You’ve heard it thousands of times… that disembodied “nice voice” reading the narration for a video or reminding you to “please hold, you have progressed in the queue”.
Is that nice voice just a nice voice? Or is there some real acting going on? Why do some of us call it “voice acting” even when there’s nary a character description or scene objective in sight?
Today in my fab little home studio, I was recording a whole stack of those polite phone messages – these ones were mostly Christmas and New Year greetings, letting customers know about upcoming holiday closures. So they were, of course, very friendly and cheerful.
I, however, was feeling very tired. It’s the end of November in regional NSW; the weather has turned. The sun wants to kill me, while the storm clouds are providing six hundred percent humidity. I am way too “40-something woman” for this nonsense, hence: exhausted.
Here’s what I noticed: every time I hit Record, my face, arms, and whole torso in my chair changed. I sat up straight, smiled, opened my face – I don’t know how else to describe that feeling! – and embraced the cheerfulness. I welcomed those phone callers like the best customer service assistant you’ve ever seen, in a Hallmark movie about expert customer service assistants falling in love in a country town called We Love Customers.
Now, my darlings, what do we call that, if not acting? (And yes, I will fully agree with you, therefore, that customer service people do a lot of great acting too!)
Not to get too caught up in technical details, but… what IS acting?
Sanford Meisner defined it as “living truthfully under given imaginary circumstances.”
So as voice actors, we have to use our imaginations, right? Sometimes, the imaginary circumstances are simple: a customer wants to know, in as short a time as possible, why they should hire the business they’re trying to call on the phone. My job becomes to, truthfully, convey to them that this business can help them.
In fact, that general idea covers the circumstances for a lot of voiceover work – commercials, corporate promos etc… authentically and specifically persuade this person that the product or service they’re seeing or hearing will help them. You can’t do they just by thinking it’s true. You have to imagine exactly what that person needs and wants. And you gotta believe it, because otherwise it’s not true!
Honestly, long story short: we (voice actors) spend an awful lot of time alone in our studios and recording booths. We do a lot of imagining. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to go elsewhere and imagine things in the same room as other people. 😄
I’m not sure what superstar customer service people do… perhaps they imagine how happy that excruciatingly fussy customer will be once they walk out of the store with lot of goodies.
I’m sure you’ve heard a voice recording or two or twenty that was obviously just somebody reading information. (Or, these days, not even somebody but a program.) You hear the difference, even if you don’t know what exactly the difference is.
Well, now you know: it’s acting. 🎭
