Marking Up Scripts with Anthony Reece

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Hi there, and welcome to Vox Talk, your weekly review from the world of voiceover. I'm your host, Stephanie Ciccarelli from Voices. Are you strategic with scripts? Joining me today is Anthony Reece from VO 101, award winning voice talent and coach. On today's show, you'll discover ways to mark up your scripts for auditions and on work that you've booked. It's amazing the difference that notation makes. So Anthony's 25 plus year career in the industry as a voice actor, sound producer, entertainment casting director, and studio director makes him the perfect guest to discuss this topic with us today. Welcome to the show, Anthony.

Anthony Reece:

Hey, thanks, Stephanie. Glad to hear.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Wonderful. So this topic, it's something that we all go through every day and probably don't think very much about. But as I was looking at the questions that I prepared in advance and just knowing your expertise in this area, it is actually quite critical that we discussed this today.

Anthony Reece:

You know, I find that it is. And when I work with students at VL 101, of the biggest things, whether they're new or they've been around the block, is quite a few of them are surprised, actually, when I bring up script markups. Musicians are very familiar with that, marking up scores and they write music and what have you, but very few people in the voiceover narrative world are familiar with this, so it's definitely something that's a must know how to do.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Totally agree. As someone who comes from a classically trained vocalist background, I know that I was constantly putting in breath marks or saying, here's where the crescendo decrescendo is, and you might emphasize something a little differently.

Anthony Reece:

That's right

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Or color a word differently. So, yes, absolutely paramount. I know talent are probably doing this in their heads and remembering stuff and then forgetting it and having really inconsistent reads if they're trying to do something with a script. So I think today this episode will help clear that up for everybody. Anthony, why would we want to mark up a script? And I'm sure there are lots of reasons for why actors will do this, but what are your reasons? What's your take on it?

Anthony Reece:

Well, like I said, just like a musician who is writing a score, sitting at the piano, pencil in their notes and creating their melody and what have you, they make notes. I can tell you right now, first, that people that have worked with me over the years have gone back to some of my scripts and look like you're having a heart attack where all these notes of the script, the reality is they're not madness, they actually make a lot of sense to me. So the benefit of marking up a script is really to create a roadmap. You know, when you look at a map, they have a legend, and on the map, the legend basically tells you details about a grid of how to get there and the streets and the Googles of the world do this nowadays too. What marking it up really does is it allows you as a voice talent before you can stand up and bother to try to record, to look at the script and really get a feel for where you're trying to go. What are you trying to accomplish? From A to Z, prepping yourself, preparing, getting ready to record. What are you looking for? Why would you want to mark it up? Short and sweet, to create a roadmap to know what you're trying to accomplish. Go through the script, breeze through the script, and it's basically find the points within the script that you want to remember so that when you stand up and you ready to record, you have an idea of where you're trying to go. Just like when we're traveling on the highway, we want to turn on the old GPS on our app or whatever, and we want to know where we're headed to, what our destination is. So that's kind of what the purpose is of marking up the script.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Wonderful. So as you've highlighted there haha, pardon the pun, but as you've highlighted, Anthony, there are benefits to adopting this practice of marking up scripts that clearly go beyond just knowing where you're going, but having a really great performance too. I remember back to high school in history class, we had this teacher and in any way he was very much adamant that we would learn how to take our notes in a certain way that, ‘use this color pen and make these subheadings. Whenever you need shorthand for something, then make sure that you use it.’ But to this day, it comes to mind as I'm looking through something or making notes, I'm like, ‘oh, I wonder what Mr. So and So would say about this.’ Or just having that practice in creating a muscle, if you will, for just how you're going to remember something or organize it right.

Anthony Reece:

That's exactly what it is. I had the same way I had coaches back when I used to play baseball as a young guy. I had acting coaches back when I used to do stuff in the early Miami days, and I had a lot of different areas of my life that they taught me how to use this. It really helps you, like you said, create a better performance. It helps you get a little better feel for where you're trying to go, what you're trying to accomplish, and it helps you create what I call in my teaching with students, what I call a soundscape or a sound pack. It helps you develop for every project that comes along, the uniqueness of that particular project. The benefits are great because they ultimately assure that you're going to know what you're trying to do with each project completely different than the last project. One of the things that I find a lot of talent do is we get stuck in the same old song and dance routine of where every one of our auditions kind of start to sound repetitive and monotonous. And back in the day, with old sardines like myself who were big fish in the palm. The reality is you can't do that today with the Gen Xers, Gen ZS, and the millennials making all the decisions. It's a much socially savvy demographic that are mostly doing the casting of projects these days. So you have to be able to offer a variety of different sounds, textures, registers, pitches, tones, tempos and inflections and all the above. You can't just deliver stuff the way that you would project by project by project. And I think that's the death of many talent when we're auditioning if they don't mark up the script to ensure that they're going to have a different outcome. When they stand up, go in the booth ready to record or stand up from the mic or whatever and hit record. They don't have any idea of what they're trying to do, where they're trying to go. There's not an end in mind. What is my goal for this? And all the elements are really the benefits to marking up your script. So the outcome is you have a unique sound compared to the last audition, compared to the last audition, and so forth. So kind of benefits are ten fold, two fold, whatever we say in the business.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Right. And I'm just thinking back again to an experience I had. But when, say, your teacher, and maybe in the context of vo, someone like Anthony says to you, you know what, we're working on the script, we're going to mark it up this way. There's a lot of deliberateness that goes behind why these choices are being made. And as we know, voiceover is all about choices and ways that you decide how you're going to say this, where you're going to inflect,

Anthony Reece:

That's right

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

all of that. And if you go off script, let's using that kind of idea of going off script as a not following the notation or the markups that you've put in, then that performance can be derailed pretty quickly.

Anthony Reece:

Really good way of saying it. Absolutely. And a lot of people, I find when I listen to auditions, when I listen to people's demos, when I listen to any kind of content they want me to review or evaluate, that's exactly what I can tell. I can tell whether or not they invest the time, pre production, if you will, versus ad libbing as they go. I believe, and I'm a true believer in spending more time on the front end then less time in the actual wasted takes. So you end up with 17, 18 minutes for a 30-second arena of wasted takes because you don't really know what you're trying to accomplish by marking up your script. You know exactly what you're trying to bang out. So this way you're putting out quality of takes, not quantity. It helps you get through more auditions. It helps you be more productive. It helps you be a little bit more quick at delivering content to the client. So therefore the more per hour you make as a talent, instead of just winging it, you know what you're trying to do. One of the key components of marking up is it helps you self direct. To be a good, successful talent, you have to be able to self direct. And when I work with my students, whether they're veterans in the business who are refreshing themselves or newbies, I teach them how to put on their self directors hat. And part of self directing is developing a good roadmap, marking up your script so that you're kind of, in a way, acting like your director prior to standing up and recording the track. Once you've done it, you're going to hear the difference and you're going to plainly hear it when you listen back to your old content, the newer content you're going to have a feel for, ‘Yes, I knew what I was trying to accomplish.’ So that's ultimately what the benefits are in the long run.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yes, a lot of people listening are like, Anthony, what do you mean old content? I delete all my old stuff. I don't want to know what I sounded like back then. But it's such a useful tool, though, to be able to go back and listen to where you've grown and how much you've grown, right?

Anthony Reece:

Big time. And I tell people, always keep a good month worth of your auditions, especially in the auditioning phase. You always want to keep content you've actually done in the can for a client at least for a year, and you get a cloud backup or a Passport or any of these backup jobs you can purchase, but preferably these days in the cloud. And you always want to keep that content for your client for at least a year because a lot of times what will happen is a client will contact you down the road and they'll say, our project went cold, we thought it was dead. We've got the green light now, we're going to move forward. About six months ago or three months ago or last month, you auditioned for us and we'd like to actually have you do a call back. Well, if you haven't kept a hold of the audition, then obviously you got to go into your hard drives, try to find that audition, and if not, you have to reach out to them and say, sorry, is there any way you can send me a sample of what I did? Unless they log into their Voices.com account or somewhere and they can go back and listen to what they did, it kind of makes it look a little amateur, a little green, so I'm a big believer in holding on. Also, the benefit of holding on to your auditions for 30 days, 60 days or whatever, is you can go back, like I tell all my students again, veterans or newbies, I tell them to go back at the end of every week. Saturday morning when you're hanging out and you have a cup of coffee and you got no stress and you're just kind of kicking back at 08:00 on Saturday morning whatever before the world kicks in and you start going out and about for your weekend. Go through your week's auditions and listen to all the stuff that you auditioned for. And every one of those auditions, the first three to five second clip you play of each one, should sound uniquely different. And if every one of them sound uniquely different, you're doing your job. If they all sound pretty much the same, then basically in the long run, you're going to starve to death because you can't be the big fish in a little pond anymore. Yes we want to have our many voice and all that, but part of what marking up the script does. It assures that every one of your auditions are unique to the next because you're making mental notes along the way and those mental notes become very valuable. Especially, you'll notice when you listen back to your auditions from the week prior, you'll be able to hear that they sound uniquely different to one another. They're still me, they're still professional, but they're unique to that particular project. So that's another benefit of the markup process.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

It's a roadmap, as you said, right? Like people just know where you're going to go. I guess the audience plays a part in all this. If you know who you're speaking to, your roadmap might look slightly different, right? In just different ways. And also I was just thinking, vocal technique, does that ever show up in your roadmap or is it more?

Anthony Reece:

Absolutely. You develop your own process. Obviously the first thing is you want to breeze over the script to get a feel for the words, to copy the message. What are they doing? What is the directive? Once you have that field and you kind of breeze through it and you looked it over, you always print out a hard copy of it. You want to have a paper copy because if you have a paper copy, you can obviously make a note. You can mark up the script. You always use a pencil because then you can erase those pencil marks along the way. It's just like when we're sitting here writing original music. But if you learn how to use a pencil and also a yellow highlighter, that helps you then start the markup process so that you can ultimately raise them. A lot of people use pens and I tell them no. Next thing that I do is I created that legend that we talked about on the very top right corner of my script. And that top right corner note area of your paper when you print it out, is hard copy. You can note the date, you can note the microphone used, you can note your tempo, you can use any processing, you can mention any equalization settings, you can note any effects. You use one word, little bullets down the side, on the top, halfway down the side. And what that allows is you to come back down the road and you can literally take a look at what you did on that project. The big thing is microphone changes. If you are a working talent who does a project in an audition phase, or you work on a long term, long form project and you're working on that project and that client has six chapters now and in a month they'll send you the other three and a month later they're going to send you another six or seven chapters. And it's a long form project. You never want to sell the microphone, you don't want to dump the mic. You don't want to all of a sudden build a new studio and build a whole new rig. Because all of a sudden when you cut section two or module three or chapter 18 and you sent to the client, the client is going to go, wait a second, it sounds completely different. Well, what happens is if you all of a sudden get a buddy who says, hey man, Amazon is having a great sale. We should buy this new whatever, and you go buy it and then you sell the other bike on Craigslist. What happens in a month or two when that client says, we're ready for the rest of this project and you don't have that mic anymore? So that's kind of the process of starting to mark up printing using a pencil and make a note from the top. And then of course, you want to start to focus on the dynamics and espressos and the stretches and naturals and all the other goodies that part of markups require them.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

I was going to say, Anthony, I think you must have a huge filing cabinet of just all of this, just thinking because some people are not pen and paper people, and certainly not pen in this case. We know that whenever you do something that isn't going to be permanent, like mathematics, or you might tweak something because hey, you might make a different choice and the director might say, no, do it this way. And all of a sudden it's like, oh no, I wrote a pen. Obviously. Yeah, I agree totally with the whole pencil thing. But just wondering, for people who are more into marking up their scripts using an app, like on a screen, like on a tablet, they might have some kind of a tool. Is there anything out there that you've seen your students use that you would say, is it a good choice?

Anthony Reece:

No, not really. Basically what I've seen a lot of my students do is they take my advice and they print out a hard copy. The old school style of printing out your auditions. Put your printer on draft mode so you get basically a draft save you ink a black and white gray skill draft, but a lot of tablets and a lot of the touchscreen type stuff out there allows you to use a yellow highlighter where you can touch the screen and circle it and all that stuff. So there are devices out there that allow you to do that. One of the very few things that people don't realize is in order to know what you're highlighting, you have to be trained by somebody who teaches what components of the voiceover are important. For example, one of the very first things that I tell people to do when they look through their script and they're thinking about marking up is highlight with the highlighter any of the dynamic words or dynamic phrases that you want to hit harder, anything that you think you want to progressively enhance. We call that dynamics and dynamically hitting words and broadcasting. There the price, the sale, the concert, the date, things that are basically important, dynamically are good things to highlight when you mark up your script. So to go through the script, pass one, read through it, find the actual things you want to dynamically hit harder, and make a mental note to yourself by marking it up, by highlighting it. The other thing too, I tell people when I teach, is draw a line on words that you want to stretch. Elongating words allows us to dramatically stretch a word without dynamically hitting the word aggressively or dynamically hitting it harder. Stretching a word, or what I call pulling a word can also be a part of dramatically enhancing the overall ring. Look at these beautiful flowers. By pulling the word beautiful, I stretched it. You can kind of think of it as the word is a rubber band and you want to stretch that word and it brings a little bit more of a dramatic attention to it by the consumer. So I tell people, mark up the script with highlighting dynamic words, draw a line above the word that you want to stretch. The next thing I tell people to do is when they're looking for expressive words, when you're looking for words that should sound as though it is expressing how it's meant to sound adventurous, beautiful, gentle, soft, laughter, happy, angry. When you think of words that are expressive, then you want them. There's a reason that the writer, the copywriter and the author wrote that word in there. They could have picked any word they wanted. They picked that particular word because they're hoping we, as the talent, will expressively hit that word and make it sound like it's meant to sound. Look at these, awesome. Isn't she beautiful? Wow, these are delicate. We want to make sure that we dynamically hit words, that we stretch words, but we also express those words as they're meant to be expressive. So what I tell people to do is circle expressive words. So I tell them to highlight dynamic words, I tell them to put a line above the stretch word and anything you're going to express harder, circle that word. The next thing is the addition of natural stalls. You want to allow yourself to add additional commas that aren't written in. You and I both know, and anybody listening might not know if they don't, then here's a little tip. Writers write for the reader. Very few people, unless they are veteran to copywriting and broadcast and what have you and manual scripts and stuff, they don't really write for the issue of a narrator or the voice talent. They typically write for the reader. And in that case they may add a comma here and a comma there in a period mark and semicolon or ellipsis or whatever. But the reality is if you read it exactly as they write it, it comes out a little bit sounded like it's read. If you allow yourself to add those natural stalls or natural pauses, it allows you to create a cadence and a conversational and a flow that allows the consumer to stay in your shadow. So besides the natural stalls, added pauses along the way that you feel naturally not crazily randomly, but naturally fit so that the consumer can stay with you. You want to keep the consumer in your shadow. So if the consumer is right with you, you are going to retain them and they're going to retain what you're saying. If the consumer falls behind you because you're blasting through and you're only hitting the commas, but you're blasting right through those like rolling through a yield sign, you're not really coming to a comma, then you're going to lose the consumer because the consumer is going to fall behind you. And the addition of natural stalls is something I tell people to definitely add. Natural stalls are simply put into writing in your own comma. So those are some of the items that you should think of when you're marking up your script and how to use abbreviations and notes and symbols along the way to help you mark up some of those items.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

It sounds like this is very personal, having your own legend or roadmap. There isn't ‘one size fits all’ from what I'm hearing from you Anthony. Certain markings will mean something different to everyone. And especially if you've already had a marketing scheme that you use perhaps in a musical context, you can just adopt that same one and transfer it over to your voiceover. Correct?

Anthony Reece:

Absolutely. That's well said. That's exactly the idea is whatever fits you, whatever works for you, whatever notes you want to make. There are standards that I teach, but as long as it makes sense to you, you want to utilize that mark up for yourself. Another thing to do is I tell people to not only draw a line over words, they want to stretch for dramatic purposes, but they want to also underline where they think are words. They want to remind themselves how to make sure they pronounce properly. One of the biggest things in the audition phase a lot of talent make mistakes of is they don't take the time to learn how to pronounce the name of the company or pronounce the name of the doctor or pronounce the name of the product. And if you're sending in an audition and it's got a name drop attached to it and you mispronounce it, chances are they're probably not going to hire you because they're going to say, well, if this person didn't even take the time to investigate on the Internet how to say our name and our product, and you got to take that into consideration, that attention to detail. I had a guy years ago that I did an eye project with Johnson & Johnson and he mispronounced lucklomay.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Oh no.

Anthony Reece:

And I was like, now, dude, in the audition, you say Glaucoma. How did you go to Glaucoma? He said, I'm going to do man. So he had a re-cut, like eight pages, ten pages of narrative. And thank God I looked at everything that I allow talent to run with. I direct and I get the first couple of pages, and then I let him run with the rest, typically. So I'm a big believer in check your pronunciation and underlying it. There's so many different things. One more other item, and I'm kind of done with what I recommend is what register are you using? Are you voicing this in your lower? Are you doing the middle? Are you doing this upper? What range, tone, pitch? In everybody else's language, I call them registers when I teach my students. And then once you make that note on the right hand side of the top, you'll have all those different cheats ready to go. Aside from what you mark out on the body of the script, you'll have all these notes written really small on the right hand side. So I think you'll find and people listening are going to find if they do this and they rehearse the script 100 times so the cows come home using this. After they've done this three or four or five times. They will find this is something that you can learn how to do off the top of your head by looking at the script and then bang. Going at it before you even get up on the chair.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah, it's all second nature at that point, right. Like, you learn your own system, you use it. I was just thinking back to when the teacher would say, oh, for commas. When in doubt, leave it out. It's like, no, we actually want to be adding more commas. And it sounds like from what you're saying, because there's these natural pauses these times where we need to just step back and have a breath and make it sound a little more natural.

Anthony Reece:

Exactly right. And one of the things that somebody asked me the other day when we were talking about this was he's a big believer in an ad-libbing type of recording process. He's a believer in some of my best pictures of my first four or five. Man, I agree with that. In the gaming animation character world, especially, yeah, there is something to be said about ad living. There is something to be said about maybe not necessarily marking up the script in all cases. There is some projects where you may get a cartoon script sent to you. It may have seven lines that you're auditioning for, or you may be hired to do twelve lines, and that's it in secondary rule. And the reality is, you probably don't want to go through that entire script because it's probably 40 pages long and you're looking for just your name, unless they put an excerpt out for you or rip out all your dialogue. But the reality is, in those cases, you probably want to ad lib, say the line two or three different times, and then send them, give or take, three takes of each of those lines. That probably isn't always the case for marking up your script, but there are times where it's advantageous, as you hear in the narrow world, the broadcast world, and longer reads probably eight out of ten times. It comes in very handy, but there are times of where I say, ‘don't know if you're doing characters or you're doing cartoon voices, or you're doing an animation project or gaming site pack or a bunch of walla or whatever you're doing. Yeah, there's no reason. Typically your script is the line eight and then you're in scene three, line two, and then you're in scene nine. So, yeah, you can't really mark up that sort of a script, but you can go through and you can make mental notes, if you want, on the script of what you want to do. Just quickly, just sarcastically, maybe they didn't give you stage direction. And, you know, this line is meant to be a little bit sarcastic. Maybe you can make a mental note next to the sentence really small, in parentheses, sarcastically, and then down the road another line that says ‘angrily,’ and you can give yourself a little bit of extra stage direction. That was the extent of what I've used and I've recommended for marking up in a cartoon animation and acting environment.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Yeah, I was just going to say animation is probably not the place where you want to make annotations on your screen, because everything changes so quickly based on the direction that you're receiving. Although what you do want to spend more time on, dear listener, is your character development and just things that you want to write down about the voice and the placement of it and just how to remember, like, well, how did I make this character voice? Because I like those that you had said earlier, Anthony, about writing down even what microphone you use for this particular session and kind of documenting there in case you should have to go back and do that read again or recreate something. Having that audio reference is also good too, because not everyone learns by reading things, often by hearing or by doing so. If you need to ever go back, everybody and just listen to an audition that someone had, obviously keep them, like Anthony's saying, have a backlog. If you're on Voices then you know that your auditions are there in your account, you can easily go back and find them and you can even see what you said to the client and you can look at that job posting, get more context for what it was that you did. But yeah, I think there's a lot of good reasons. I can't think of one reason to not mark up your script and have it backfire. There's one of the questions I was going to ask you, but as we've been talking, it seems like there really isn't a way for a markup script to backfire unless you are possibly putting in the wrong markings or you're like you're doing something that doesn't make sense. One last question here before we go, Anthony, but how important is it that someone actually takes the time to read the copy aloud before they do their marking up? There's just markings that come to you naturally because you've read it aloud and then you kind of jot them down to remember what you did.

Anthony Reece:

Yeah, you're absolutely right. Going back to what you just said about making sure that you allow yourself a couple of passes through the script before you even bother to marking up, going to the animation character stuff, short and sweet. You want to definitely allow yourself time to research and develop, create characters backstory, allow the characteristics of the voice. All the stuff that I talk about in my character development webinar as well as my character stuff that I teach. And what you guys have there is explore and develop and play with the character before even bother to do anything with it. Once you find what makes a character who she or he is, what's the backstory, why they got the personality, you almost have to create a fictitious background of life. You have to almost make a note of why is the character angry? And once you find all the motivation behind this fictitious character, you want to allow you to create the characteristics, the trace, the different sounds, the textures and all that. The same thing happens. You're doing a dry read, you get an audition in from Voices.com and it says a very small amount of direction, like a lot of them pretty much limit us. We're looking for this and that, this and that, must be this and that, and that's kind of what you get. And then you kind of have to wing it and this comes from, for all of you, experience, talent. You understand if you're a newbie. This comes from experience. This comes from the school of hard knocks, of being in the trenches, of doing a couple of months worth of auditions at voices.com. It allows you to develop over time the process of elimination by going through the script first. Once you breeze through the script and you've read the script, you got familiar with the copy. You got familiar with it enough to where you can't do anything with it till you own it. As people hear me say all the time when I teach, you can't play with the copy until you own the copy. Once you own it, you got a feel for what's going on, what's being said, who, what, when, where, all that stuff. Now you print it out and you can go ahead and start off your markup. As you evolve as a talent, you will slowly start to get even sharper and sharper and clearer and clearer at doing this to the point of where down the road you'll be able to hopefully, off the top of your head, project to project, decide what you need to mark up and what you don't need to mark up. But sometimes less is more. But I'm a big believer in just whatever you can do to mark up the script, even. And so that when you go to record, you got a pretty good idea of where you're going with this particular audition and it's going to enhance your odds.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Absolutely, agreed. And I think that that's a wonderful place for us to close because everything you've just said kind of leads into people going out and trying to do these reads and coming across auditions and getting coaching too. So, Anthony, obviously you're coaching. You do all kinds of different things in your career, but where is the best place we can go for people to learn more about you and what you do?

Anthony Reece:

Well, I would recommend to go to VO101.com and take a look at the different training that I offer there. I do a demo production. I do evaluations. I have a live beginner plan. I have a live intermediate advanced plan. I work with new talent. I work with talent that are in the business, that are looking for high end quality techniques. I work for talent that are not only looking to refresh themselves, but talent that are looking for the opportunity to enhance their offering. So that's kind of it in a nutshell, how I approach it differently in a way.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

Great, Anthony. Thank you so much for that. So everyone knows to go to VO101.com and you can find more information there. Well, Anthony, it's been a real pleasure to catch up with you and to hear all about this topic of marking up scripts today.

Anthony Reece:

Well, my privilege and I'm glad to be with you guys. Thank you so much.

Stephanie Ciccarelli:

And that's the way we saw the world through the lens of voiceover this week. Thank you for listening to Vox talk. I'm your host, Stephanie Ciccarelli. Our producer is Geoff Bremner. Our special guest today was Anthony Reece. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you next week. Bye.