| Main Feature Story - Friday, November 21, 2008
Feature: Guided by voices
When you find yourself wondering what a nervous glass of talking tap water might sound like—you're at Voicetrax…
by Joy Lanzendorfer
As with most people, I don't like hearing the sound of my voice. Even though I know that my voice sounds different in my head than it does to other people, hearing it played back to me is always a little unsettling. So, standing in a recording booth behind a microphone, about to record a mock voice-over audition at Voicetrax, a voice acting school in Sausalito, is a tad uncomfortable for me. It doesn't help that outside the booth, a room full of advanced students is listening to my every word.
I'm supposed to read a monologue where tap water tries to convince the listener that it is better, cheaper and fresher than bottled water. Through a window in the booth, I can see Samantha Paris, owner of Voicetrax, sitting behind recording equipment. A successful actress who was the voice of Roxy in the 1980s cartoon show Jem and the Holograms, Paris is a compact and bright-eyed woman in her late 40s.
Through a speaker, she tells me to practice reading the monologue before we record it. The mic goes off and it's suddenly quiet in the booth. I look down at the script in front of me. "Hi, it's me, Water," I mumble, trying to summon high school drama class to my mind.
I'm taking part in a game the voice class is playing. The idea is for each student to deliver a perfect reading of the monologue in as few takes—or tries—as possible. Everyone starts out with four takes. The first person to get it right in fewer than four raises the bar so that the students who go afterwards have to get it as quickly as the previous student did, or lose. Paris coaches the students along, helping them find the story behind the script. Meanwhile, the class listens in, learning from each other's mistakes.
This class has about 20 students from the 300-student school. They are a mix of men and women starting in their mid-30s and up. What's noticeable right away is how warm they are to each other. They seem excited and happy to be here.
"These things are not so much classes as they are support groups," one student, Nick Schulte, had told me earlier in the day. "You know, we're all in this together, let's get it done."
Schulte, a retired cameraman from the East Bay, has been taking classes at Voicetrax for eight years. Voice acting is his hobby, although he has done some paying voice jobs as well. Though he favors longer narration projects like audiobooks, Schulte says he's open to all kinds of voice work.
"There's so many niches to do in voice-over," he says. "I think that's what makes it exciting—there are so many aspects of it. And I think the school is kind of the clearing house to find out where you would fit best."
• • • •
VOICE-OVER ACTING IS a broad and varied field that includes movies, radio, TV commercials, audio tours, books-on-tape, video game narration and even Saturday morning cartoons. Voicetrax, which started in 1988, is the only school in the United States where you can learn all aspects of the profession. Students come from as far away as Mendocino and Sacramento to take classes here. In fact, Marin is the only area within driving distance that is underrepresented at Voicetrax. When we spoke before class, Paris told me that only about nine of her students come from Marin.
"The majority of students are from the South Bay and the East Bay and San Francisco," says Paris. "So it certainly makes sense for us to move into the city, but I'm not moving."
While Voicetrax doesn't offer a degree or accreditation, once students have the basics down, they have a consultation with Paris, who helps them focus their goals and define what they need to do to get there. In this way, Voicetrax is both less structured and more personalized than most schools.
"I prioritize for them," says Paris. "I tell them what I think are the most important things for them to do each term and I write a note to each student on how they're doing and what I want them to work on, that kind of stuff. That way, everybody feels like they're being held by the hand and led step-by-step to achieve whatever goals they have."
There's another reason Paris takes so much interest in her students' talent—Voicetrax also does casting. Producers pay Paris to pick out a small selection of talent, which they then narrow down to the person for the job. Her client list includes companies such as Chevron, VISA, Macy's, AT&T, Starbucks and Fisher-Price, as well as advertising agencies such as Goodby, Silverstein & Partners; JWT San Francisco; and BBDO West.
Paris is acutely aware of what makes someone successful at voice acting, and she would have you know it is not the voice. It turns out that voice-over acting is, well, acting. A good voice professional employs the same skills that any other actor would—he or she must identify the story in the script and act it out in one or two takes.
The acting aspect is so easy to overlook that even people who are accustomed to using their voices professionally can be unaware of it. Voicetrax student Ken Crauss may have had his own radio show for five years in Mendocino, but he still never thought of voice-overs as acting.
"I did not realize that at all when I got here," says Crauss. "Sam calls it finding the bunny in the script, you know, finding that gem, that little treasure that's in there. The teachers here are so incredibly helpful at getting you to the place where you can see exactly what a script is about. It's not just reading words on the paper. There's a story in there."
Crauss is currently represented by Stars Agency in San Francisco, but while he has gone on auditions, he hasn't gotten a job yet. However, with voice acting, failing to get an audition is not as traumatic as it is for other actors. For one thing, voice auditions are short, requiring less time and preparation. For another, they're not as emotionally risky as other auditions.
"When I was in L.A. and I was doing on-camera work, for every job I did there were probably 20 that I didn't get," says Paris. "I was really told, oh she's just the best actress, but she's just not quite pretty enough. Or, oh she's the best actress, but she's a little overweight. From an on-camera perspective, it really feels like rejection. When it's just your voice, it doesn't really feel that way. I don't know what it is. I think it's because it's nothing to do with outer anything. It's just your voice."
Paris started Voicetrax almost by chance. In 1988, she moved to Mill Valley and was planning to do voice work from Marin, flying down to L.A. when necessary. Then one day someone asked her if she taught. Although she hadn't ever had a student before, she said yes. She started taking on one student, then another and another until it became a school.
While San Francisco has some of the biggest ad agencies in U.S., up until then, advertisers had to go to L.A. for voice talent. So a voice-over school was of natural interest to them. As word got around, Paris got a call from a producer asking if she cast. Although she didn't, she said yes. In 1990, she added the casting arm to Voicetrax.
• • • •
OVER THE YEARS, the school has sometimes grown to more than Paris and her 30-some instructors can handle—at least in the personalized way she prefers. Today, she tries to keep the number of students between 300 and 350 so she can get to know each person and his or her goals.
"When it got big, that's when it really felt like a business," she says. "And I never intended to have a business. Being an actress in my early years, I always told myself that the minute this wasn't fun or I felt like this was a job and I was here solely to make money, then I wasn't going to do it."
Recently, the school has expanded again to include Voice Yente, a Web site devoted to helping producers find voices for their projects. When a producer approaches the site, Voice Yente recommends several people in an online database of voice demos that might match the project. If the producer is interested in an actor, he or she can get the contact information for a fee of $19.95.
While most students work toward completing a degree, voice-over students work toward completing a demo. The demo, what Paris jokingly calls a "lying résumé," displays a variety of vocal styles designed to show off what the student can do. The demo is the bottom skill level someone has to be at to work in the voice-over industry. "If you're not at that level, you're not ready," she says.
Paris plays me a few demos by former students, including one by Al Bedrosian, who is now an instructor at Voicetrax as well as a voice actor. His demo goes through a variety of styles you hear every day on the radio. One moment his voice is warm and reverent when talking about veterans, then it's a hard-boiled detective character, then it launches into the machine-gun lawyer-speak of ad disclaimers.
A successful voice actor has to know which skill to pull out for which job. Since a radio commercial creates the pictures for the reader, the actor's performance has to be broader and bigger. With a TV commercial, the pictures are already there, so the actor has to say the lines in a way that doesn't overpower the pictures yet still delivers the message. Character acting is equally varied—video-game acting is more realistic while cartoon acting is more exaggerated, for example.
This is a lot to learn and can take some people longer than others. In 20 years, Paris has had plenty of challenging students. In one case, a blind woman named Dionne Quan came to Voicetrax. She had always wanted to perform but her disability held her back. Paris had never known a blind voice actor, but she saw no reason why Quan couldn't read the scripts in Braille.
Quan's training took a long time. First she had to get to the point where she could read Braille quickly enough to sound natural. Then she had to adjust so that you couldn't hear her fingers moving over the page on the microphone. Once she got to that point, she had to learn the same acting skills everyone else has to learn.
However, the work paid off. Today Quan is a thriving L.A. voice actor whose work includes Rugrats, Bratz and Pirates of the Caribbean.
"I get so mad when people talk in terms of this word talent," Paris says. "If you've never done something, what is the reality that you're going to be good at it right off the bat? Especially because 95 percent of the people who come here are not actors."
• • • •
I THINK OF these words an hour later as I stand in the recording booth, practicing the monologue I'm about to say in front of the class. "Hi, it's me, Water," I say again.
Paris's voice comes through the speaker into the booth: "OK Joy, we're going to record it now."
In the monologue, tap water is telling a human being how it is better than bottled water. I read it through, trying to put some inflection into my voice. Even I can tell that my reading sounds stilted.
Paris explains that I need to imagine the person I'm speaking to. "Pretend that you're talking to a friend, someone who you really like, but who you haven't seen for a while," she says.
I record the monologue two more times, trying to pretend to be tap water talking to a friend who has been ignoring me, ostensibly because he or she prefers bottled water to my company, but whom I still like anyway and want to remind of my presence. At the end of the third take, Paris has a new note for me.
"In between every few sentences, I want you to add in a nervous giggle."
Nervousness. Now that I can work with. I still haven't forgotten the room of voice actors listening to my every word outside the door. Talk about the bunny in the script.
I record a third time, no longer trying to hide my nervousness. Every few phrases, I force an awkward giggle that makes me feel silly. But when Paris plays my recording back for me and the other students, I'm surprised. My awkwardness had been seamlessly funneled into the reading. The recording sounds like tap water is so worried about offending the bottled water-drinking friend that she is deflecting the confrontation with a please-like-me chuckle. I can suddenly see how some actors make entire careers out of being the awkward guy in the room. Maybe that could be my voice-acting niche.
Driving home, I pay more attention to advertising on the radio. I never noticed all the ways that voices enter your daily life, and most of them are voice actors. And while I'm not ready to give up my day job yet, I can see how it could be a lucrative and fun career. It may take some work, but Paris is adamant that it's a job anyone can have with enough practice.
"I swear to god...anyone, if this is what they want to do and they work hard and they're persistent, they can be successful," she told me. "It's like, do you love it? Do you want to work at it? Then I'm here."
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