Effective talk: Creating character voice
Year of Talk: 2021
Video Link: Finding Character Voice With Your Voice
Being a voice actor means you bring a character from the pages to real life.
Explicit Characterization:
This can be any detail that is written down for the character. Either details or backstory of said character.
For starters look and the basic details of the character. Age, gender, background, any other descriptions.
Giving more backstory might not always be the solution if it feels like a character doesn't have a voice. Especially since not a lot of people will read the extra lore
At the same time, many characters won't appear for long enough in the story to matter and need the extra backstories.
Implicit Characterization:
It can be useful to find implicit ways that the character might sound through art assets or animations.
Artists can have characters move certain ways or wear certain gear that helps show what the character might look like and what they believe is important.
Also, people move differently depending on how they act. People that are normally very happy will move more energetically.
For Writers:
Planning out who might be good voice actors for each character gives you a better idea of the range of speeches and vocalizations that they can do.
It can help determine if certain characters would sound good when saying certain lines or not.
Other notes:
It's important to be willing to rewrite a character if a unique Voice Actor comes along and audiences. The unique voice of the actor can help make a character even more unique and memorable then intended.
Also, try to do a line reading session between the writers and voice actors. Letting the Voice Actors understand what is being asked of them as well as letting the writers understand how the Voice Actors might read the lines before recordings.
Line Reading sessions also let writers later go back to the drawing board and rework scenes so that the lines are more understandable.
Try to physically act out scenes. This lets both the actors and writers better visualize how people might move around in a scene as well as understand if there is too much or too little movement from certain characters.
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