0667 – Your Character’s ‘Voicernality’

2022.10.29 – 0667 – Your Character’s ‘Voicernality’

It’s more than the ‘voice’

Remember that a character’s voice (including your very own!) is partly based on one’s physicality: how they talk is affected by how they walk, how they hold themselves as they speak, how they stand and sit, their physicality, their energy and more.

All of these elements help create their ‘voice personality’, what voice actor Katie Leigh calls ‘voicernalities’. Some of these factors affect the voice indirectly (someone holding tension in their fists or frame will have a tense voice and attitude) and others will affect the voice much more directly (as Katie says[1] “If you do kids’ voices, you’ve got to remember their lungs are smaller than ours so they’re gonna breathe differently…” ).

Many of these attributes will tell you not only about the character’s voice, but also their attitude: their mental and emotional state, their physicality. And you will create a more believable voice for your character if you try and physically embody who it is you are playing. Now that’s quite easy if you are playing an army officer (standing up straight with steely eyes, barking orders), or a grandparent (maybe bent over, short breaths leading to a higher-pitched voice), and it’s admittedly less easy if you are playing a cartoon cat or an animated aeroplane.

Then, you need to look deeper into the character that you are playing: their age, background and storyline and it’s from that kind of detail that the voice will emerge.

You need to know the subtleties within the character, not just ‘do the voice’. Voiceover expert Marc Graue says on The Voice Over Experts podcast (15/10/2008) “A great example is doing the voice of a big fat pig. … now we need to make him a bit more effeminate. Now he needs to be a 7700-lb pig  and make him sound stupid. These are all the kinds of things that come into play and you need to be able to do this on the spot”.

[1] “The VO Meter Podcast”, 25/08/2021

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