It's been a huge year for Holly Reddaway, Voice and Performance Director on CrossfireX and Alan Wake 2. As well as being named in MCV/DEVELOP's 30 Under 30 (2023), this week she was also spotlighted in BAFTA Breakthrough 2023 talent program.
The initiative celebrates the next generation of creatives across film, video games and television, for programs through the UK, the US and Indiam selected by a jury of cross-industry figures. It gains its name from spotlighting and supporting those as they gain their breakthrough. You can learn more about the project and other successful applicatants, HERE.
When it comes to Holly Reddaway, there is no doubt why she was selected. BAFTA expands on her incredible career across several mediums, and why her application stood out. "Holly’s journey to becoming a director, working across games, animation, immersive, screen and VR/AR, started through directing plays at university. Moving away from traditional stage performances, Holly began working in more interactive settings, creating shows in the likes of multi-story carparks, libraries, nightclubs and even a Victorian observatory. A providential trip to the V&A’s Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt exhibition in 2018 gave Holly a whole new professional appreciation for games as an artform, and they quickly recognised that someone had to direct those performers. Holly’s never looked back since – until, perhaps, it came to writing their Breakthrough application."
Holly Reddaway | BAFTA Breakthrough 2023 Transcript:
I'm Holly Reddaway. My Breakthrough projects were the games, Baldur's Gate 3 and Alan Wake 2, and I worked on them as a voice and performance director. With Baldur's Gate 3, probably the thing that I enjoyed the most as the wide variety of characters. I think what I love most about working in games as a director is that it's really transformative for actors. In Baldur's Gate, we had Vampires and Myconids and Tieflings and Goblins and this whole fantastical array of characters and so getting to think about the movement style for those characters and how we created them, with the voiceover and the motion capture, was just so much fun and really different to anything that I'd done in my career before.
One of my favourite memories of working on Alan Wake 2 was we did a development session to explore the sounds of the two different locations in the game and Richard [Lapington], who is the audio director at Remedy, came up with this crazy list of different sounds that he wanted to explore with the actors. And so we spent some time workshopping and we came up with some really exciting discoveries that made their way into the game.
As a voice and performance director in games you get offered the screenplay and you come on board when the text is already kind of pretty fixed and so to be able to work with Remedy a little bit earlier on in the process and to make some of those early discoveries was something that I loved and then informed other aspects of the audio in the game.
I always played games growing up. I loved them for the worldbuilding and the interactivity. Then after I left drama school, I had lots of friends who were actors who were doing voiceover for games and motion capture for games, and then just had a bit of a light bulb moment and was like, "Oh my gosh, someone must be directing them. That's something that I'd love to do." It feels like such a privilege to have been selected for Breakthrough and it also feels incredibly affirming and also really liberating that an organisation as incredible as BAFTA is championing you and supporting you.
I think it can be incredibly hard to break into the creative industries, especially as a freelancer, and I know that I'm certainly always thinking about what the next job is and how I'm going to make it work and how to try and build a sustainable career.
It's really exciting to have been given the opportunity to celebrate the journey that's led up to this point and to dream a bit and get excited about the future. In terms of Breakthrough as a program, it's something that I've been aware of for a really long time. I've admired the work of so many previous Breakthroughs. They're people that inspire me and excite me in this industry and certainly the peers on the Breakthrough list this year, I'm kind of astounded to be amongst them. So I'm really excited to get to know everyone and get started.
Voice and performance director Holly Reddaway (@hollyreddaway) has worked on a phenomenal 11 games releases in 2023, including one of the year’s biggest hitters, Baldur’s Gate 3.
— BAFTA (@BAFTA) November 29, 2023
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