Top Voice Over Coaches, Pinocchio, Getting Pronunciations Right

Introduction

Hi there and welcome to Vox Talk, your weekly review from the world of voice over. I’m your host, Stephanie Ciccarelli from Voices. In today’s show, you’ll hear all about the top ten voice over coaches per Voices’ 2022 State of Voice Over Report, the many Pinocchio films being released in 2022 and why it’s so important that voice actors do their homework when recording a script that includes names and words they may not be familiar with.

News 1: Top VO Coaches from 2022 Voices State of Voice Over Report

Are you studying with a voice over coach?

If you’re looking for someone to work with, the survey results from Voices are just in time for you!

Voice actors around the world weighed in who they trusted most for voice over training advice. 1,675 people responded with 674 recommendations. Here are the top 10:

1) Bill De Wees
2) Nancy Wolfson
3) Bev Standing
4) Anthony Pica
5) Terry Daniel
6) Linda Bruno
7) Anthony Reece
8) Steve Blum
9) Crispin Freeman
10) Mary Workman

To find out more about these coaches and get links to their websites, be sure to visit the Vox Talk show notes for this episode and click on the link to the Voices 2022 State of Voice Over Report.

News 2: Pinocchio’s big year - Disney, Netflix, Lionsgate

Has there ever been a bigger year for Pinocchio and Pinocchio features?

When researching all the Pinocchios being released in 2022, there are four, count’em four, productions.

From Disney’s live action computer animated, star-studded Pinocchio directed by Robert Zemeckis to Guillermo Del Toro’s equally star studded stop motion take with Netflix to Lionsgate’s Pinocchio: A True Story featuring actor Pauly Shore as Pinocchio and Tom Kenny as Geppetto, there’s a tremendous amount of storytelling with various interpretations of author Carlo Collodi’s tale.

Rounding out the quartet is Pinocchio and the Water of Life starring Tom Kenny as Pinocchio with a cast of high profile voice actors including Phil LaMarr, Fred Tatisciore, Maurice LaMarche, Rob Paulsen and Candi Milo to name a handful.

As with any works inspired by the original, some are truer to the author’s intent than others. Disney’s first Pinocchio animated feature was released in 1940 during a time when the original content was still under copyright. Disney’s Pinocchio was by all accounts a sunnier version of Collodi’s book, and with Tom Hanks starring as Geppetto in the 2022 release, it’s sure to be sunnier as well.

You might remember when we covered Public Domain Day earlier this year and how works enter the public domain. Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio was published in February 1883. Since Pinocchio was published before January 1st, 1927 and Carlo Collodi died over 100 years ago (he died in 1890), the work entered the public domain in 1960, which explains to a degree why so many productions have been made since and are being made now.

For links to a few great articles that discuss the Pinocchio films in greater detail on Cinema Blend and Screen Rant, particularly those being released by Disney and Netflix, be sure to visit our show notes. I’ve also included the trailer for Del Toro’s Pinocchio featuring the narration of Ewan McGregor, who plays Sebastian J. Cricket in the stop motion feature.

Vox Talk Community Spotlight: Pronunciation Tools Online

In this week’s Community Spotlight, I wanted to take the opportunity to riff on why doing your homework as a voice actor, or podcaster in my case, is so important.

A couple of week ago, I posted a lively conversation to my LinkedIn profile where I asked people to share what sites they go to when researching how to say words or names. The post read:

“When preparing to record, I research how to say a name or place I'm unfamiliar with. Sometimes this research includes watching the opening seconds of an interview on YouTube or using a website where you can hear how a given word is pronounced. What do you do and where do you go? Share the tactics and tools you use to get pronunciation right before hitting record!”

There were so many great answers! Many people used YouTube and Google to hear pronunciations while others relied on other niche sites to get the correct pronunciations they were looking for. You can read all of those comments in the link to Vox Talk episode 107’s show notes.

More often than not, I follow my own advice, but when recording last week’s episode of Vox Talk, I fell short. Instead of doing some extra work ahead of time looking for interviews to hear the source or an interviewer give the appropriate pronunciation, I used a few tools online that regrettably gave me varying results for how to say the surname of James Giangola (you may remember him from our story about Google Assistant’s backstory).

Super embarrassing and a big mistake! As someone whose own last name is often mispronounced, I try hard to not do that to other people. That said, I completely missed the mark on this one and I wanted to correct the pronunciation here and now.

Okay, so with that out of the way, you might be wondering about some other resources you can turn to for finding the right way to say something you need to read in a script.

One website that a lot of voice talent use is howjsay.com. Another is Youglish.com

Another tip for getting pronunciations right is to ask your client if there’s a word in the script that you are unsure of. It’s far better to ask the client than to plow ahead and make a mistake that will cost time, effort and money as the case may be.

Trust me, you want to do your homework! Can you relate? Let me know by joining the conversation on LinkedIn or emailing stephanie at voices.com.

Wrap Up

And that’s the way we saw the world through the lens of voice over this week. Thank you for joining us on the show! If there’s anything you’d like to hear about on Vox Talk, be sure to send your ideas to stephanie at voices.com. I enjoy hearing from you and am always looking for ways to make this podcast even better for you. Thanks for tuning in! I’m Stephanie Ciccarelli for Voices. We’ll see you next week.