I spend a lot of time having voiceover students focus on finding their own inner “magic.” The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron is a great resource for tapping into your own inner “magic.” Everyone has it, and I can see it in every single person I meet. The problem is that for some reason it all disappears (like magic!) once they start “reading.” Yes, reading copy can be a dry and sterile affair if you let it. Students can get caught up in the idea that they’re reading, and try to do it perfectly. This sounds “read.” They can also get caught up in the fact that they’re trying to make it interesting, and this usually winds up sounding “over the top” when done the wrong way. There is a way to sound both natural and interesting and I am going to show you in 3 easy steps. Or one, depending on how you look at it.
There might be about 60 seconds of copy that you are dealing with, and trying to make it all sound authentic and intriguing all at once can be overwhelming. I advise students to minimize that overwhelm by reducing the script to one sentence. Or two. In general, the first and last sentences are the most important. The first sentence can be the make or break moment where the writer/producer chooses to keep listening to your audition or not. The last sentence will be what they remember you by. The best way to find your best read for these sentences it to do the sentence a few times in a row out loud. Then and only then will you find, by isolating the sentence, that you can vary your takes on it and find the best one. When done with the rest of the spot you don’t experiment with it and it can sound bland and just lumped in with the rest of the read. Isolating and playing with a line lets you explore different inflection choices, different places to pause, etc. Try it with any sentence you like from any script and notice how you instantly have a better read than you did when you it was read with the rest of the script. An instantly better read. Or three reads, for that matter.