My team and I at Bonus Stage are always happy to help with EN/JP loc stuff, especially VO which can be very daunting and difficult for outsiders to get going on.

Hope this was helpful and feel free to ask anything you'd like 🤘

Unless you make an effort to go off the beaten track with a group like Kaiju, you'll be agency shopping whether you like it or not.

Freelancers may seem like an attractive, low-cost alternative to the tiered talent mentioned above, but you're going to have a hard time sourcing the talent alone.

The general wisdom is, unsigned talent = unreliable.

It's obviously not TRUE but it holds to how everyone generally does business.

There are casting agencies such as Kaiju that specialize in open casting calls, and Kaiju are AMAZING at finding talent, but...

3. Freelancers

No casting agency or loc vendor is ever going to offer you freelance talent in Japan.

There is a thriving indie voice actor scene, of course.

But good luck getting anyone to touch it.

The good news is though that all of the pitfalls and complications I've outlined above can be evaded and negotiated if you have the right people in your corner. Obviously I recommend Bonus Stage, but there are other great options too - just make sure to do your homework.

Let's say, for example, one of the reference audio files contains a cough that isn't in the script.

Was it an accident?
Was it an adlib?
Have the as-recs not been updated?

Nobody in the studio will know, and you better hope the JP voice director is bilingual - RARE!!! - to try figure it out.

You should know that when you go to these vendors, there's a HIGH possibility they're going to tell you what you want to hear to get your money.

"Yes we can do that in that time no problem"

Except they won't be the ones doing it.

And yes problem.

Problems even.

2. Vendors and cultural blindspots

So a large amount of these multi-language localization vendors are, for whatever reason, based in continental Europe and have LITTLE TO KNOW UNDERSTANDING OF JAPAN AND HOW THINGS WORK HERE

This can get very bad very quickly, and if one agency catches you doing something you shouldn't, word gets around. You likely won't be doing JP voicework again.

But Andy, you say, this all sounds very complicated. Surely my vendor will know what to do.

Ha

Hahahaha

Japanese voice acting contracts typically stipulate separate payment strands for each use case.

For example, multiplatform title?
Actors get multi-paid.

Wanna use a line in the trailer?
Actors gets a royalty for that.

It's very important to know you do not have carte blanche on your JP audio.

1.3: Rights

Buyout contracts basically don't exist in Japan. You will not - or are very unlikely to get - Japanese talent agencies to sign off on giving you, a foreign entity, unlimited control over how and when their talent is heard.

So already you can probably tell this is gonna be a pricey endeavor.

Unfortunately the costs don't necessarily stop there, and you'll wanna pay attention to this next part to avoid legal ass kickings lol

The actual fee varies wildly too, and almost every project is negotiated individually, but generally pricing breaks down something like this:

A-tier actors: 700,000 yen per day or more

B-tier actors: somewhere between 300,000 - 500,000 yen per day

C-tier actors: 150,000 to 250,000 yen per day

1.2: Moneyyy 💰

Japanese voice talents don't always work on hourly rates. Often their agency will draw up a quote for their appearance in the project and divide that up with the studio based on how much time they expect the work to take.

If you're expecting to get hourly rates quoted, think again.

There doesnt tend to be a huge difference in quality in my experience, rather that the C's and B's just need a little more direction than the A's do to get their best work out.

There does tend to be a huge difference in cost though...

1.1: Talent Tiers

Japanese voice actors are generally divided into tiers A,B, and C. A will be your Sumire Uesaka top-tier superstars, B will be your up-and-comers, and C's will be mostly unknown.

Most JP dubs of Netflix shows use mainly C tier actors.

This manifests in a few ways, but mainly in cost and the strands associated with that.

For example; let's talk tiers.

1. Japanese voice acting is serious business.

So. Let's just get this out of the way; JP voicework is likely to cost significantly more than any other language. The reason is cultural: Japan has built a whole celebrity eco-system around voice acting in a way other markets just haven't.

Before we get started, this is all based on my experience as a member of the Bonus Stage Loc team. We're a small loc studio based in Tokyo with experience across all game styles/sizes. Check out our site for more info. For now, on with the thread.
www.bonus-stage-loc.com