Giving Depth to Words

Julie-Ann Dean: Welcome to Voiceover Experts brought to you by Voices.com, the number one voiceover marketplace. Voiceover Experts brings you tips, pearls of wisdom and techniques from top instructors, authors and performers in the field of voiceover. Join us each week to discover tricks of the trade that will help you to develop your craft and prosper as a career voiceover talent. It’s never been easier to learn, perform, and succeed from the privacy of your own home and your own pace. This is truly an education you won’t find anywhere else.
This week, Voices.com is pleased to present Marc Cashman.
Marc Cashman: Hi. This is Marc Cashman. My subject today is giving depth to words. You know, I’ve been struck many times while listening to a radio or TV commercials or various forms of narration or in the classes I teach. How many voice actors deliver their words with awesome articulation and precise projection? But detached delivery. They’re quite adept at lifting the words off the page effortlessly but failed the opportunity to color words or phrases with the appropriate attitude or emotion.
They sometimes forget to use their acting abilities to give depth to the words they speak. In voice acting, all our emotions and attitudes come through our voice. People can’t see our eyes or our body language like they can on stage or in film. The slightest nuance in the tone of our voice can convey myriad feelings. Non-verbal utterances can convey even more. But there are so many places and copy where we can really give the words the depth they need but feeling the words were saying and putting emotionality into them.
An example that came up in one of my classes occurred when we we’re working on a spot for a regional hospital and one word that kept popping up was hope. Ask yourself, what is hope sound like? When you say the word just by itself out of context, you tend to naturally say it on a down note. Hope. One word spoken with a period after it, but think about what hope means. Hope means to cherish. A desire with anticipation. To wish for something with some amount of expectation. It could be something you long for that’s realistic or unrealistic.
It’s an attitude or a feeling that could be attainable. And then the context of a hospital and the feelings that evokes in potentially life-threatening situations, it’s a word with a very powerful meaning. So in this context, hope is a word we need to lift and the attitude is a positive one. When we say this word, we need to have hope in our heart in order to have hope in our voice, because people can hear if we’re being sincere when we say this word or any word for that matter.
Of course, we could say hope in a sarcastic way, the mean way, the forlorn or a hopeless way. But in a spot or a narration for a hospital, we have to infuse the word hope with a positive attitude, with compassion and complete sincerity. On the other end of the spectrum, I hear the word pain a lot in copy. And I hear it thrown away but this is another opportunity to infuse the word with emotion. When you’re talking about pain and you’re a sympathetic or empathetic person, when you say the word pain, you should be wincing a bit. A listener can hear it in your voice.
And here’s a perfect example of how the sound of one word can provoke an emotional response. How many times have you called someone you know and just by the tone of one word they use to answer the phone. Hello. You can tell if something’s amiss. It’ll provoke you to either say, “Hi, how are you doing?” or “Are you okay?”
So if one word can get that kind of response, just think of how thousands of your other spoken words and phrases are perceived. There are enumerable words that you can color and give depth to whenever you come across them. These words are loaded with attitudes and emotions. Don’t throw away the opportunity to infuse these words with the appropriate color, feeling, and attitude. When you say the word excitement or exciting, deliver it with an exclamation point.
An exclamation point is the only punctuation mark I know that literally connotes an emotion, excitement. When you talk about how a particular client cares, care should be delivered with concern and compassion. Whether they’re nouns, verbs, adjectives or adverbs, don’t throw these words away. For voice actors, words are easy to say and lift off the page effortlessly, but the listener needs to hear some thought and feeling behind those words.
When you really start thinking about them, words are easy to bring to life when you say them with the appropriate feeling or attitude. Here are just a few examples.
Friendly. Elegant. Patriotic. Confident. Sultry. Scary. Stiff. Sensual. Helpful. Funny. Concern. Evil. Tiring. Appetizing. Sad. Cautionary. Breathless. Wacky! Tough. Delicious. Carefree. Perky! Nervous. Stuffy. Mellow. Heroic. Magical. Cute! Bored. Sly. Exciting!
In my classes, I have my students say these and many other words with their accompanying meaning and sound and also have them say them with their opposite meaning and sound. It’s funny to say friendly in an angry tone. It’s funny to say confident in a wimpy way. And when you do this exercise, it becomes clear that as voice actors when we speak, we’re painting a picture for the listener, compensating for the fact that they can’t literally see us saying what we’re saying.
A lot of the copy you get as a voice actor will not be chock-a-block with words and phrases that you’ll be able to get behind emotionality. There’s no emotional hook in 2.9 percent APR financing for 60 months on all vehicles in stock, but the next time you do get some copy to perform that has any kind of emotional words or phrases or theme, sit with those words for a minute. Feel the emotion behind the copy. Think about how you would feel. How someone you loved or something like a pet would feel and then deliver it with a newfound depth to the feeling.
I guarantee you that you’ll start performing two-dimensional words on a page in three-dimensions. This is Marc Cashman. Thanks for listening.
Julie-Ann Dean: Thank you for joining us. To learn more about the special guest featured in this Voices.com podcast, visit the Voiceover Experts show notes at Podcasts.Voices.com/VoiceoverExperts. Remember to stay subscribed.
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