Brush up on your monster accents, Canadian thesps. Voice work in video game production has become a gold mine for performers.

ACTRA, the country’s performers union, earlier this week told an all-party finance committee on Parliament Hill that its Montreal members last year collectively surpassed the $1 million mark in earnings from video game motion-capture and voicing work.

Gaming giants like Ubisoft, THQ and WB Games are finding Montreal in particular offers varied voice talent for blockbuster product destined for the world market.

That voice acting is also providing much-needed narration work for local actors after Montreal’s once-mighty animation business, underpinned by the 1990s success of Cinar, has greatly reduced in size.

“The [Montreal] voice community that used to make a living in animation has, for the most part, made a nice transition to video games,” Raymond Guardia, ACTRA’s eastern regional director, told Playback Daily.

And with generous tax credits having lured video game giants like Ubisoft, THQ and Warner Bros. Games to Montreal to ramp up production, digital acting work for ACTRA members could prove an even bigger draw.

Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed 2, Prince of Persia 3 and Rainbow 6 titles, for example, offered a host of sound studio work for ACTRA members, before going on to earn the Canadian video game award for best technology and best visual art, among other trophies.

And Canadian actor/rapper Drake recently voiced Epic’s Gears of War 3, to be released in April 2011.

That said, the transition of voice work from traditional animation to game production has its challenges.

For starters, an industry that mostly targets pale teen males in basements as yet holds out little voice work for women.

“Most of the games are shoot-em-up or capture-the-treasure – it’s a boy-heavy genre,” Guardia observes.

That’s in contrast to traditional animation or narration where high-pitched female voices were long kept busy with dialogue for young children, farmyard animals or other fluffy characters.

In addition, the interactivity of video games means accompanying voice work has actors working off of complex, non-linear scripts where dialogue branches and loops.

And ever-deeper video games have far more dialogue. That means actors must offer a host of vocal responses to the many scenarios and situations a gamer may steer the content.

Beyond the voice, game dialogue may also have actors working in front of 3D motion capture cameras to make games look more real.

Here the challenge is marrying a performance to a voice as actors jump, run or fall against a green screen in spandex unitards covered in white tracker balls.

ACTRA’s Guardia insists Ubisoft and other game publishers and developers expanding into Toronto may eventually make them major employers for actors in the industry’s largest production center.

“Montreal got a jump on things, but this is a booming industry and five years from now, the landscape will be far different,” he said.