Practice! Practice! Practice!

 

Hey there!

 

I wanted to talk about one of the biggest things that continues to help me in my voice over journey: practicing! When it comes to practicing, there’s a plethora of ways for you to improve. For me personally, I like to do a lot of reading and fan work. Whether it’s reading whatever is in front of me at the time or sitting down and reading an excerpt from a scene, I make sure to have fun with it and experiment on new methods.

 

To begin, I wanted to talk about the few posts I have made on my YouTube channel. To practice video game acting, I dubbed over a scene from Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair where the protagonist, Hajime Hinata (played by the fantastic Johnny Yong Bosch), has a breakdown after finding out that has to choose between two heavily imposing choices: his life or the world. I wanted to reference Johnny Yong Bosch’s performance within my take, but I also wanted to really go into depths of the feeling of paranoia/madness of having to choose between such heavy topics. I felt that, in that moment, Hajime is put into a situation where he, as stated within his life, is questioning his entire life, his talent, and his purpose. He just found out that he doesn’t have a talent, which directly ties into what society deems as your purpose. I felt that someone in that situation would feel intense feelings that is just exploding out of him. He can’t contain himself, this fear, this despair. He can’t stop this feeling of paranoia. I do think there are several aspect I could have improved, however. For starters, I could have worked on the timing of some of the lines I read. I felt that I took a very awkward breath in between a line which I felt can take the listener out of the moment. Also, I need to work more on adjusting my interface’s gain for my microphone whenever I’m shouting. I think I just need to experiment a bit more with the act of switching my gain to something that works but still keeps the performance together. Overall, I learned a lot from my practice!

 

Next, I wanted to cover my second practice, this time on cold reads! Cold reads is the act of “sightreading” some material in what feels right in that moment. I’m incredibly happy to be able to work on this, especially for longer pieces. I wanted to practice breaking down a concept and pursuing it within my read through. For this example, I went with Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Tell-Tale Heart’.  In my portrayal, I felt like I could have performed it much better, but I learnt a lot about cold reading. I felt that I focused heavily on the madness and paranoia (we’re starting a trend here), since the jump. I felt I could have played it a bit more “calm/cool”, especially when he’s trying to convince the listener/reader that he’s not mad. This would make his descent ever more apparent and impactful. Overall, I learned more about “putting my feet into the water” to make more impactful choices later on.

 

The biggest thing I’m learning is practice, practice, practice! Practice may not make perfect, but it does make you more comfortable!

 

Thanks for reading, and Happy Voicing!