ABSTRACT
I’ve mentioned how competitive the profession of performing is, and it is a fact that cannot be stressed strongly enough. Well, now we come to the most competitive and closed off area of the business – that of voice-overs. Unless you live in a wilderness without television or radio, you will hear voice-overs every day of your life. You may not really pay that much attention to them or you may think how easy they sound. You’ve also doubtless heard talk of the staggeringly high fees reputedly earned by people in this medium and thought ‘I could do that’ and ‘That’s money for old rope.’ Well, I’ll dispel these myths and put the record straight. Like any form of acting, voicing is a very specialised skill, which can sometimes come naturally but is usually learnt over time, often taking years of practise and experience to perfect. When you hear a voice-over on a commercial – perhaps someone instantly recognisable, or maybe just ‘the voice next door’ – it does sound effortless, but that is down to the delivery and
expertise that the particular artist brings to the job. ‘But just how hard can it be to say a couple of lines extolling the virtues of a random product?’ you may be asking. There is actually a huge amount of skill involved. Vocal versatility is a great asset, as is modulating the tones of your delivery. Some campaigns will need a harder, more urgent sell ‘Sale must end Friday – buy now!’, while others benefit from a softer stance ‘Relax your cares away in a long, soothing bubbly bath.’ These are the two extremes and most voices will be somewhere in between. Authentic accents and dialects (or the ability to do several) and character voices can be useful too. Listen to commercials whenever you can, see what sorts of voices campaigns need and are using and which best suits your vocal capabilities. Can you emulate them or even offer something completely different? As with everything mechanical, commercials are timed meticulously to fit into the advertising slots that are booked with the radio and television companies. Sometimes a script might be far longer than the slot – 37 seconds, for instance, when the slot lasts just 28. While the powers that be might decide to cut it down to size by those 9 seconds, they sometimes will not want to lose that much valuable information and so it will be down to the artist and director to speed up and make everything fit, without compromising vocal quality, enunciation and audibility. This is no mean feat and can be nervewracking to say the least, especially when time is of the essence to get it right. Practise all these skills as much as you can and keep your eye, and ear, on changing trends. While sessions can be quite highly paid, with buyouts or repeat fees on top, the really big money goes either to those famous voices that we all recognise instantly, or to the unknown people who voice major worldwide campaigns for years on end (sometimes appearing on several different ones simultaneously).
