"People always ask me for advice on how to get started in the VO business. My advice: 'Get this book'."
- Phil LaMarr, Actor Futurama, Family Guy, Metal Gear Solid
One great way of getting your ear (and then your voice) attuned to a variety of voices, inflections, accents and qualities is to go people watching, or people-listening, rather…
Find a fairly busy spot, like a mall, a zoo, a crowded lobby, café, etc, sit yourself down, and observe. Listen to how different people talk, take note of their pauses, inflections, their unique affectations and things you find interesting about them. Without appearing creepy, you might even pay attention to their mouths to see if there’s something specific they’re doing to create sounds.
If you think it might help, bring a note pad along so you can take notes on things you want to remember. Consider also bringing your quality check list with you so you can quantify for yourself the characteristics of the voices you’re hearing. In case you haven’t built a quality list yet, here are some examples to start with. Use them as a jumping-off point and add your own!
Calm Pointed Sincere Flustered Agitated Loving
Hypnotic Polite Warm Shrill Distant Brash
See how many different qualities a particular person’s voice might have: perhaps they have a calm, sincere, loving, polite voice, or maybe their voice is pointed and agitated. Mix and match to best describe the voice you are listening to, or add any qualities you become aware of that aren’t yet on your list.
We stress the importance of reading out loud. It may seem simple, and maybe you haven’t done it in years, but it can be hugely effective in improving everything from your acting to your ability to quickly assess a script, make choices, and pull the words off the page. Sir Ian McKellen claims that reading out loud was how he learned to act, and I think most of us will agree that he knows his stuff in that area. So, good enough for Sir Ian, good enough for us.
Here’s a simple exercise you can almost anywhere and on your own time: Pick three things to read. Any bit of written media will work. Start small if you want. A pamphlet, a matchbook, a newspaper article, a newspaper ad, a comic book, a shopping list, someone’s blog, anything. Over the course of the day, collect those three things. Now– and this is where it gets tricky –read them. Out loud.
Read each one at least once through, and if you’ve got time and you’re enjoying yourself, read them through again. See if each time through differs for you. See how the writings may be different from each other. Is one a story? Is one just trying to sell a product? Is one using a story to try and sell a product? Is one just a list of numbers on a receipt? If you’re having fun, give a different “character” to each one, or even switch it up within the writings.
You may not feel a change after doing this exercise, but trust us, it gets your brain and mouth working in all the right ways. Most importantly, as long as you’re reading out loud there is no wrong way to do this exercise. Unless of course you’re a monk who had, until this exercise, taken a vow of silence. Or if you’re in a library where they frown on doing anything out loud.
As a voice actor your job is not only to come in and do your voice acting, it is also to get the jobs that you will come in to do in the future, and almost more importantly to take care of your voice (and the future health of your voice).
Unfortunately though, sometimes, no matter how hard you fight to take care of yourself, you get sick. This has to be one of the worst things, since you feel like poo, but more than that, you can’t work (’cause you don’t sound like yourself) and you can’t audition for future work (since you don’t sound like yourself!). It is torture. Besides the inconvenience of illness or even the rescheduling or canceling of work, which is so hard, the not-auditioning can be even harder, since you have to make the call to not put yourself in the ring for jobs down the line.
I just had to talk with my agent about a client request audition for a video game from last week. At the end of the week, I was sick and I made the call to decline (hopeful that come this week I would be right as rain). Monday I got the call that they still wanted to hear me, but still under the weather so I begged off once again, but somehow it was harder this time. I sound a little better, what could screaming and yelling a little bit hurt?
Well, it can hurt everything, even coughing while being sick can strain the vocal folds which can possibly lead to nodules and even nodes. Knowing this, and having battled vocal strain in the past, I know it is the responsible thing to do, to not push my vocal health (since not only do I sound like a frog underwater, but pushing to record could permanently damage my vocal cords and future vocal health).
It is so hard to say no, to turn down work, and potential work, but ultimately as Yuri’s favorite arachno-human says “with great power comes great responsibility.” In my case it may not be power to save the world or throw killer spiderwebs, but I have the responsibility to take care of my voice so that I can have the power to use it! So I am begging off work with the hope that my responsibility to myself and possible jobs will pay off and come health, I will be ready and able to work once again.
Being sick can affect everyone, or as I like to say: Cause ’sick’ is just ’suck’ with an I for a You.
As actors we can sometimes become too focused on the craft of acting and neglect something that’s equally important: the business side of acting. This may not be as “fun”, but just as important as tuning your vocal instrument is finding out who might hire you to use your voice and where they are. It’s a pro-active way of forwarding your career in voice-over. So for a moment look at VO as a military objective. This week’s exercise focuses on selecting a few targets and doing a little recon, or research. And you won’t even need to get your hands dirty.
Start with what you like. For example, if you really like the show Naruto, you might search and find out that in the United States, Naruto is licensed by a company called Viz. A little more looking (with your friend Google) might turn up that the English dub for Naruto is recorded at Studiopolis. Voila! You now have a production company to add to your hit list when you have a demo to mail out! With commercials, you might have to be a little more investigative, but there are resources (such as adforum.com) out there that can help you find the ad agency who produced the commercial and who’s associated with the promotion of that product.
So, for this exercise, pick an area to start with: animation, video games, or commercials. Now choose three of your favorite shows/movies, video games or commercials. Begin to do a little Internet legwork. Find out who the production company is, and in the case of commercials, the ad agency who commissioned the spot. Try and discover if the company/agency casts their projects in-house, or if they have a relationship with a separate casting company. In some cases, you may even find that the same studio/ad agency produced more than one of your selections, then you know they’re definitely somebody you want to target.
There is plenty of information available on the Web, and a little digging could turn up e-mail addresses or maybe phone numbers that you could use to contact the company and find out who might be best to send your reel to. Start a file and keep the info you find for future reference. Good hunting!
