Latest / Lydia Nicole's Acting Smarter Now Podcast / How to Build a Successful Career in Voiceover

Transcript

How to Build a Successful Career in Voiceover · Lydia Nicole's Acting Smarter Now Podcast

• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: We're told be the best you you can be, but then they put a lot of restrictions on that.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so to be able to say, be who you are, enjoy it, that's and just stand in it.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: Don't suck in your belly if that's not who you are.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Just be, be and not just that, not just because that's not who you are.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Uh release the muscles there because you need them to work in a different way.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: You need them to work to give you strength to push out a 10-second scream, you know, a 10-second breath, whatever you need.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but there's also that whole attitude of well, it has to do with voiceover.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter what you look like, and that's the joy of voiceover.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And and why so many people get into it, I think, because they will often, or they have the potential to be cast for a voiceover for a character that they would possibly never be cast as on camera, right?
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: For people who do both.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: So um, you know, a girl who's who's well, let's say uh an older woman who's 45 years old.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_00: The first instinct isn't, okay, that's what I'm gonna use for uh the voice of a 10-year-old boy.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: However, Nancy Cartwright, who's been doing that the voice of Bart Simpson for the last what 35 years, absolutely, and that's one of those joyous things, Lydia, about women in voiceover for animation is we can do voices that are realistic sounding boy voices.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: And what happens to boys, real boys, although I love working with kids, is you get to that 10, 11, 12-year-old range and their voices change.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: I remember um when I was working, I would get resumes from kids when I was doing casting for kids.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: There'd be like 10 kids who credited themselves with the voice of Charlie Brown.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because 10 different kids did the voice of Charlie Brown, because as soon as they age out, they have to recast.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: What a hard casting that is! Thank God I didn't have to do that gig.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because it still has to sound like the original Charlie Brown, right?
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: And but every year, somebody new the voice changes.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll tell you a really cool story.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: I um I found some paperwork many years ago about one of the first castings I did for Warner Brothers.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: It was for Tiny Toon Adventures, the first Steven Spielberg project I did.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I was looking at the SAG sign-in sheets.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, you just had to sign in, give your name, your age, and I would use them to put my notes on for the actor.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And I noticed that two actors I had marked as the two best actors I read.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: But I couldn't hire either of them because they were literally at the point where I could hear their voice changing.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it was changing like in the studio while they were auditioning for me.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: And it was Leo DiCaprio and Giovanni Rubisi.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: And they were probably 10 years old at the time, 12, maybe 10, 11, 12, but their voices, and I thought, these guys were such good actors, but I cannot hire them.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: But it was simply because their voices changed.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_00: So women, women do a lot of boy voices.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's a really that's a big advantage.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: But you have to you have to think about things when you're doing kid voice like that, about how kids breathe different and they'll breathe in a really weird place that we adults would never think of breathing in.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: We we go for the phrases they don't.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so that was one of the few advantages because for the most part, when I started working in voiceover for animation, I'd say 75 to 80 percent of the castings were for males.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: There were far fewer roles for women, except when it came to little boy voices.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: I always auditioned real kids and adult women, and we would pick the best voice.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: And if we had a series that we knew it was gonna go on, we we were confident.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: I think even for Tiny Two Adventures, the initial purchase for that was for 65 episodes.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: So that's gonna take at least two, two and a half years to produce.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_00: Those kids whose voices were already changing were gonna sound like men by the time we finished production.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I had to look at voices who either and there's a couple of adult men like the Jason Marsdens, um, whose voices are naturally young.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: They will be able to sound like 12-year-olds Scott Mendel.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: He will sound like a kid.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: He's gotta be 50 years old by now, he still sounds 12.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: But it's fabulous.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's given them, I mean, he's been the voice of Robin for a decade, probably, and and that's an advantage, that's terrific.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: You as a woman have you've really done an amazing job, and your career has taken off.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_01: Where I don't know that a lot of women have had that kind of trajectory.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_01: That even you started as an actor, you got into um uh the theatrical um uh agency, then went into casting, then went into directing at an early.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you started directing when it was still early.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_01: It was, you know, you had Hannah Barbera, you didn't have many other um studios doing uh animation in the way that that you started doing it.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: And so what do you think kept you hitting all the marks and becoming so successful as a female director in that genre?
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_01: Because um you really you you are the one to be man, woman, dog, child, you're the one.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: You're you're the one.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you uh uh I I I as I was studying all that you've done, I I was thinking, acting, acting, you know, for me in looking at you, just just observing what you've done, I I go, oh, it's acting.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: That that she's been able to morph into so many different types of characters while she's been on this career.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: So I I just want to hear it from you how how you've handled it, because you've had a stellar career in this business uh uh for anybody, just just being able to work continuously.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: It was a lot of luck, being in the right place at the right time, and a lot of taking risks, because sometimes you have to take a risk as a creative person.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I I my my family, I come from a very large family.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh um, I'm one of eight kids.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: So part of my energy comes from that fact.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm uh child number six, there's only two younger than I.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: And so at the dinner table, to get attention, you had to, you know, put yourself out there, and so I I got very sort of comfortable demanding attention.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean that in pay attention to me, I just mean commanding attention.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And um, and my family all had a great sense of humor, and that helps a lot.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I also was like a cheerleader.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: I know that sounds like a silly thing, but that actually helped in my career.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: I was a drum majorette, that helped in my career.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I have to give full credit to my number one mentor, Gordon Hunt, who was the director at Hanna Barbera for years and years and years, and my dear, dear friend, who's no longer with us but left quite a legacy.
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, he also had such great respect for actors, which was delightful.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: And he was not afraid to um reach out to the acting community for people who had not done this work before.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: Gordon had been the casting director at the Mark Taper Forum for years.
• 9:06
  SPEAKER_00: And so he knew an awful lot of actors from that.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, sat down with me one day and said, let's open this up to those actors.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: Let's look at the agency lists and start talking to the agents about people who have not yet done voiceover, but whom we know are good actors because we've seen them on stage or we've seen them on TV or we've seen them on film.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_00: So we have that benefit of actually knowing their work already.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_00: Microphone technique, studio stuff, I can teach in a very short period of time.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: Acting, I can't teach in a four-hour session.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: I need them to come in as good actors.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: So Gordon encouraged me to reach out to other actors than the group of people who had been doing it up to that point.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: You're also a very curious person.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_01: It seems like that, you know, that you you got the job at at Abrams and you went and you took a voiceover class, and then you uh went to Hanna Barbera and you went to every department to find out what everybody did.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: And to me, that is brilliant.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it it reminds me of Stella Adler.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_01: I studied with Stella for a while, and and and she was always talking about research.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_01: And you are a great example of somebody who's researching your environment, your immediate environment, not just, you know, we're in the office, what do you do, what do I do, but you're really wanting to know what everybody in the whole company does.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: And and you're right, it is a curiosity.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: It also, you know, I think this came from Fredonia's mentality of if you're gonna be an actor, which is what I was studying when I was at Fredonia, you have to find out what does the stage um, let's say the lighting designer, how does he contribute?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: And what does he have to go through?
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: And and so that that aspect of studying all the different uh parts of the people uh who create the production carried into animation.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, oh my goodness, here I am in one of the finest studios.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: I was such a huge Hanna Barbera fan as a kid.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: I was beyond thrilled when I got the gig there.