VOICE TALENT

You love to speak in different voices. You are great at accents and dialects. You do a terrific George W. Bush impression. Perhaps your career is in voice work. Voice talents are the people whose off-screen voices lend that special something to television shows, films, and commercials to make them truly entertaining. The work you can do as voice talent is broad. Full-length animated films use voice talent to speak the parts of the animated characters seen on-screen. Many films, such as The Royal Tenenbaums, and television shows, such as Scrubs and Arrested Development, use a narrator. A narrator is someone whose voice is heard off-screen telling the viewer more specific details of the story.

The next time you watch television, pay some attention to the commercials. Notice that almost every commercial has a narrator—that is, a person who talks about the product but whom you cannot see. This is a different person from the actors in the commercial. This is a person who does voice-overs for a living.

Voice Tapes

If you want to pursue a career in voice work, you will need a professional demo. This is a regular cassette tape or CD with samples of your voice doing different things, such as speaking with different accents, narrating part of a story, and reading commercials, all set to music. Your demo should be only about two minutes long, and it has to be made in a studio. Before you go in to make your demo, you will need to know specifically what to put on it.