So You Think You Want To Be A Freelance VO Director?

Morgan Freeman, Voice Over

Voice acting is not unlike other forms of acting: It arises from a place of truth and conviction. If the eyes are the windows of the soul, voice can be the sound of the heart’s feelings and emotions. In commercial voice over, if the talent is excited about announcing a new product, their voice will carry that enthusiasm. If you are enthusiastic, your audience will experience that too. If the voice over project calls for a serene and calm voice to promote a yoga or meditation retreat, the voice announcing the retreat will reflect that tranquility. There are many ways to guide the talent to obtain the result your project needs. One path is to give the talent a hint of the type of feeling you ultimately want their voice to carry such as winning the lottery for excitement, reaching a seemingly unlikely goal for perseverance, finding cure for a terminal illness for progress, science and hope. The list goes on. Directing talent is about communicating with them and not dictating to them. Provide them with a clear situational framework to get closer to the text and the result might even be better than you had envisioned.

Directing a voice over project implies you are familiar with basic acting principles. It signals you are on the same page as the talent you are about to direct and that presumably you speak the same language. Directing with some familiarity of the artistic intricacies involved in the creative process of acting can make all the difference in the outcome of the project. Conversely, taking the text apart, not allowing talent to give a few uninterrupted read-throughs with natural flow and micro-managing to the point of taking a word apart too often can make the talent lose sight of the entirety and purpose of the text at hand and become a mechanical tool that is being used in a non-creative way.       

It is magic when the dance happens because no one is stepping on the other person’s toes. The voice talent becomes nothing but an instrument when direction is approached from a mechanical standpoint and creative freedom is stifled. A successful voice over project will no doubt opt to dance.