Voice Acting is Hard Work: Here’s 4 Tips
AUDIO VERSION
If you want to land some voice acting jobs, first you’ll need to fine tune your technique. It’s not super easy to land these gigs, but if you are determined enough, it’s a great way to showcase your range (and you may even get to work from home). Here’s how.
You’ll need to work on articulating your words, meaning you’ll need to be very mindful that you are speaking one hundred percent clearly, emphasizing each utterance. This isn’t something anyone commonly thinks about in everyday conversation. Everyone has their own ways of pronouncing certain words – a dialect they’re used to speaking that is based largely on how they’ve learned to speak early on in life. In normal day-to-day conversation, it’s uncommon to take the time and effort to annunciate to the degree that you’ll need to in order to book voice acting jobs.
You’re breathing is also important – which is another one of those things that no one really takes the time to think about. It just happens. Voice actors know how to control their breathing, so they don’t run out of breath in the middle of a word of a sentence. They also know how to minimize coughing, sighing, swallowing, or gulping. In order to book voice acting jobs, you’ll need to become familiar with how to control all of these things.
You’ll also want to learn how to speak with different tones and styles so you can fulfill a wider range of voice acting jobs. This means, you’ll need to do more than just learn how to articulate when you speak and control your breath, but you’ll want to be able to do so in many different styles of speech. It is common for voice actors to be booked for roles that seem completely counterintuitive to who the actor is in ‘real life.’ The best voice actors can adapt their vocal cords to accommodate a wide range of jobs.
Another must-have skill is the ability to maintain character consistency. It can feel uncomfortable speaking in a totally unfamiliar speech pattern, and most of the time, you’ll have to do that for more than one go-through – in fact, you may have to do so for more than one day. You’ll have to get into character and stay in character for the duration of the project. To satisfy the needs of casting directors who are seeking to fill voice acting jobs, you’ll have to match the personality and characteristics of the role you’re portraying even though you’re never actually seen on camera. Your vocal tone should match the attitude, dialect, and sometimes even the accent, of the character.
Most voice actors pursue other gigs at the same time they’re hoping to break into the industry in order to allow enough time to hone their craft and understand the nuances before applying for gigs. There is so much more to voice acting jobs than recording yourself and calling it a day. In considering this type of work, it’s important to keep an open-mind and diversity your skillset as much as possible. Then, take a deep breath and get into character!
To learn more Tips for Voice Acting, feel free to sign up for our next FREE Online Workshop. On this free Online Workshop, you will learn about the recent changes in the modeling and acting industries that is opening the doors for more job opportunities. You will also learn cutting-edge ways to have good paying modeling and acting jobs in your local area, flood into your email inbox on a regular basis. You will learn what to do to land these jobs from the comfort of your own home. Click below to register now!
