Indie games to TV Animations — voice acting is a key audio component that could make or break your project.
It’s important you choose the right voice actor to bring life and personality to your character – within budget of course.
The perfect voice can convey emotion and authenticity to ensure your audience connects with your character on a deeper level.
Drawing on the experience of thousands of character voice casting projects, we’ve assembled a short guide of essential steps to help you complete your masterpiece.
Step 1: Identify the primary emotion you want to evoke
Your character may have great depth and complexity but you’ll still need to decide exactly how you want your audience to feel when they speak.
A character quickly becomes forgettable and irrelevant if the viewers feel nothing, so keep it simple. Do you want your audience to be filled with a sense of inspiration, joy, peace, anger, sadness, assurance?
Pick the single, most important emotion of all.
Step 2: Define the core attributes of your Character’s voice
Don’t allow yourself to be distracted by vague, subjective terms like “substance”, “charisma” or “personality”. The core attributes are very simple and clear cut:
Gender – how does your character identify? Are they male, female, non-binary etc
Age group – are they a young adult, a senior etc
Pitch – do they speak with low or deep pitch, a light-camp pitch etc
Tone – the manner in which they typically speak e.g. authoritative, enticing, nurturing, conversational etc
Step 3: Pick a specific regional accent or dialect
In the world of entertainment, immersion and context are essential. A regional accent can tell you the characters social class and origin within seconds. So, a poorly chosen dialect will disengage your audience and tarnish a potentially fantastic production.
For example, if you’re producing a WWII project, using a classic “High German” dialect for your soldier is on par with casting Kevin Costner as Robin Hood. Don’t do it!
We recommend selecting exactly 3 attributes for your voice:
- The language
- The country of origin from which the language is spoken.
- The accent or dialect formed in that country.
Step 4: Budgeting – you get what you pay for
Working with a professional voice talent is critical, an experienced voice can control the subtleties of their vocal characteristics which is crucial to portraying your characters personality.
A slight shift in the intonation or pitch can give the character a different feel altogether!
This is why it’s important to put some work into identifying the desired traits of the perfect voice. It’s also important not to skimp on your budget. Even if it’s an indie project, paying a bit more for experience will elevate the quality of the audio considerably.
Conclusion
If you’ve made it this far, you can take comfort in knowing that by completing these basic steps, your deceptively simple character profile is about to make your entire production more memorable than 80% of your competition.
Why? Because time and time again, professional voice-overs are overlooked and mistakenly hurried through as an afterthought as projects near deadlines.
With virtually no effort, your project now has a huge advantage over many others.
Hire Character Voice Actors for Your Project
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