Exclusive Rights to An Online Voice Actor

Chapter 52

Tinsunny and Belegdae, thank you guys so much for the coffees! ≧▽≦/

TLC: Lilies

Editing: Whiteflare

A competition without suspense was not enough to appeal to the audience and having no unexpected accidents lacked thrills—Crossing the bridge noodle’s final score was a surprise for a number of people, including Qi Jing.

“Eh?” Qi Jing couldn’t help but find himself stunned when he saw the score in the window.

The scores were organized in the same sequence as the judges: first, Longbow‘s; second, Pu Yuzhi’s; and third, Northwest Road‘s. The exact score of Crossing the bridge noodles looked as followed:

【Voice Quality】: 3.5, 3.0, 3.0, average score 3.17

【Enunciation】: 4.0, 3.0, 3.5, average score 3.5

【Foundation points】: 4.0, 3.5, 3.5, average score 3.67

【Charisma】: 3.5, 3.0, 3.0, average score 3.17

Judging panel’s evaluation: 3.17+3.5+3.67+3.17 = 13.51 points

Additional audience vote points: 85.6% voting ratio = 0.856 points

Overall score: 13.51+0.856 = 14.366 points

The MC Yang Chunqu didn’t read out all of the scores in detail, only announcing the final score. That outcome momentarily caused quite a stir in a considerable part of the audience, Crossing the bridge noodles’ fans seemed to have received a huge blow, leaving them quite at a loss. Theoretically speaking, Crossing the bridge noodles was the first contestant to perform, so there was no telling if that achievement counted as good or not, but the score he received seemed to be lower than what the majority of the audience expected.

“I feel like the score he received… isn’t too normal.” Qi Jing instinctively voiced his thoughts, his eyes shifting towards Shen Yan.

Shen Yan said nothing, but Qi Jing took note of his brows furrowing a bit as if he also felt confused.

To be fair, with a five-point scoring system, Qi Jing thought that with Crossing the bridge noodles’ skill in acting he deserved to get at least over four points on average in each category. That’s why it really went beyond his expectations when he saw the score display full of threes.

Sure enough, among the three judges, Pu Yuzhi was the most strict with scoring, but he didn’t expect Northwest Road to give a score this low as well. Longbow was the only one to give four points.

Qi Jing felt that if he was a judge, his score would probably be about the same as Longbow’s—or even higher.

It was clear that Crossing the bridge noodles’ little fans didn’t buy it—objections started showing up on the screen, rapidly snowballing in number. As they heard the MC announce their idol’s score, a lot of them started spamming the chat, calling it into question.

Audience 1: Σ( °△ °|||)︴Am I seeing it wrong? I feel like Little Noodle’s score is a bit low…

Audience 2: Replying to the one above, you’re not alone in that! I also think that his score was deliberately lowered. Clearly during his performance, the public chat’s reaction was pretty good? Especially the charisma category, a mere 3.17 as an average score just doesn’t make sense!

Audience 3: &#k252B;&#k252R;&#kUR4U;&#k252B;&#k252R; Begging for explanation! Begging for clarification!

Audience 4: &#k252B;&#k252R;&#kUR4U;&#k252B;&#k252R; Begging for explanation! Begging for clarification! +10086

Audience 5: &#k252B;&#k252R;&#kUR4U;&#k252B;&#k252R; Humpf! I don’t care! Either way Little Noodles is the best! In my heart, he gets straight fives!

Audience 6: Ladies!! Ladies, please stop spamming!! Noodles has just said in the group to not spam the chat, let’s let the other people finish their auditions before talking~ Ladies, be good~ The “Rice Noodles Fans” are good children, right?? o(≧0≦)o

It seemed like Crossing the bridge noodles had spoken up in his QQ fangroup chat, asking fans to stay calm. Since the person involved said so himself, the fans followed suit and complied without making a hubbub. The scene of protest in the public chat slowly started to die down.

However, as the host of the competition, the MC Yang Chuqu couldn’t possibly turn a blind eye to those remarks, so she proceeded to explain politely and affably, “I can see that everyone seems to have different opinions in regards to the number one contestant’s score. Everyone, please rest assured&#k2014;after the individual auditions are all finished, we’ll ask Teacher Longbow to act as judges’ representative to explain their reasons behind each score. So when the time comes, everyone will be given a logical explanation. Thank you for your understanding.”

According to Qi Jing’s knowledge, both of the two previous《Order to End the Heavens》competitions had incidents of dissatisfaction with controversial scorings—in the most severe case, the contestant publicly denounced the judging system as unfair, even issuing a complaint to the company responsible for the game, causing a huge scene. As a company making a commercialised game franchise, the developers probably didn’t wish to get involved in another controversy like that.

Likewise, if the fans continued to make a noise even under these circumstances, it would make the CV in question look bad—thus, everyone could only wait patiently.

At that moment, Shen Yan, who had been studying the content of the score window, suddenly got up and grabbed a notebook, one he usually used to make notes of work-related information.

Qi Jing observed him curiously as he returned to his seat, flipped through the notebook in search of a blank page, and started by using his pen to write down a single “1” before he lowered his head to note something. Qi Jing leaned over to take a look, only to see some key phrases related to the performance like “fluent transition”, “need to refine understanding of background information”, “a bit overboard with emotions”, and so on.

“What is that for?”

“I’m writing down my thoughts to compare them with the judges’ opinion when the time comes, so I can see which ones overlap and which ones turn out different.” Shen Yan concentrated on taking notes, his head down. It seemed like he intended to do that for each of the thirty contestants, including Crossing the bridge noodles.

Qi Jing was surprised at Shen Yan being this conscientious and, after his initial surprise, sighed with a smile, “Geese Fly North-sama, there might not be many CVs like you anymore.”

The pen in Shen Yan’s hand stopped momentarily, nib staying still for the length of his pause, “Is my behaviour… very strange?”

Qi Jing replied, chuckling, “If it’s you doing so, then I don’t think it’s strange.”

If it was Shen Yan, no matter whether it was for 2D or 3D world, he would always be uniformly conscientious, just like his approach towards life.

“Not only is it not strange, I even like it a lot.” Qi Jing stuck out his pinky finger, curling it around Shen Yan’s left pinky finger—that same left hand was still holding the notebook; the gesture was just as flirtatious as his words.

They were sitting shoulder to shoulder—from such a distance, even the slightest of the expressions could be caught. Under the soft lamplight, Qi Jing saw Shen Yan blinking twice, his lips pursing a little as his eyes moved away a little. Somehow… it looked like he was actually feeling a little embarrassed.

“It’s a practice I developed a long time ago.” Shen Yan cleared his throat and said in a low voice, “I was at college at that time and had just gotten in touch with voice acting. A few people would often practise acting together online; whenever I listened from the sides, I would use pen and paper to take notes while listening and take it out after going offline to study—with the course of time, it developed into a habit .”

That habit sounded very reasonable and couldn’t be any more normal. However, being able to keep at it for year after year wasn’t as easy as it sounded.

The smile on Qi Jing’s face overflowed—the corners of his lips were about to reach his ears while his gaze was filled only with tenderness. “That’s why I said people like you are hard to come by. Some of the CVs these days, when they’re dubbing for a drama, don’t even mention trying to figure out and understand the character by themselves, they wouldn’t even read the retake notes the director painstakingly wrote.”

Shen Yan sighed, “In fact… I was away for two, three years, so I’m not used to the community now, nor do I know how to deal with the current production crews. I’m afraid people would regard this habit of mine as weird… or regard me as weird.”

In that case, it was no surprise that in everyone’s minds, the CV Geese Fly North would never say a word outside of handing in the recordings or retakes.

“And also…” Saying up to that point, Shen Yan hesitated.

“And also?”

“That night, when a crewmember from《Trap》asked me to temporarily stand in for the main character and act with you, it was my first time acting with another person since I came back after being away from the voice acting scene for so long.” His gaze seemed to wander far away as his words slowed and faltered, like the fine sand in an hourglass, falling down alongside the memories, “To be honest, that time… I wavered for a long time in my decision.”

Qi Jing stiffened, his throat somewhat hot as he laughed in a hoarse voice, “Can I say—how fortunate that you ultimately agreed?”

How fortunate that they met each other and later got to know each other.

No matter if it was in the identity of Don’t ask for my return date and Geese Fly North or as Qi Jing and Shen Yan—he had never regretted it.

The competition went on.

Only after continuing to listen did Qi Jing realise that Crossing the bridge noodles’ score was already among the highest. Quite a few of the following contestants scored around 3.0 per average in each category, especially with Pu Yuzhi—from the beginning to the end, she had never given a score higher than 3.5 occasionally, and she even gave rock-bottom scores such as 1.0 or 1.5.

Of course, there weren’t many among them that could outperform Crossing the bridge noodles.

Pu Yuzhi might have been strict, but she was no doubt impartial, while the scoring criteria of the other two judges also seemed to differ a bit; Longbow’s style was gentle—unless the contestant really screwed up while acting, his scores wouldn’t vary too much, most of the time fluctuating between 3.0 and 4.0. Northwest Road would at times give a score as high as 4.5 and as low as 2.0 at others, making one unable to fathom his thoughts.

All kinds of things would happen during the competition; one contestant was too tense and didn’t take note of the procedure, reading the lines straight away—out of fairness to ensure that everyone got the same amount of time, the MC had no choice but to interrupt and ask him for a retake. Another contestant’s voice was distinctly trembling and he kept making mistakes; there was also one whose internet connection was simply too tragic—he kept connecting and disconnecting, and at last, he could only forfeit.

After listening to the competition for half an hour, Qi Jing managed to gain quite a bit of insight.

Yang Chingu’s capabilities as a MC in charge of managing the field were truly praiseworthy. Despite the everchanging and complicated conditions, she was still able to conclude the scoring for the last contestant smoothly and according to the schedule, so there would be more time for the contestants to listen to the judges’ feedback.

After all, that was the true climax of the competition.

“Everyone, the first round of the preliminary voice auditions for the《Order to End the Heavens》character, Liu Suyu, has now come to an end! During this half an hour, our contestants all gave us splendid performances. I believe everyone also enjoyed listening to it, but I implore you to not leave us yet. Next, we’ll invite the judges’ representative, Teacher Longbow, to provide us with commentary for each of tonight’s performances! Everyone, welcome Teacher Longbow!” Yang Chunqu let her voice rise, once again bringing the crowd into a state of excitement.

Sure enough, Longbows’s red ID appeared at the top of the voice channel.

As a seasoned voice actor, one who spent a lot of time in the commercial voice acting circle even, each and every action of Longbow’s was poised and urbane. He wouldn’t forget to first say a couple of rather conventional greetings, expressing very diplomatic thanks to the performing contestants and reiterating that the place they achieved wasn’t important—it was their competitive spirit that mattered.

The actual commentary only started later, “First of all, let’s start with contestant number one.”

Hearing this, Qi Jing straightened his back slightly, his attention wholly focused at listening. Shen Yan flipped through his notes calmly and opened it on the first page, putting them on his knees in preparation for comparison.

“The sense of age in contestant number one’s voice was on spot, but it didn’t sound particularly mild. It might be because his voice got affected by the cold just as he said, so I found it hard to judge and gave it 3.5 points—it’s a score I believe to be a middle ground between good and very good. Though the two other judges should have their own reasons, the judgement I’m stating now only represents my own personal thoughts.”

Longbow’s words made Qi Jing a bit disappointed—he felt that it was the two other judges that were responsible for suppressing the scores, but it was truly too unrealistic to make each judge give a commentary. Besides, Longbow’s explanation sounded pretty rational.

“As for number one’s enunciation, I think it was very good. He had a pretty solid grasp of the pace, while pronunciation, just as I’ve just said, was affected by the strong nasality, making individual words sound rather unclear. But it wasn’t too much of a problem.” That’s why Longbow gave him a high score of 4.0—it wasn’t unintentional.

Crossing the bridge noodle’s fans sent a bunch of TATs on the public chat, all feeling regretful that he participated in the competition while he was unwell, making him unable to fully display his abilities.

But Longbow proceeded to point out more of Crossing the bridge noodles’ shortcomings apart from his voice.

“As everyone knows, the evaluation for foundation points and charisma both depend on acting, but there is a slight difference between the two. The foundation points can be thought of as similar to reading comprehension skills—it’s based on the contestant’s ability to follow the script’s prompts and act out the emotions and it’s important whether the shift between different emotions sounds natural or not. Meanwhile, the charisma goes even deeper and shows whether the candidate took the background of the character to heart, acting on it when considering the slight subtleties when portraying the character’s speech.

“I truly admire number one’s skills in changing the tones, especially the shift between the first and the second line from the first scene. The same goes for the mood transition from the last line; the handling of it really was well thought out and coupled with pretty good acting.

“But the family circumstances of Liu Suyu were actually pretty good—upon checking the detailed background information, everyone should realise he was no poor scholar, but a young master of a merchant family. Since ancient times, the merchants were looked down upon, only able to bring honour to their family by becoming an official—that’s why he was so hung on passing the Imperial Exams and achieving a scholarly honour. In number one’s voice, one could hear the restlessness of waiting for the results before the scoreboard, that feeling of wanting to see but not daring to look—that part was very well done… but it was performed in a way that strayed a bit from the “pampered son of a wealthy family” setting and kind of reminded of a small scholar—the comprehension of the character was a little superficial.

“This particular point was especially clear when he later started shouting “I got in, I got in!” repeatedly. It can be said that the acting there was a little bit too ostentatious. Considering the upbringing the character received since a young age, he wouldn’t in fact shout loudly even when overjoyed—it should be expressed by the contradictory instinct of wanting to shout loudly, but suppressing his voice subconsciously. “

Hearing Longbow’s words, Qi Jing felt as if he finally understood and nodded unconsciously. Then he suddenly remembered something and hurriedly turned his head to look at the content of Shen Yan’s notes—all of sudden, those few phrases, “need to refine understanding of background information”, “a bit overboard with emotions” became clear.

“So you really did notice that before.” Qi Jing opened his eyes wide—he didn’t think that Shen Yan’s train of thought would be so similar to Longbow’s.

“It was just an inkling. Only after hearing Teacher Longbow’s explanation did I realise where it came from.” Shen Yan smiled at him mildly, then quickly restrained his smile. He continued saying with his eyebrows furrowed, “But even with things like that, the scores the two other judges gave… personally, I still think they were a bit too low.”

The following contestants couldn’t compare with Crossing the bridge noodles in terms of comprehension of details, but there wasn’t as much of a disparity between the scores. It was unknown whether the judges became too benevolent during the latter part or if their scoring of the first person to perform was too strict… Either way, this time Crossing the bridge noodles could only be said to have had terrible luck.

The whole commentary segment went on for thirty five minutes. Longbow’s explanation was very detailed and practical and Qi Jing benefited from it a lot.

“Thank you Teacher Longbow for working hard to provide us with such feedback.” Yang Chuqu announced some unexpected news once she regained control over the mic after Longbow left the voice channel, “Everyone, if you wish to listen to the next audition for the “Old Man Xiao Shan” role, you need to remember that the competition starts at 8:30PM. When the times comes, we’ll be changing the judge responsible for the commentary to Teacher Pu Yuzhi, please stay tuned—”

Qi Jing sucked in a mouthful of cold air.

Pu Yuzhi? According to her ruthless scoring style, when it came time to give commentary, wouldn’t her feedback also be incredibly cutting, cutting to the point of absolutely devastating a person?

Shen Yan had yet to fully recover from his illness. What if when the time came, she picked out a whole bunch of issues—wouldn’t it make things even worse?

His heart suddenly fell into disarray.

“Shen Yan…” He looked over uneasily, but the gaze of the person beside him was calm, a far cry from the flustered look he had imagined.

“It doesn’t matter.” It was Shen Yan who actually comforted him instead, saying in a soft voice, “Actually, I would rather listen to Teacher Pu’s evaluation to hear the reason for her giving such a low score.”

“But…” I’m still worried.

“It’s just commentary—no matter what she says, she won’t be able to alter the already published score or change the ranking.” Shen Yan laughed gently. Qi Jing sighed inwardly—although that was true, what he was worried about was how that negativity during the next performance might influence his performances after that.

If… if even the Old Man Xiao Shan, the role he felt the most confident about, received heavy criticism, then it would be even more so with the more rebellious and harder to grasp Bai Ke. There was also that Marquess Shun, the one Shen Yan always said he wanted to use to “overcome something”.

The future didn’t look too optimistic. All of sudden, Qi Jing couldn’t muster any enthusiasm for the competition which would start in half an hour.

A/N:

It’s the first time I had to use a calculator when writing a chapter, haha.

We bullied Little Noodles this round… It’s Dr Shen’s turn next (eh?)

T.N:

Lucilla: Σ(⊙▽⊙ Protecc the goose!!!!

Whiteflare: SY’s so earnest! Fighting!!