The Art of Voice Acting: the art and business of performing for voice over (38 page)
Read The Art of Voice Acting: the art and business of performing for voice over Online
Authors: James Alburger
OK, you’ve just completed several weeks of a voiceover workshop and you’re excited about getting started on your new career path. You received lots of positive feedback and encouragement during the workshop, and now you’re ready to produce your voiceover demo, right? Probably not!
The single biggest mistake beginning voice actors make is to produce their demo too soon.
The reality of voiceover is that unless you already have a strong performing background, you are simply not going to be ready for your demo after taking a single workshop—or, for that matter, possibly several workshops or even months of private coaching. You certainly won’t be ready for your demo after just reading this book. Mastering your performing skills may take a considerable amount of time. Producing your demo too
soon may result in a presentation and performance quality that is likely to be much less than is needed to be successful in this business. Producing your demo too soon is simply a waste of time and money, and can potentially affect your credibility as a performer later on.
Before you even think about having your demo produced, make sure you have acquired both the business skills and good performing habits necessary to compete in this challenging business. Remember that there are a lot of other people trying to do the same thing as you. Anything you can do to improve your abilities and make your performing style just a bit unique will be to your advantage. Study your craft, learn acting skills, and develop a plan to market yourself
before
you do your demo. Take
lots
of classes—you’ll learn something new from each coach! Acting and improvisation classes will help you develop your performing skills and voiceover classes, workshops, and conferences will hone those skills for the unique demands of voiceover work. If possible, find a voiceover coach who will work with you one-on-one to polish your technique before you go into the studio.
So, you’re probably asking the question: “How will I know when I’m ready to do my demo?” Good question! In her
Demo and Marketing Magic for Voice Actors
workshop and E-book, my coaching partner, Penny Abshire, breaks this question down to four possible answers.
- The short answer is:
You’ll know. - The medium answer is:
You’ll know when you’re ready for your demo after you have the proper training, you’ve researched and studied other professional voice talent and their demos, know what the marketplace is looking for and feel confident you can deliver at the same level as other professionals doing similar voiceover work. - The long answer is:
You’ll know you’re ready to produce your demo when you can be handed
any
script—cold—and, within two or three takes, you can perform that script at a level comparable to other professional talent. You also feel confident that you can get work with your demo that is enough to cover the costs of its production. - The best answer is:
You’ll know you’re ready to produce your demo when you can stop asking yourself the question “Am I ready to produce my demo?” Which takes us back to: You’ll know!
The craft of performing for voiceover is, for most people, an acquired skill. There are some rare individuals who are natural-born performers, but most of the working professionals in this business started out by mastering their fundamental acting skills and moving on from there.
Of course, you certainly have the option to take some short-cuts and produce your demo after only reading a book or taking a single class. I wouldn’t recommend it, but you can do it. And you may get lucky.
Remember this: Your performance, as heard on your demo, will be compared to every other demo a producer listens to—and most producers listen to a
lot
of voiceover demos. After a few hundred demos, it’s not hard to separate the great talent from the “good,” and the “good” from the rank beginners. Most producers will know within about the first five seconds of listening to a demo. You want your demo to present you as one of the great talent and keep them listening a lot longer than that first five seconds!
To do that, you must become an expert at communicating with drama and emotion before you have your demo produced. Here are some things that will help you get where you want to be quickly.
- Study acting.
Acting is the key to an effective performance. Learn how to act so your performance sounds natural and believable, and learn how to use your voice and body to express drama and emotional tension. - Do your exercises.
Set up a daily regimen for doing your voice exercises. Get into the habit of keeping your voice in top condition. Your voice is the “tool” of you trade—take care of it. - Take classes and workshops.
Have an attitude of always learning. You will learn something new from each class and workshop you take or repeat. The voiceover business is constantly adapting and new trends become popular each year. You need to be ready to adapt as new trends develop. Voiceover workshops will give you a foundation upon which you can develop your craft and business. - Read other books about voiceover.
Every author on this subject presents his or her material in a slightly different manner. You may also learn new techniques or get some fresh ideas from reading a variety of books on the subject. If you learn only one thing from reading a book, it was well-worth its purchase price. - Practice your skills and techniques.
When you are working on a piece of copy, rehearse your performance with an attitude of continually perfecting it. Have a solid understanding of the techniques you are using and polish your performance in rehearsal. - Get personalized coaching.
Every performer is unique and it takes personalized coaching to truly discover and refine that uniqueness. As valuable as they may be, you won’t get this from a voiceover workshop. Seek out a qualified private coach to help you become the best you can be before you produce your demo.
The tendency of many people who enter the world of voiceover is that they want to fast-track their training and rush into promoting themselves as “professional” voice talent. This inevitably means producing a demo before they are ready. There are several companies who take advantage of
this natural tendency for instant gratification. They will teach a very encouraging introductory class for a minimal fee, then up-sell to a very expensive three-, four-, or five-day workshop, often held at a recording studio in a different city. As icing on the cake, they will include, or offer for an additional fee, a complete demo session as part of the course.
Consider this: Would you be ready to perform at Carnegie Hall after only a week of piano lessons? Would you be ready to perform major surgery after only a single year of medical training? Of course not! It would be foolish to even consider such things. Professional competency in any craft is only achieved after consistent study and considerable experience. It never happens overnight. Yet a beginning voice actor will often jump at the opportunity to spend several thousand dollars to take a fast-track voiceover course so they can get their demo produced long before they have acquired either the essential business or performing skills. Although the information and basic training may be of some value, the production of a demo after only a few days of training inevitably results in a demo that is both costly and unmarketable.
Before you spend the money for a demo, I strongly encourage you to study both the business and craft of voiceover to the point where there is no doubt in your mind that you are ready to get that demo produced.
Your voiceover demo must be “great!” It cannot be merely “good.” To create a great demo, you must make the effort to develop and hone your performing skills. Since your demo may directly result in bookings, it is extremely important that you be able to match the level of your demo performance when under the pressure of a session. It is quite easy for a studio to create a highly produced, yet misrepresentative demo that gives the impression of an extremely talented and polished performer. If the performer’s actual abilities are less that what is depicted on the demo, the shortcomings will be quickly revealed during a session.
Your demo should be professionally produced by someone who knows what they are doing. Even if you’ve assembled a top-of-the-line, state-ofthe-art home studio, without practical knowledge of the business and extensive production experience, don’t even think you can put a demo together at home and expect it to sound professional. Even with my many years of experience as an audio producer and sound designer, I still want the assistance of a good director when I’m in the booth. It is extremely difficult for one person to deal with both the engineering and performing aspects of producing a demo at the same time. You need to be focused on your performance and not dealing with any equipment.
You need a director to listen to your performance objectively, help you stay focused, and help get you in touch with the character in the copy. In today’s world of voiceover, it is essential that you develop self-directing skills because you may find yourself recording many projects in the privacy of your home studio. However, performing effectively without a director, or by directing yourself, is very challenging and it’s the last thing you want to do when producing your demo. Although many professional voice actors believe they don’t need a director—and can actually perform quite well without one—all voice actors do, in fact, need a director to bring out their best work. The top professionals will tell you that they perform much better when they have a good director to guide them through their performance.
When you go to the studio to produce your demo, you should consider the session to be just like a real commercial recording session. You need to be able to get to your best performance, in three or four takes. If you need more than six or seven takes to get the right delivery, you may not be ready. Realistically, anything after about the fifth or sixth take should be aimed at fine-tuning your delivery. Be careful that you don’t spend a lot of time just getting into the groove of the performance for a script. If you do that, your end result may not be an accurate reflection of your abilities. The same can be true of over-rehearsing your copy. Too much rehearsal can result in setting a groove for your performance that may be difficult to break out of. Your copy should be rehearsed just enough so you are comfortable with it, yet can be directed into alternative deliveries.
I know of one voice actor who was booked through an agent based solely on the demo. The demo sounded great and had logos of major television networks and other advertisers on its cover. The impression was that this performer had done a lot of work and was highly skilled.
The performance was recorded during an ISDN session in San Diego with the performer in a New York studio. A few minutes into the session, it became apparent that the voice actor could not take direction and would not be able to perform to the caliber of the demo. The producer gracefully ended the session and a different voice actor was hired to complete the session the following day. The producer refused to pay the talent agency’s commission because she felt the talent agency had misrepresented the voice actor’s abilities. The original performer was never told that the session was unsatisfactory and actually sent a nice thank-you note to the producer. The performer did get paid, but the recording was never used.
It turned out that the agent had never worked directly with the performer. They had been promoting the person based solely on a highly produced demo. A few days later, it was learned that the performer was actually attempting to memorize the copy due to a problem with dyslexia that made it difficult to perform the lines live, as written.
The agent later apologized to the producer and mentioned that this performer had done some excellent self-marketing, had extensive stage experience, and presented a very professional image during the interview. There were only two problems: The first was that the performer had created
a demo that clearly exceeded actual abilities. A secondary problem was that the agent signed this performer without first testing those abilities with a cold-reading. Bottom line: You
must
be able to perform to the level of your demo when booked for a real session.
There are two schools of thought for demos. One suggests that a demo should reveal the performer’s range of versatility through a variety of examples showing different emotions, attitudes, and characters. This type of demo reveals a wide range of vocal styles, placements, and character voices, and is commonly used to market for animation and video games.
The other approach to a voiceover demo focuses on the performer being the most real and natural person he or she can be while demonstrating a range of emotion within the natural delivery of their own voice. This is the most common approach to commercial, narration, IVR, and telephone messaging demos.
Good voice actors can do dozens of voices, emotions, attitudes and characters because they are able to find a place in their body from which to center the character and place the voice—even if the character and voice originate from their natural personality. Other good voice actors have developed a highly defined performance style that is at the center of everything they do. These two basic types of performers are the
character
and
celebrity
voice actors discussed in detail in
Chapter 10
.
Regardless of which approach works best for you, it is the range and variety of performance in a demo that represent a voice actor’s abilities. The essence of who you are needs to be present in every track of your demo. You need to capitalize on your strong points and present them in the best possible manner in your demo. The range of attitudes, emotions, and characters you can express during a voiceover performance is your own, unique,
vocal versatility
. Your strongest, most dynamic, and most marketable voice is called your
money voice
. This is the voice that will get you the work and may eventually become your trademark or signature voice. Your other voices are icing on the cake but are necessary to clearly show your range and versatility as a voice actor.