The Art of Voice Acting: the art and business of performing for voice over (60 page)

It was 1995. I checked my voicemail
:
“This is your agent,” the voicemail message said. “Be at Fuller Recording Studio at 2 PM August 4th. You’ll voice a commercial for Rainbo Breads. The contract’s at the date. Bring it to our offices after the session.”

Easy. All I had to do was drive to a studio, go inside, and after a short conference with the producer or client, read a script into a microphone. The audio engineer did all the rest.

My voiceover agents (six of them in various cities) all began urging me to refresh my skills as an audio engineer. “Laura Stevens already has a recording studio in her home. So does Jeb Brown,” one taunted me.

“My voice talents who have studios are getting more jobs,” said another. “Being an audio engineer as well as a voice talent will mean more money for us both and you already have the skills.” I turned a deaf ear.

Now, I look back with regret for procrastinating putting in my studio but I first had to build a studio of my own. Where to start? When a student wanted a voiceover demo, I produced the demo in someone else’s studio. I lost thousands upon thousands in revenue not to mention jobs. I was bewildered. Live and learn.

I first became an audio engineer about 20 years ago as the Creative Director of a large audio production house. We created jingles, songs, and libraries used worldwide by radio and TV stations. Once, I created and engineered a 38-CD library of jingles and voiceovers! The firm had three cushy recording studios that looked like spaceships! There were hundreds of knobs and sliders on the engineering console. Sometimes, we used two engineers because one person couldn’t manipulate all of the knobs at the same time. In the four years without a recording studio in which to work, my engineering skills were dormant. What’s more, I knew nothing of the digital recording revolution.

With advice from audio engineer friends, I purchased digital recording equipment, a new computer, soundproofing materials, and prepared a room in my home. Since then, I’ve spent many thousands more. A studio is always
a work in progress
! We even
replaced windows in our home with triple pane glass and hung multiple pairs of heavily lined draperies.

Now, I also have a state-of-the-art portable recording studio on my laptop. My Internet “stick” provides instant Wi-Fi. I travel worldwide serving clients, teaching at universities, presenting workshops and symposiums. Not only can I record at home in my wonderful studio, I can record in a tiny Swiss village or in the rain forests of Panama. I’ve done both traveling the globe! I’m wired for sound!

So, I wear two hats… one as a voiceover talent/studio singer, the other, as an audio engineer. Do I get paid double? Not often. Can I ask a client for my full audio engineering rate when I also am the talent? Today, most clients expect a one-price package. Competition is fierce. Too many people are eager to record lowball jobs for practically
no wage
! That hurts us all!

Everything’s changed.

That’s not to say I don’t love—and I mean, really, really love— being an audio engineer. I do. I am proud of my skills. It’s fun to add effects, aircraft engine noises that move from one speaker to another giving the effect of motion, animal sounds, African drums, night sounds on the farm, creating what radio buffs used to call, “theatre of the mind.” Postproduction is so creative. It’s magical. For me, being an audio engineer, especially creative postproduction, is the most fun I have as a voiceover talent or singer.

Quite some time ago, I began urging online “pay to play” websites to separate experienced audio engineers from those who were beginners or who did not record at all. Being capable of recording oneself voicing an audition is not the same as calling oneself a professional audio engineer! Maybe someday this important distinction will be observed by online casting sites. At this writing, that has not happened. Audio engineers with vast expertise are not set apart.

Some projects are extremely complicated. When I see these types of jobs on an online casting site, I wonder how many are auditioning whose recording skills are inadequate. The client chooses a voice, assuming that that person can also engineer it. Stories abound concerning botched projects, time wasted, nerves jangled, because someone took on a project for which they were not equipped!

What to charge?

When you audition for (or accept) a voiceover project requiring audio engineering, you must first decide if it is worth your time. If the price is too low and the hours too great, pass it up (unless you like working for nothing or consider it a free learning experience!). If it is “workable,” name your fee. Be sure to mention that changes (redos) cost extra. Specify what constitutes a redo for which you
expect to be paid. Of course, you agree to fix a mistake if you’re at fault.

What is your time worth? Estimate how many hours a project might require to both voice and engineer it. Every job should have a “bottom line” below which you will not go. Some engineers feel that one hour of finished (playable) audio requires about two-and-a -half hours of recording and engineering. Many websites contain budget guides. Check it out.

Be cautious about voiceover projects with unrealistic (or undoable) expectations. That is, read the specs carefully. Does the project require recording multiple voice talents who come to your studio? That’s time-consuming. Does the project need special music or effects you may have to find or buy? Is the project long-form audio (an audio book or other lengthy piece)? Must you divide the work into segments over a month-long period or more, turning down other jobs that come your way? Do you have a day job that precludes spending long hours in your studio?

Never hesitate to ask advice from those more advanced than you. Budgeting projects is a skill unto itself. You may want to offer to pay an advisor to help you with a workable budget. It will be well worth it.

If you’re so inclined, I encourage you to hone your audio engineering skills and keep improving them over-time. But know your capabilities and don’t over-promise or take on projects you shouldn’t until those skills are well in place.

Maybe you’ll stay at a rudimentary audio engineering level, someone capable of recording a voice audition, but incapable of postproduction. That’s OK. Not everyone will become a skilled audio engineer. Not everyone will succeed at voiceovers either. We’re all unique. It’s a big world and all of us can contribute. Keep up with new technology. Investigate new recording software and hardware. Enroll in a class at your local community college or a recording studio. Many cities are offering audio engineering instruction of various types. There are “support groups” and community groups in some locales.

Pay for a few private lessons from an audio engineer at a local studio. Ask an engineer if you can observe a session or two. Perhaps you can even offer to be an unpaid recording studio apprentice or helper to soak up the studio environment and sit in on some sessions. Several students of mine became office workers at recording studios. They later emerged as engineers! On -the-job training’s always best.

We live in an “instant world” and becoming a really accomplished audio engineer is not “instant.” Like playing the piano and tennis, it takes time for experience to grow. Go for it!

I’ve worked in video production and broadcast for a little over 15 years and I’ve hit the record button with a variety of people facing a mic; professional VO talent, show hosts, reporters, and even producers who love to hear themselves speak. Overall the one thing I love about recording or listening to voices is how unique every voice is and how each voice talent handles their work differently.

Some of the talent I’ve recorded would voice a piece and then want to hear it back before recording their next take, while some would just voice it once and walk away.

Some just seemed to care while others didn’t. I once worked with this guy who would have me press play on a video tape and he would just ad-lib a 2- to 3-minute segment on the fly. This other girl, whom everyone thought was a diva, was very receptive when I gave her some direction when no one else bothered to tell her that her delivery was too flat. I have no real experience teaching or coaching anyone, but I’ve been producing long enough to tell her how
not
to do it.

My best work always comes from those recordings where the voice talent and I are working as a team, and it is always a pleasure working with a professional who takes their work seriously and truly cares about doing the best job they can. When I’m recording someone who just doesn’t care… the quality of the whole production suffers, and that’s not good for any of us.

It’s hard to remember exactly when we got our first coloring book, but we do remember it was fun. At first, we sprayed crayon colors all over the page, without a care as to whether we stayed inside the lines or not. As we became toddlers, our coloring got more refined. We learned boundaries, we assigned certain colors to certain objects, and were more discerning in our choice of colors. A few years later found us drawing with colored pencils or markers. Later still, we marveled at the results of paint-by-numbers, and then on to watercolors and pastels.

The coloring books were random, assorted pictures, themed pictures or page-by-page pictures that laid out a story. And each one of these pages had the same format: a black outline on a white page that showed a picture. At a glance, we could see a cabin on a lake, with smoke rising from its chimney; a boat tethered to a pier, fishing poles jutting out at its end; a winding road leading up toward the cabin, and a big, broad apple tree on its front lawn, with majestic mountains towering behind the cabin, backed by a sky full of puffy clouds and a bright sun.

As children, we looked at this black and white tableau and made some decisions: the sky would be blue, we’d leave the clouds white; the cabin would be brown and the lawn would be green; we’d apply the same colors to the apple tree, but add some red for the apples; the road might be charcoal; the lake would be blue, the mountains might be gray, and the sun would be yellow. We colored in the outline of a story.

As adolescents, we got better at drawing. Our sky might be bluish-purplish. The clouds might have shades of gray and green; the water on the lake would be a mixture of many colors, possibly reflecting the boat that floated on it; the road might be a mixture of brown, dusty tan or beige to signify dirt, with black rocks and pebbles strewn about; the cabin would have a different colored roof, and, like the apple tree, cast shadows from the light of the sun.

We’d use different coloring tools in our teens: pastels, colored pencils, watercolors and markers. And we’d start adding depth and shading, because we could discern perspective and light better. And we’d spend much more time at our task; we were more exacting and meticulous.

Printed words are groupings of black symbols on white paper. Strung together intelligently and creatively, they tell a story, just like
the outline of a picture in a coloring book. It’s our job as voice actors to color words, to give them depth, shading and perspective. Our tools: our voice, vocal techniques and acting abilities. And it’s our acting that has to come to the fore through our voice. And through our voice needs to pour conversationality and emotion in order for us to sound believable.

The reason that most great stage and screen actors are believable is because we can see their characters. We see their body language, their movements, their gesticulations, and their eyes. We see them embody characters through their actions. But people can’t see voice actors—they can only hear us. So all the color and emotions we bring to a script has to come out of just one place—our mouth.

The nuances of the human voice are extraordinary. Millions of years of human evolution have made the sound of the human voice a wonder to behold and something no machine will ever duplicate. Oh, they’ve tried. At first, people thought that developing speech recognition would be a simple matter of replicating phonemes, and they’ve had some success in transplanting those basic sounds into myriad applications. But like astronomers exploring the universe— the more they peer into the vastness of space, the more they realize how complex it is—in their quest to simulate real speech with a machine, scientists have found that the more they try to perfect speech recognition, they realize they can’t. Because the human voice is so incredibly unique. Our vocal cords hold a powerful gift: the power to paint pictures, with an infinite variety of colored shades, textures, depth, patterns and mixtures. We have the innate ability, through our voice, to convey meaning without even uttering a word! No machine could do that.

Many of us refer to ourselves as voice artists as well as voice actors. If we’re artists, then we have to take out our palette of vocal colors and brush those words, wash, tint and dab them. We have to channel impressionism, cubism, pointillism, abstract art, op art and realism into our phrasing. We have to apply the endless color combinations of emotions and infuse them into words. When we’re presented with text that cries out for coloring, take out your 120-count box of vocal Crayolas
^®
with all their wonderful hues and shades and create a masterpiece!

We’re blessed with the ability to lift words off the page effortlessly and to articulate them clearly. But if we don’t inject emotional depth and real meaning into them, if we don’t artistically color in the outlines of those pictures, we’ll never do justice to beautifully crafted text or capture a listener’s attention. And we’ll waste a great opportunity.