Voice Acting For Dummies

by David Ciccarelli

  By their very design, these types of reads sound natural. This naturalness ideally connects with the audience in a more direct and affable way. Think of the real-person read as a form of permission marketing where the listener is welcoming the advertisement. It carries a greater currency in a relational sense. An example of permission marketing is if you catch someone’s attention and she continues to listen, this person has allowed you into her world and is more likely to consider or value what you’re saying.

  With this type of read, the audience must relate to you as a real person. Sounding like you’re speaking to an audience of one, when in reality you’re speaking to hundreds or thousands if not millions of people, is a skill that takes time and practice to develop.

  The following sections delve into the characteristics of the real-person character and give you some pointers when using these characters in your voice-over work.

  Becoming more conversational

  In order for your read to sound like a real person, you want to make sure you sound informal and genuine. Just like walking a dog, you have to train your read to stay authentic, which takes discipline.

  Furthermore, these tips can help your real-person read sound more conversational:

  Speak slowly. Reads come across with greater sincerity when spoken at a slightly slower pace. When people rush through their words, they can either sound like they’re hiding something or that what they have to say is more of a sales pitch. Although this is true, you may find that commercials don’t afford you the luxury of reading slower because they contain too much copy to read at a slower pace. Commercials require that the voice actor reads the copy within the time allotted for the spot.

  When you’re nervous, you may react by speeding up in order to finish more quickly. Quickening the pace can get your read all out of sorts, potentially resulting in stumbling over words, slurring words, or sounding like you’re out of breath. Keeping a steady metronome-like tempo gives you the freedom to massage each and every word and give it the proper attention it deserves while observing punctuation and places to breathe.

  Speak naturally. Reads also sound more conversational when they don’t sound as if you’re reading the words or that the dialogue is contrived, meaning that it’s deliberately created instead of arising naturally.

  Speak with conviction. Sounding genuine also implies that you believe what you’re saying. Authenticity and being able to relate to your audience are very important for this type of read. (Refer to the later section, “Extending authenticity” for more information.)

  Speak conversationally. Other factors that can make you sound more conversational are pitch, tone, phrasing, intonation, and fluctuation. Being able to control your voice helps to shape how your voice comes across from a tone perspective and also how effectively you’re able to use your instrument to deliver a message. Chapter 5 is full of great information specific to using your instrument and goes over elements such as tone, pitch, and so on.

  Coming across as real

  A real-person read requires you to put aside your professional voice-over voice and just be real. Even though your trained voice usually serves as a benefit, sometimes the client wants you to sound less polished with a real-person read.

  To help deliver a read as a real person, you can picture the person you’re talking to. You may even go as far as pinning a picture up in your studio and speaking to a photograph of a loved one as if that person is the audience. Perhaps you even need to gesture with your hands or pretend that someone is seated beside you. If you find that looking at a friend or family member helps to inspire a more conversational, genuine read, go for it!

  One of the beauties of voice acting is that the audience doesn’t have a front row seat to your recording session nor does anyone else. You don’t need to be embarrassed because no one can see you when recording at home. Setting yourself at ease is critical when performing a real-person read.

  Extending authenticity

  Sounding authentic is an important aspect of delivering a real-person read, although doing so isn’t easy, especially when you’re recording a commercial or a piece that involves persuasion or the selling of an idea. Authenticity is very important in voice acting because listening audience members need to feel that what you’re telling them is true and that you’re in agreement with what you’re reading 100 percent. To be authentic, you need to make sure the listener feels as though you, as the voice actor, match the role and who the listener expects you to be. People who come with a broadcast radio background in particular often struggle with sounding like a real person. They often fall back into the default announcer or on-air persona when interpreting a script.

  You may hear someone say that if you can fake authenticity in this business, you’ve got it made, but that isn’t necessarily the case. If your heart isn’t in sync with a piece of copy or your role, or a conflict of interest comes into play, you won’t sound authentic. Voice acting requires that you immerse yourself in the role you’re being asked to perform, which may require that you leave certain aspects of your voice or speaking style behind, such as a radio voice, a regional accent, or a shift in intonation.

  If you really want to sound like you mean something, believing it to be true helps! If you don’t believe or agree with what you’re saying, passing on the audition or job is a good idea. (Chapter 9 discusses questions you can ask yourself to determine whether you want to audition for a job.)

  Meeting the Narrator

  Storytelling is where the narrator is most at home. Omniscient, courteous, and honest, a narrator’s job is to provide an audio landscape for the listener, briefing the listener on background information, posing questions, telling a story, and providing solutions as he or she guides the audience through a program or documentary. Narrators can be male or female, and the most important factors are that they can communicate clearly and engagingly. These sections explain what an effective narrator looks like.

  Suspending the audience’s disbelief

  Although the listener is quite aware that the narrator is only telling a story, no matter how fantastical it is, the listener can suspend his or her belief and decides to enjoy the story. The listener embraces the narrator’s world and the author’s intended different reality to be entertained.

  As a narrator, you can help the audience suspend its disbelief. These sections give you some pointers to make your reads believable, no matter what.

  Knowing how to make your read believable

  Your primary role as a narrator is to draw your audience into the story you’re telling and to get your audience to temporarily let go of preconceived notions for the duration of the commercial, audiobook, or animation. You need to believe what you’re saying. In order to do so, place yourself in the time, place, and minds of the voices you provide, which can help your audience follow suit and become more invested in the story you’re telling.

  For example, one of the greatest storytellers today, Pat Fraley, teaches voice actors how to create an environment wherein the audience signs a contract so to speak with the narrator to temporarily suspend their disbelief.

  If you, as the narrator, slip in and out of character or overdo it, the listener will notice and lose faith in you, which breaks the suspension of disbelief. By maintaining your presence and keeping to the contract you signed as narrator with the audience (as Fraley suggests), meaning that your read is consistent and unbiased, you can keep the listener engaged and earn the listener’s trust.

  Focusing on the narrator and audiobooks

  Narrating audiobooks is a marathon that requires the ultimate balancing act of artistic and technical endurance coupled with the ability to continuously suspend the audience’s disbelief. Because some audiobooks are so long, they may take up to three weeks to record. As a result, you need to be able to pace yourself and preserve your voice.

  If you�
��re narrating an audiobook, you can utilize these suggestions to help suspend the audience’s disbelief:

  Engage the listener. Give the listener a reason to listen to what you have to say. Be a solid voice that they can rely on to share information as it unfolds.

  Make and keep a contract with the listener to suspend their disbelief. Do everything in your power to ensure that you don’t break the illusion that you have transported the listener to a different time, place, or season of life. When recording, remember that you need to know everything about the world the story inhabits, lending the omniscient perspective of someone who is looking in.

  Give a consistent performance. Stay consistent with the narrator’s voice and anything else that requires consistency throughout the recording, such as character voices, accents, voice ages, and so on.

  Have intuitive timing. Develop a feel for how you pace your read as well as how much time you give to punctuation marks, such as periods or commas. You may find that the text sometimes sounds better when timed differently than what the printed page may present in terms of punctuation.

  Develop multiple convincing and separate character voices. If a book you’re working on has many characters, you need to give them each distinct voices. You may want to keep track of each character’s vocal attributes in a document for reference or record how each character sounds to remind yourself of how to voice them. Giving each character its own identity can help you to clearly differentiate which character is speaking for your benefit and the benefit of the listener. (Refer to Chapter 5 for more assistance.)

  Be an authentic narrator with an independent voice. A narrator’s voice needs to be distinct and set apart from the characters’ voices in the story. You may find that the narrator’s voice most closely resembles your own natural speaking voice with a touch of authoritativeness. When shaping your narrator voice, make sure that you’re comfortable with voicing it and that you can perform using this voice for long stretches of time.

  Interpret the author’s intent. Try to understand why the author has positioned things the way she has. What are her motivations? What means the most to her and how can you follow through with her intentions? Good narrators are able to grasp an author’s concept or vision. You can achieve it by reading the full manuscript before recording, and if possible, having a chat with the author. If the author isn’t living or is unavailable, the person who commissioned the audiobook may have an understanding of how the story should be told.

  Transport the listener to a different time and place. Use your voice and the tools provided to you in the text to take the listening audience to the landscape, soundscape, and time period the book was written in. Accents, manners of speaking, and production elements, such as sound effects and music (if appropriate), can help with this.

  Maintain a solid presence. Consistency is key for narrators. Audiobooks are more of a marathon than a sprint. Be sure to keep the contract (suspension of disbelief), keep your voices consistent, and stay true to the author’s intent.

  Bring the story to life. Here you get to have a lot of fun! Establishing all the voices, creating the characters, and setting the scene for a story well told is an exciting experience for actors. You get to play all the roles in this book, so have fun with it.

  When you meet these criteria, you can feel great about your work and can also be assured that your audience will connect with the story, relate to the characters, and have full confidence in your ability as the narrator to captivate, amuse, and delight.

  Telling a story

  As a narrator you’re a storyteller, which isn’t always as easy as it looks or sounds. You have to consider the who, what, when, where, why, and how as they pertain to the story in general, the characters, the context, and so on. In a way, you may find that you’re just as much a researcher as you are a storyteller. Knowing everything there is to know about the story you are telling provides a solid foundation for every word that you speak.

  Think of yourself as a detective of sorts and use the text as your guide when seeking clues about the author’s intent and how you can best communicate what the author prepared for you and the intended audience. Although punctuation is important as you communicate to the audience, don’t let punctuation dictate all that your voice must do. Use inflection to color words in order to authentically express what the author has in mind.

  As you tell a story, consider how you will design unique character voices that suit each role and give your characters diverse vocal traits that set them apart so the listening audience can distinguish them. This task can be fun, especially if you have several characters to voice. The author tends to help you with the clues presented in the book. The author is your greatest ally when it comes to creating believable characters. Creating a variety of characters is easier when you know what you can do to differentiate them from each other, especially vocally.

  Keeping the voices as separate as possible can help you to more clearly remember what each character sounds like and why they sound the way they do. Great narrators consider the following criteria to shape and differentiate the voices of their characters in a book:

  Gender: Before you hit record, you need to consider what the gender of each character is so that you can shape how they all sound. If you’re reading for characters who are the opposite gender, consider how you would speak. If you’re a man, how would you voice female characters? If you’re a woman, how would you voice male characters? Good narrators are able to utilize their vocal range. Men sometimes need to speak slightly higher when voicing females and women generally deepen their voices by using the lower end of their range to voice male characters. The falsetto voice (think the Beach Boys) isn’t necessarily the best way to go for men voicing women, although using the upper register with a lighter tone and different vocal placement may do the trick.

  Pitch: Everyone has a natural vocal range where they normally speak, sometimes referred to in singing as tessitura. Think about where your character’s speaking voice rests and where it’s more comfortable. You can use pitch to differentiate characters. Just make sure that you’re comfortable performing in the vocal range that you have assigned to each character. You can also use pitch to express emotion. The higher the pitch is, the more emotional the audience may perceive a read.

  Accent: Giving characters accents is a wonderful way to make them stand out and inform the character’s identity. Make sure that the accent is believable and consistent throughout the audiobook. Many voice actors work with accent and dialect coaches to master new accents to add to their repertoire.

  Qualities: Believable characters are important. In order to be believable, you need to know the characters inside out. Give each character his or her own set of qualities. List those qualities and use them as tools to shape how you read for each particular character. For example, if one of your characters has a kind temperament, speak kindly and with care. You’ll also want to consider physical qualities. If your character has dentures for instance, you’ll need to learn how to speak as one who has a set of dentures.

  Look for clues about the characters that may tell you how they talk. How old are they? Do they have anything specific about their physicality that determines how they speak? Are they from a place that has a regional dialect you can tap into? If you want, you can also consider borrowing vocal traits from friends and family.

  Knowing how the story ends

  A good narrator also knows how the story will end. To do so, the narrator reads the script before recording to have a good idea of how everything plays out before the audience does. As the narrator, you don’t want the ending to surprise you. The more you know, especially about how things turn out, the more convincing your read will be.

  The more comfortable you are with telling a story, the greater the likelihood that your listeners will come along for the ride because they trust your knowledge as the narrator and are sec
ure in where you’re headed. By starting your work with the end in sight, you can lead your listeners through the peaks and valleys of a well-woven tale and truly function as the omniscient narrator you are meant to be.

  Going online for help with plot and character development

  A number of tools online can help you succeed in your quest to narrate to the best of your ability, enabling you to know more while saying less. Even if you have read the book, you may find these resources to be helpful when researching because they can provide additional context for your read and analysis to aid in developing character voices.

  Many free online resources break down books in terms of plot, characters, and so on. Some even go chapter by chapter. When time is of the essence or you want to deepen your understanding of the book, its characters, and your role as narrator, the following are great resources to discover and invest some of your time in:

  JiffyNotes: One of the reasons why we really like JiffyNotes, which focuses on literary analysis, is because of the chapter summaries they provide, which can come in handy if you want to get some context at the chapter level. Other features of JiffyNotes include access to a book’s historical context, main characters, points to ponder, and the plot summary.

  SparkNotes: What appealed to us about SparkNotes was that you can learn so much for so little. Context, summary, characters, and analysis are available for free by navigating through the section devoted to each book. You can also purchase to download the SparkNote as a PDF or an ebook for under $5. Being able to do so comes in handy when you’re in a bind and need to take the material with you in places where you can’t connect to the Internet. You can even print and read it on a plane or anywhere else.

  CliffsNotes: Did you know that CliffsNotes offers free audio summaries of some of the books in podcast form? In addition, you can also download iPhone and iPod apps for certain books to take them with you on the go. Most are available for about $1.