Finding Character Voices for Commercials, Video Games and Cartoons
David Rosenthal
David Rosenthal talks about ways to "find" character voices for your bag of tricks.
IVC embraces the use of audio and video as teaching tools -- and you should too. Examples come to life when heard, and become 3-D when seen and heard. We provide a transcript to help you with note taking or searching our site…but recommend that you push "play!" David: OK, so we are talking about character voices and we talking today about how do you find characters. Well, how do you find characters? A lot of times, they're right out there, right outside your door. They're at a party, at the grocery store and you have to be open and available to listening, to watching in that moment and hopefully being enough of a chameleon, enough of a morph inside yourself and being willing to play with that to allow that character, that person that you're watching to come inside you. It involves a lot of trust and what that means to me is that I know who I am enough so that if I let some complete stranger inside, right, as an actor, I know how to live with that, how to be with that, how to make room for that character, then let it go when it's over, OK? That's the basic trust. I also have to trust that I know how to do it and I know how to play with that creative muse that's happening. So a lot of this involves a certain kind of "creative confidence", a certain boldness to go where not everybody feels comfortable going. Now a lot of people may call it almost a certain kind of madness to be able to like let yourself go and find something else. And I think some of us aren't secure with the idea of letting ourselves go. We've worked very hard on getting this person who we call ourselves to be just this and so to go elsewhere can be scary. It becomes vulnerable. We're suddenly scared that everything we are that we accept and know and love all of a sudden goes out the window because now we're playing a character that may be judged, right, in the wrong way. So it's very important that you find that confidence and that ability to trust yourself to play like you've never played before, to listen, to transform like you never have before. You do that, you're going to be in great shape. You're going to find all these character, all these people coming inside you. And you won't be able to stop it sometimes, but you know what, you're building a repertoire, you're building a whole group of characters. Hold it, I see a hand there. Yes, you. Mary: Are we just copying someone else? David: Well that's the wonderful thing, thank you Mary. Actually no, we're not just copying somebody else, We are finding that place, that part of ourselves that is that character. In other words, if we were that person that we're watching or seeing, what would it be like if we were that person. And suddenly it has our own unique branding, right? It has our particular emotional, physical life. So it's never going to be exactly like that person, because if it does then we're in our head. We're saying "Ok, we're doing this, ok I'm doing that, I'm checking all the checkpoints off". Uh-uh, it has to be immediate and spontaneous.
? I'll talk to you more about this next time on Internet Voice Coach.
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