The best performances come from within
I have been actively working on voice acting for over eight years. And when I say actively, I mean that I doubt if I could find more than a few days gap between some type of learning about VO, whether in private coaching, participating in or watching a webinar, reading in a coach-led workout or a peer workout, listening to a podcast or sharing in an accountability group. To say nothing of learning from fellow voice actors asking questions and sharing information in Facebook groups, on Instagram or from LinkedIn posts.
Actually, it's closer to ten years, because I spent almost two years researching and learning about voice acting even before I ever contacted my first coach.
SO many details
I have even been told by multiple coaches and agents who I respect and who are well known in the industry, that I have been over-coached. That's how much I have put into voice acting over the past decade. And it's not a good thing. When you are trying to please everyone, you end up pleasing no one. In other words, focusing on what everyone else thinks of my reads, and receiving contradictory comments, has at times led me to a place where I no longer can hear my own voice. Or I hear it very faintly. I then focus on a sound, a nuance, a sentence (and whether it should end on a upswing or a downswing) or on a single word, and whether that word should be emphasized and if so, slightly emphasized? Stretched out? Delivered in a whisper? Said close to the mic? Far away? As I'm turning my head to the side and away from the front of the mic?
Acting should be fun
After this many years of reading someone else words, into a piece of equipment that I still don't fully understand how it all works, in a very, very small padded room, is hard enough to feel like yourself. You really have to try at it. But, hey... isn't that what acting is all about? Putting on a persona of someone else, and taking that persona for a little spin? Whether it's for a few minutes for an audition, for a few hours in a stage play, or off and on during most of a day while narrating an eLearning module or an audiobook, or even all day (and possibly into the night) if shooting a movie, it's all considered acting.
And as someone who started 'acting' as a little four year old, getting into my Mom's closet and jewelry box to dress up and pretend to be someone else, if only for a little while, this is what I love doing.
So I will continue to take classes, read in coach-led workouts, get private coaching and will submit auditions. I've been told to 'read and follow the specs' and have also been told to 'ignore the specs'.
In other words, I don't think that there is any right way to be an actor.
I think the best way for me is to go with my gut, try to figure out who my character is, who I'm talking to and why, to be as real as possible, and to have fun.
One of my coaches has said that actors should "take in everything they have learned, and then when it comes time to perform, throw it all out the window."
I think I need to get a window installed in my booth...
Photography by Hannah Tims, courtesy of Unsplash.
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