Coloring Our 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: You know, it’s hard to remember exactly when we got our first coloring book, but we do remember it was fun. At first, we sprayed crayon colors all over the page, without a care as to whether we stayed inside the lines or not. As we became toddlers, our coloring got more refined. We learned boundaries. We assigned certain colors to certain objects, and were more discerning in our choice of colors. A few years later found us drawing with colored pencils or markers. Later still, we marveled at the results of paint-by-numbers, and then on to watercolors and pastels.
The coloring books were random, assorted pictures, themed pictures or page-by-page pictures that laid out a story but each one of these pages had the same format, a black outline on a white page that showed a picture. At a glance, we could see a cabin on a lake, with smoke rising from its chimney; a boat tethered to a pier, fishing poles jutting out at its end; a winding road leading up toward the cabin, and a big, broad apple tree on its front lawn, with majestic mountains towering behind the cabin, backed by a full sky of puffy clouds and a bright sun.
As children, we looked at this black and white tableau and made some decisions, the sky would be blue, we’d leave the clouds white; the cabin would be brown and the lawn would be green; we’d apply the same colors to the apple tree, but add some red for the apples; the road might be charcoal; the lake would be blue, the mountains would be gray, and the sun would be yellow. We colored in the outline of a story.
As adolescents, we got better at drawing. Our sky might be bluish-purplish. The clouds might have shades of gray and green; the water on the lake would be a mixture of many colors, possibly reflecting the boat that floated on it; the road might be a mixture of brown, dusty tan or beige to signify dirt, with black rocks and pebbles strewn about; the cabin would have a different colored roof, and, like the apple tree, cast shadows from the light of the sun.
We’d use different coloring tools in our teens: pastels, colored pencils, watercolors and markers. And we’d start adding depth and shading, because we could discern perspective and light better. And we’d spend much more time at our task; we were more exacting and meticulous.
Printed words are groupings of black symbols on white paper. Strung together intelligently and creatively, they tell a story, just like the outline of a picture in a coloring book. It’s our job as voice actors to color words, to give them depth, shading and perspective. Our tools: our voice, vocal techniques and acting abilities. And it’s our acting that has to come to the fore through our voice and through our voice needs to pour conversationality and emotion in order for us to sound believable.
The reason that most great stage and screen actors are believable is because we can see their characters. We see their body language, their movements, their gesticulations, and their eyes. We see them embody characters through their actions. But people can’t see voice actors, they can only hear us. So all the color and emotions we bring to a script or text has to come out of just one place, our mouth.
The nuances of the human voice are extraordinary. Millions of years of human evolution have made the sound of the human voice a wonder to behold and something no machine will ever duplicate. Oh, they’ve tried.
At first, people thought that developing speech recognition would be a simple matter of replicating phonemes, and they’ve had some success in transplanting those basic sounds into myriad applications. But like astronomers exploring the universe, the more they peer into the vastness of space, the more they realize how complex it is, in their quest to simulate real speech with a machine, scientists have found that the more they try to perfect speech recognition, they realize they can’t. Because the human voice is so incredibly unique.
Our vocal cords hold a powerful gift: the power to paint pictures, with an infinite variety of colored shades, textures, depth, patterns and mixtures. We have the innate ability, through our voice, to convey meaning without even uttering a word. No machine could do that.
Many of us refer to ourselves as voice artists as well as voice actors.
If we’re artists, then we have to take out our palette of vocal colors and brush those words, wash, tint and dab them. We have to channel impressionism, cubism, pointillism, abstract art, op art and realism into our phrasing. We have to apply the endless color combinations of emotions and infuse them into words. When you’re presented with text that cries out for coloring, take out your 120-count box of vocal Crayolas with all their wonderful hues and shades and create a masterpiece.
You know, we’re blessed with the ability to lift words off the page effortlessly and to articulate them clearly. But if we don’t inject emotional depth and real meaning into them, if we don’t artistically color in the outlines of those pictures, we’ll never do justice to beautifully crafted text or copy or capture a listener’s imagination and we’ll waste a great opportunity.
This is Marc Cashman and thanks for listening. If you have any questions of comments, don’t hesitate to send me an e-mail at [email protected], that [email protected].
Julie-Ann Dean: Thank you for joining us. To learn more about the special guest featured in this Voices.com podcast visit the voiceover expects show notes at Podcasts.Voices.com/VoiceoverExpects. Remember to stay subscribed.
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