When you listen to someone speaking on the radio or hear a person doing voiceover work on a television commercial, it may occur to you that you could do that work just as well, if not better. While sitting in a movie theater watching the latest animated offering from Hollywood, you can sometime recognize the voices of famous actors as well as unknown people lending their talents to cartoon animals and other characters. At this point, you begin to realize that voice acting is a job that seems within your reach.
These voice-acting roles are a good way to flex your acting muscles and use your natural vocal talents to entertain and inform the public. If you have a good speaking voice and a flair for the dramatic, you may be considering beginning a career as a voice actor. Raw talent is a good starting point, but you need to study and practice regularly to hone your voice acting skills. Success in voice acting requires you to get professional training. You also need to network to find jobs and promote yourself.
Skills
You must have a voice that people enjoy listening to. If your voice cracks or is otherwise unpleasant sounding, it may be too difficult a hurdle to get over. However, if you already have a good speaking voice, there are skills that you can develop to help you in a voice-acting career.
You will need to practice breath control to ensure that you can take in a large enough breath to say a long section of narrative text without having to pause unnaturally in the middle. Practice will help you get better at pacing your breathing so that your words sound natural as you read from scripts.
If you are interested in doing comedic voice acting, such as in animated comedies, your ability to improvise and think of humorous things to say on the spot will give you an edge over other voice actors. Your director may wind up using your ad-libs in the finished project.
Enroll in Voice Acting Class
It’s essential for you to enroll in a voice acting class. Acting classes cost money, so you may have to work at a part-time job to pay for your tuition. Not only will you benefit from an instructor who has experience in the industry, you will also be able to learn from your classmates as you critique one another. You will pair up with fellow students to practice dialogs as the teacher listens to you and evaluates your progress.
It’s better that you make basic mistakes in the classroom setting, where you can work them out with the help of an instructor, rather than try to recover from a blunder during an important audition for a national TV commercial spot.
Hire a Coach
After you have spent some time in the classroom environment honing your voice acting skills, you can further develop your abilities by hiring an acting coach. He will work with you individually, giving you exercises to practice at home and pushing you to practice different types of characters, accents and emotions.
Advertise Yourself
Make a demo audio recording of yourself doing different types of voices to show your range. For example, select monologues that require different emotional tones, such as happy excitement, enthusiasm, sarcasm, anger or confidence. Send your demo recording to agents. The wider the acting range that you demonstrate, the more options an agent will have to work with to find you paying work.
Take advantage of your social networking sites to spread the word about your availability as a voice actor. For example, after you have mastered some new foreign accents, showcase your talent by announcing it through Twitter and by posting details on your Facebook and Google + pages. If you include audio recordings on your social networking sites, blog and website, interested people can quickly get an idea of what you sound like. You should also take advantage of sites that let you post your own demos and act as a job board.
Voice acting is an exciting career, and you might be tempted to try to jump straight into it. Take a little time to prepare and you’ll be in a much better place to take the voice acting world by storm!
