I'm having a couple if issues with a scene in my quest.

The scene:
Phase 1: Player control is disabled. The player follows an NPC while the NPC moves to a location
Phase 2: Player control is enabled. The NPC says a line of dialogue. Phase end condition requires player input.
Phase 3: Player control is disabled. The NPC moves off to a new location with the player following.

The fist issue with the NPC dialogue in phase 2. There is usually no evidence of dialogue in the game other than the NPC idle, but on some occasions you to see it briefly flash up for less than half a second. I have tried it with both recoded silence and recorded speech because I read that silence can cause this problem, but it made no difference, I still get no sound in game and no subtitles (which are enabled in game). The NPC does use an idle which suggests it is saying some dialogue, but stays silent. I have tried having the dialogue in just phase 2 and extending it over phase 2 and 3 but there is no difference, as well as adding timers to the NPC actor.
Edit: Typical. Stuck on this problem for days and solve it minutes after making a post. For some reason I had to make the text longer. It was a short sentence but I had to add more characters until the character count turns bold. I would have nice to have known about this requirement but the CK gives no indication of it.

Less of a problem is at the start of phase 3 the NPC will start walking to its new location as soon as the scene starts as expected, but the player will just stand around for 10 seconds or so before running to catch up. Is there anything I can to to make the player follow more quickly. Max distance is set to 256 but the NPC goes way further than this before the player moves.

Any help with ether of these would be greatly appreciated.