Adjusting Interpretation to Book your Brand

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 has 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 Nancy Wolfson.
Female: Going back here reassures someone else …
Nancy Wolfson: Thank you, yes.
Female: …what we’re talking about earlier. What about those of us that just kind of sound like we’re smiling when we’re like bawling?
Nancy Wolfson: Everything is relative like I was saying about the people who might sometimes be on the other side of the spectrum who come across – who’s flat and have to really get out of their comfort zone to hit a middle read that sounds warm and pleasant. You might have to get out of your comfort zone and go a little darker. If – from a one to a 10, one is disconnected flat and unemotional and a 10 is joyful exuberant, cheery, loud, and a five is the middle. Well, if you feel like you skew towards an eight skewing it an eight, you might have to pop down out of your comfort zone and pretend to feel a bit more solemn yourself …
Female: Okay.
Nancy Wolfson: … if you’re doing warm equals warm or you might have to imagine someone who is in a greater state of anxiety and that will just inspire a level of reassurance that takes it down a couple of notches. I always prefer the second way. Rather than trying to dive into the swirling vacuum of self and trying to just make your self be something, it’s so helpful to adjust your audience. So, if you feel like what you’re doing is about as much of a five as you can possibly do but your brand skews cheerful, just adjust your audience. If you thought you had been talking to someone who was sort of wide-eyed and listening to you and concerned, you know, about their healthcare and you were reassuring and it came out too cheerful, it came out it like an eight, then imagine them in a serious panic and anxiety. And they’re really in a bind and they’ve got a really more grave problem, you’ll just autocorrect it better.
So I always say, adjust your imagined audience to put the difference. So just really keep this trick in mind. Reassurance will purge the saccharin from your read. If you were just on autopilot with your brand being warm, being told to put a smile on your face, yes, it could triple whammy you into something too saccharine to believe. But with your brand intending reassurance, that ought to cut the mix right down the middle.
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