The heart of voiceover is about reading copy. And the wondrous aspect of that is in the endless variety that winds up on the stand in front of you. You never really know what’s coming next and the gamut runs from straightforward to over-the-top, to ridiculous to sublime and then right back to… straightforward again.
Developing a skill for reading copy requires, well… reading copy! So you’ll need to have a good source for that at hand. And there is simply no end to the subject matter of art, business, self-expression on the internet, yielding billions of pages of words that are waiting to be voiced, so they can be heard by others for years and years to come.
Pretty awesome when you think about it, actually. VO is a kind of living legacy of your voice and your performance, no matter how brief or seemingly trivial. Once you’ve voiced a project, that piece is ALIVE. And online? Likely always will be.
Each piece is an artifact and performance that you alone have contributed to and brought in part, to life. Something that will always be out there, swirling around in the electronic universe, and that likely, you’ll be able to see and hear at will.
Very cool.
So walk yourself through some of the huge variety of commercials, games, audio books, narrations, promos, trailer copy. And here’s a cool idea to get your skills in motion. As you page through, DON’T read the words silently. Read them out LOUD, right from the first look!
This is a practice called “cold reading” and it means you have no familiarity with what is coming, but you’re doing your best to make sense and not garble the words as you give it this first, cold, initial shot (and by “cold,” I mean at first sight, not unemotional).
It’s a great exercise to get your mind and your mouth fully engaged. And it’s a skill that will serve you well to hone, for future recording sessions, when there may be very little time to prepare a page of changes a producer hands you at the last minute and says: Hey, these just came in and we’re going with them instead of what we sent you the other day, so give it a quick look and let’s try a take…
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