Watch what you say (before you read that Voiceover script)

A lovely, new voiceover student of mine brought to the surface for me something that’s been brewing in my subconscious for a while now: How we talk about the script we are looking at.  There is much power in our words.  Our words connect to feelings, our feelings come through as intentions, and our intentions direct the way we emote the heart of the script.  Or not emote.

We were looking at a script for Grape Nuts  This is the text:

 A breakfast your heart and taste buds can agree on.  Post Grape Nuts.  Anything but ordinary.

Simple enough.  I asked her what her impression of the script was, what the mood/style was, how it seemed the writer might want her to read it…and she responded by saying it seems like a campaign to sell you the cereal.  It’s written very “commercially.”  Perhaps if she had the word, she might have even said that it seemed “anncry.”  I asked her to read it.  It sounded – false.  She was reading with a detached sensibility, talking without passion, a forced smile, and speaking impersonally to the “air.”  This isn’t going to work is it?  I then agreed with her wholeheartedly (because I actually did) that the script seemed written with one goal – to sell, and to not pretend it’s doing anything else.  It starts off with a positive description or angle on the product, and finished with a “slogan.”  Totally.  Announcery.  I then told her, which is true, which I saw happen all the time when casting commercials, that writers and producers ask for the script to be read CONVERSATIONALLY, NATURALLY, NON-ANNCRY all the time, and even when the writing reflects something totally the opposite from that.  Check out this article on homing your conversational voiceover read if you have time.  I’d like to think voiceovers is harder than film.  You work with a message that often lives in an emotional vacuum, which asks something of you that isn’t there.  Film offers you character background, plot, context.  Voiceover doesn’t.  No wonder some of the best voiceover artists out there are also the best actors. 

Back to the student and the Grape Nuts script.  This time I asked her to simply suspend her disbelief, ignore the “way” it was written, especially if the specs are calling for a “conversational” read.  No sense in saying it’s not, right?  Because someone else will just MAKE it conversational – and hey, they’re getting that job.  Well, the right-brain intentional angle worked.  She said it warmly, as if directly speaking to a friend.  She pretended.  And I believed.