The Complete Guide to Videogame Performance Directing: Place, Time, Action

This book teaches the complex, sometimes confounding, and often beautiful art of directing live performance for videogames. Starting from a clear and comprehensive introduction to the nuts and bolts of directing on the motion capture floor and in the voiceover booth, this book dives deeper with concrete examples from the author’s 25-year career directing seminal games from the early years to today’s blockbusters.

Identifying the Place (What is the physical environment?), Time (What just happened?), and Action (What do the characters want?) of every scene empowers directors with essential tools to dive straight into the subtext, the life below the words. Through step-by-step instructions, this book shows how to make scenes and lines come alive. It offers real-world advice on everything from casting to table reads, rehearsal, and production days. In addition, readers can find valuable advice about self-care and sustaining a long-term career as a performance director.

This book is sure to be an essential resource for directors, actors, voiceover artists, and game developers who want to master videogame performance.

Tom Keegan trained as an actor, movement artist, and director, performing in theaters throughout the US and Europe. He worked in animation at Hanna-Barbera Studios and Universal Cartoon Studios before transitioning to videogames in 1998 where he has performance-directed some of the most popular and successful videogames of the last 25 years. His award-winning work includes AAA franchises such as Battlefield, Wolfenstein, Call of Duty, Resident Evil, Need for Speed, Dead Rising, and Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners. He received a BAFTA nomination for his work on Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. He is best known for his direction on Jedi: Fallen Order, Jedi: Survivor, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Throughout the year, Tom offers classes in acting and directing through his company, TomK Studios.