The Art of Voice Acting: the art and business of performing for voice over (25 page)

Question marks are opportunities for dramatic punctuation. I’m not referring to the punctuation mark—?. I’m referring to words or phrases in the copy that give you the opportunity to ask a question. If the copy specifically asks a question, you should make that clear with your performance. Question marks that do not ask questions are usually found in sentences that describe or explain something. Someplace in the sentence there will be an opportunity to answer the unasked question.

Find those spots and figure out your own answers to the questions. This woodshedding technique can be incredibly useful to bring your character to life because the answers you come up with are part of the character’s knowledge or history, which helps make the character real. Here’s a 30-second radio script with places noted where question marks present opportunities for discovering information noted in parentheses:

You can take this process as far as you like, even to the point of asking questions about every word in the script. As you choose the answers to the unasked questions, you will be creating the foundation of your character’s attitude and personality, and creating a context for your performance. Commit to the answers you come up with and use them as tools for giving your character life. However, be prepared to modify your answers as your character develops and as you receive direction from the producer.

An important part of the woodshedding process is to experiment with your choices out loud, exactly the way you intend to perform the lines. This means you can’t hold back just because you are afraid of what someone nearby might think. Always keep in mind that you are an actor, and as an actor, your job is to perform. And in order to create a great performance, you must rehearse the way you will be performing.

Be careful not to make the mistake of rehearsing and woodshedding silently or at a whisper. Unless you test your woodshedding and script analysis out loud, you can’t possibly know exactly what your performance will sound like. Your delivery might sound great in your head, but the minute you start performing on mic, it will almost always come out of your mouth sounding completely different from what you had in mind.

One of the keys to success in voice acting is to let go of any judgments, inhibitions, and concerns you might have about what you are doing. Leave your ego outside. Allow yourself to become the character in your script. If your delivery needs to be loud, go someplace where you can be alone to work on your performance.

The director in the front row of your mind is not there to judge you, but should be considered a coach and an advocate whose sole purpose is to make your performance better. There is an important difference between being critically analytical about your performance and judgmental.

Judgmental thinking would be:

• “The way I delivered that last copy was just horrible! I’ll never be able to do these lines right.”
  
• “I just can’t get into this character!”
  
• “I can’t do this kind of copy!”
  
• “I shouldn’t feel embarrassed when I do copy like this.”
  

Analytical, or critical, thinking would be:

• “I didn’t like the way I delivered the copy—it just didn’t seem real.”
  
• “I know I can be more effective than that last read.”
  
• “What can I do to make my character more believable?”
  

Judgmental thinking usually approaches the subject from a negative point of view, stops you in your tracks, and prevents you from discovering the solutions you need. Critical (analytical) thinking is constructive and helps move you toward solutions that will make your performance more believable. Of the two, judgmental thinking comes naturally to most people, while critical thinking is a learned skill.

When you leave your ego, judgments, and inhibitions in the car, you’ll be open to critically analyzing your script to achieve the best possible performance.
Chapter 10
, “The Character in the Copy,” will give you some tools and techniques for doing this.

While woodshedding and rehearsing, don’t just read your copy. Have a conversation with the listener. Talk
to
your audience, not
at
them, always striving to motivate, persuade, or move the listener to action. Remember that even if you are the only person in the booth, the
other
person is always there. Visualize the perfect person to hear the message, and talk
to
them. Talking
at
your audience will sound like you are either reading the script, selling the message, or acting. All of these perceptions are ineffective and ultimately result in the listener disconnecting from the story.

Only by taking the voice out of voiceover—in other words, creating a completely believable and compelling conversation—will you be able to draw the listener into your story. Although we refer to the craft as voice acting, or voiceover, the reality is that you are a storyteller. Remember:

• Use drama (
  emotional hooks
  ) to attract and hold attention.
  
• Talk in phrases, not word by word.
  
• Don’t read—tell, don’t sell.
  
• Don’t act—be authentic and real at all times.
  
• Let the content and subtext of the copy determine your dynamics.
  
• Have a conversation with the listener.
  
• Talk out loud to yourself to find hidden treasures in your delivery.
  
• Experiment with different attitudes, inflections, and emotions.
  
• Take out the punctuation marks in the script to make the copy flow more naturally and conversationally.
  
• Have a mental attitude that allows you to create a feeling of reality and believability. If you believe your character is real, your listener will.
  

Music can be a powerful woodshedding tool for helping you discover the emotional content, attitude, pacing, timing, and overall delivery style for a piece of copy. Experiment by rehearsing a script while playing an instrumental. Focus on matching your delivery to the mood, tempo, rhythm, and tone of the music. You’ll quickly discover that if you let the music guide you to your character, everything about your performance will change depending on the music you are working to. An upbeat music track will result in more smile, a quicker pace, and a brighter performance. A slower, dramatic music track will result in a more intense, dramatic, and emotional performance. By testing your performance against a variety of musical styles, you’ll be better prepared to make valid choices for your performance when you record your auditions and paid session work.

Of course, the music you rehearse with will never actually be used, so you can feel free to use your favorite instrumental CDs or downloaded files. Movie soundtracks are excellent for this technique because of the wide range of emotions and dramatic content. If you want to work with the same type of music that commercial producers use, you can visit any of the numerous online music libraries. Although these music libraries sell their music downloads, there is no charge for auditioning, or listening to the music. It’s relatively easy to select a genre and start listening to music as you work with your script.

Because your job as a voice actor is to provide dry voice tracks to your clients, I don’t recommend purchasing any library music. Of course, if you have the talent for providing complete production services, having some library music on-hand can certainly be a benefit.

There are literally dozens of online music libraries and the easiest way to find them is to simply enter an Internet search for the keywords:
production music library
.

Regardless of the type of voiceover script you might be working with, your job as a voice actor is to effectively communicate the message, often
attempting to reach the listener on an emotional level. The challenge is in figuring out how to do that.

We can borrow a basic concept of marketing and apply it to our woodshedding process to result in a powerful tool for creating an effective delivery. Whenever we want to communicate something to someone else, we need to do four things: 1) we need to get their attention, 2) we need to keep their attention, 3) we need to give them the information, and 4) we need to give them an opportunity to respond or act on what we’ve said.

In marketing, this is the process of
interrupt, engage, educate, and offer
. This process should not be confused with advertising. Although an advertisement might include these four components—and some of the best ads do—advertising is more about creating an interrupt and making a message memorable through repetition. Marketing is more about creating a unique aspect to the message that will make it memorable without repetition.

So, how do we apply this concept to voiceover? Glad you asked!

As you peruse your copy, woodshedding for the various elements discussed so far, take a close look at the first sentence or two. How can you speak those words in a way that will instantly take the listener’s mind off of what they are thinking and swing their attention towards you? Your interpretation of those first few words creates the
interrupt—
and there may be dozens of ways to do it! You might achieve it with a whisper, an emotional subtext, through tempo, or by speaking with an attitude in your tone of voice. Every script will be different, and there may be only a few ways that will work well with any given script. Many of the techniques explained earlier are specifically intended to help you to create a powerful Interrupt.

Now that you’ve got the listener’s attention the real work begins. In order to keep them listening you’ve got to
engage
them in the message. A well-written script will help, but the real secret to successful engagement is in the nuance and subtlety of your interpretation. You can’t just be reading the words. And if you sound at all like you are acting, or in any way phony, all credibility and believability will be lost. This step of engaging the listener requires a deep understanding of your character’s role in telling the story. This component is critical to an effective voiceover performance because it gets the listener involved and invested in the story.

Once the listener is invested in listening to the message, important information can be delivered to
educate
them. This part of a script is usually pretty obvious. It’s the description and price details, or the explanation of how something works. It’s often nothing more than raw, uninteresting information. But you can’t let it sound like that. You’ve put a lot of work into getting your listener invested in what you have to say. Don’t throw it all away now! By the time you get to the educational part of your story, your delivery needs to have evolved in such a way that the flow from interrupt through engagement and into education is imperceptible.

The final step in this process is the
offer
. This could be a tag delivered by a different voice, or it could simply be an address or phone number. The idea of the offer in marketing is to provide a safe and low-risk way for the audience to take the next step in the sales process. In advertising, this is referred to as a
call to action
. As with the other three components, the way you deliver the offer will be directly dependent upon the context of the script and your choices in how the story will be told.

These steps of
interrupt, engage, educate
, and
offer
must be positioned in that order for the communication to be effective. A properly written script will use this structure and may actually repeat it throughout the script with multiple interrupts, engagements, educational sections, and offers—but they will always follow that sequence.

Many inexperienced copywriters don’t understand basic marketing and advertising concepts and will leave one of the components out completely, or worse—begin the script with the offer. This sort of poorly-written copy is all too common. As a voice actor, it will be your job to bring the words to life—regardless of how they are written. When you master the various ways to incorporate
interrupt, engage, educate,
and
offer
into your delivery style, you will be far ahead of most other voice actors who will still be struggling with their basic interpretation.

It is only by woodshedding a script that you will be able to discover the most effective punctuation, phrasing, attitude, character, emotion, subtlety, nuance, and the meaning of words in the context of a story. You can’t change the words in a script, but as a voice actor, you have a tremendous amount of flexibility in determining how those words might be spoken. And that’s what the process of woodshedding and script analysis is all about.