FIRE POETS
Human connection
Audio veteran Adam Chapman on his new voice production studio, Fire Poets, and the threat of AI
Adam Chapman loves his job. His face lights up when he talks about it. Even towards the start of his career in videogame voice production in the early 2000s, when he was required to sift through thousands of lines of dialogue in his role as a sound engineer, his enthusiasm for the task would remain undimmed. “I just never got bored,” he says. “I’d just listen and listen and listen and listen, and I just loved it.”
Chapman worked at Babel Media in Brighton in the mid-2000s, before going on to found the voice production company Liquid Violet in 2011. That was purchased by videogame services company Keywords Studios in 2014, and Chapman remained as director until 2021, when the pandemic prompted him to pause and reflect, just as it did many others. The company’s growth under Keywords inevitably meant more staff and bigger overheads, with a growing focus on money and targets. It made Chapman realise he had been moving farther away from the things he loved most of all.