you can create scenes that feel rich and nuanced.
By following these four steps, you can create dialogue in GTA V that is engaging, realistic, and compelling. Take the time to understand your character, use realistic language, show rather than tell, and add depth and subtext to your conversations. With practice and attention to detail, you can craft dialogue that enhances the immersive experience of GTA V and keeps players coming back for more.
Step 1: Understand Your Characters
When creating dialogue for GTA V characters, it’s crucial to have a deep understanding of their personalities, backgrounds, and motivations. Take the time to develop detailed character profiles, including factors like age, interests, speech patterns, and relationships with other characters in the game. This will help you ensure that the dialogue feels authentic and true to each character’s unique voice.
Step 2: Focus on Realistic Language
One of the keys to creating convincing dialogue in GTA V is using language that feels natural and realistic. Avoid clichés and overly formal language, and instead focus on how real people speak in everyday situations. Pay attention to slang, regional dialects, and colloquialisms that could add depth and authenticity to your characters’ dialogue.
Step 3: Show, Don’t Tell
Instead of having characters simply explain their thoughts and feelings through dialogue, try to show these emotions through actions and interactions. Use body language, facial expressions, and other non-verbal cues to convey the subtext of the dialogue. This will make the interactions between characters feel more dynamic and engaging for players, enhancing the overall gaming experience.
GTA V: Creating Convincing Dialogue for a Captivating Gaming Experience
In conclusion, creating convincing dialogue for GTA V involves understanding your characters, using realistic language, and showing emotions through actions. By following these four steps and paying attention to the details, you can enhance the storytelling in the game and create a more immersive experience for players. Keep these tips in mind as you develop dialogue for GTA V characters to make your game truly memorable.
Source: Youtube Video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jihWz7W7dSs of Channel whanowa.