Ok, you’ve wracked your brain and finally finished writing the copy for your website video. You worked hard on it, and you can even imagine how the voice over will sound for your specific product. Or, you’re a first-time published author and your book is selling well. As you were writing it you imagined your various characters engaging in dramatic dialogue, fueling your story’s plot. You could hear their individual voices… You even imagined what they each looked like didn’t you?
Writing as a creative act is a wonderfully cathartic, even therapeutic endeavor, isn’t it? Often, you can work out deep emotions, explain complex ideas, inform a broad audience of your goals and your mission. The written word has been accomplishing this for centuries.
Even if you’re not the writer what I’ve described above still applies. How many times have you read a novel and envisioned the setting, plot, and dialogue unfolding in your imagination. Say, you’re the account manager who’s going to make the final decision on the voice over it’s the same thing. When you read the author’s copy you hear it in your mind in a certain way. A way that best represents your companies’ interests, don’t you?
Now, however, you want to render your script or manuscript into an audio format. Either to accompany a visual presentation for commercial purposes or to help your literature reach a larger audience by engaging their appetite to hear it read aloud. Whatever the reason you now find yourself faced with a new task – who do I get to read it for me?
First off, finding voice talent isn’t that difficult. Searching in Google, or even in your Yellow Pages will yield multiple groupings of websites, studios, individual voice actors, etc.… So many, in fact, you’re first chore is to narrow the list down to accommodate your available time to search, your budget for paying a voice talent, and your location if you’re wanting to employ voice talent local to your area.
These often go together, in fact. Say your project is time-sensitive and due soon, you have a certain amount of money set aside to pay for a voice-over, and you live in a big city with multiple candidates. In this case, hiring locally could prove beneficial because you can meet and direct your voice over actor face-to-face on the specifics of your project.
However, hiring nationally or internationally, has its benefits also. You can get in contact with the experienced voice actors who’ve been recommended to you or that you’ve heard of, who’ve worked for your company before, or that you’ve found in your Google searches. Quite often, you’ll find their rates are competitive with your local artists as well.
So, finding a large group of voice talent candidates for your project isn’t what I want to address here. That, as I’ve just described, is simple.
No, I want to help you understand the process at arriving at the voice over actor that’s perfectly suited to your project and it goes back to my first paragraph in this blog post. As the author of your project you have an idea in your mind how you want it to be read aloud don’t you? As you were writing it you were imagining it I’m sure. More than likely you read it aloud yourself numerous times to check the syntax and cadence of your prose. It has to sound good to sell your idea, right? Sure, it does. You put the energy and creative effort into writing it so that it would.
This is your starting point for finding your ideal voice actor to narrate your project. Now, the task after narrowing down your list I mentioned above is to narrow it down even further to the age, vocal style, and accent (if you’re wanting that) you want to hear.
This is where your next piece of work begins. Whether you’re searching locally or over the Internet, you’re going to have to listen to many different voice actor’s demos and auditions. Voice over actors, whether they’re employed by a local recording studio, on a roster of talent on a website, or have their own individual businesses, will all have a list of mp3 or WAV demos of themselves reading across a large and varied group of genres – commercial, dramatic, documentary, etc. – in many different age and vocal styles and accents to showcase their talent. So, you as their potential client can listen and find the voice you like best.
In addition to this, studios and websites will offer your project for their talent roster to submit custom auditions for you to select from. Voice actors running their own businesses submit custom auditions as well. It’s standard operating procedure in our industry.
Quite often, these two activities go hand in hand. You’ll need to listen to several different talent demos to arrive at a short candidate list and then request custom auditions from them to make your final selection.
A custom audition means that the potential voice artist will make a recording of a portion of your script for you to get a more precise idea of how the finished product will sound. This ties back in with the voice you were originally hearing in your mind when you were writing.
Of course, you’ll need to be prepared to spend time listening to many different demos and then custom auditions to arrive at the artist you want to narrate your project. This can be very difficult, and I can’t stress this enough. Voice over acting is a fiercely competitive industry. You’re going to find many different voice actors, locally and on the internet, both male and female that sound fantastic. The rates are usually competitive across the board as well… We all make ourselves accessible to our clients via email, phone, Skype, etc. to ensure your needs are met. I know this because I compete with them for your work every day. It’s a basic truth of our industry.
If you’re lucky to have access to a team of colleagues who you can delegate and divide the demos and auditions with then do so. But, whether you do or don’t, eventually the decision as to which voice talent you’ll be hiring is yours alone to make.
This is where it comes down to you and your idea for your final audio version. You need to be honest with yourself about what kind of voice you want exactly. You do not want to settle for anything less because you’ll regret it later and may be forced to find another voice talent and start all over again which you do NOT want to do, I’m sure.
So, think back to when you were writing it. How do you want the emotions and meaning of your content to be portrayed? If it’s a commercial/business type of project do you want an announcer style or more conversational? If it’s an audiobook or a dramatic presentation then you need to consider how exactly you want your characters to sound. Do different characters need various international accents? Or, are they all in one country so they just need to have different dialects? Do you want your narrator to be a male voice overall or female? Both are equally versatile for a veritable host of projects. In an audiobook, the narrator and all your characters are voiced by one voice talent. Indeed, you’ll want to communicate with them beforehand to be certain they can perform all your character’s voices to your satisfaction.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is how you want your project to be voiced and the searching methods and demo/audition listening tools I’ve mentioned here all lead back to this. It’s a subjective decision. It’s specific to you and your project. For us, as voice actors, it’s always different because everyone’s different and we, as professionals, must improvise and adapt to your vision of your project.
Therefore, the final best piece of advice I can give you here goes back to where I started. Remember the voice you had in your mind as you wrote your piece. It was different from your normal everyday speaking voice, wasn’t it? It was an enhanced version of you reading your project in the way your words demanded. It was you as an announcer reading it at a convention, or as an actor performing on stage, or as your neighbor engaging in an interesting conversation. When you read it aloud for proofing purposes you may have even found yourself standing or gesturing differently than you’re used to doing. Remember? I’m sure you know what I’m talking about here.
That’s where your ideal voice actor you’re eventually going to hire originates from. From the voice actor within you. Don’t leave your voice over actor version of yourself behind after you finish writing either. Stay in touch. If you do a lot of writing, you’re going to need them again and again. You’ll be glad you did.
Hope this was helpful for you. I love talking with you. Until next time… Be well. Stay creative. Be useful.
Talk again soon…
