Developing your character

I had quite the assignment today, mainly because we were short handed and I had to develop 3 different characters for a furniture store.. Now think about this, I was going to be the only voice on this spot, how am I to differentiate my voices from each other, engage, entertain and still bring the message home?

Well it certainly wasn’t easy, but it can be done, we all have talents, mine happens to be that I can method act on command.. tell me how old I’m supposed to be, what my motivation is and who am I talking to and I can deliver a believable character in moments. However,,,, if the copy is bad to begin with, then we have a whole different ball of wax to melt.  But let me go back where I was.. ummm where was I .. oh yeah, developing your characters when you are the only voice.. I use Adobe Audition exclusivly as my editing tool, so I was able to pitch my voice over on one of the characters slightly without losing it’s believablity, I used an entirely different accented voice on the other read and the Announcer part was my normal speaking voice. Add the a bevy of effects, and light sound bed for the announcer tags and voila’ done.. but there is a caveat to this method of production, you can’t do it very much or you’ll end up doing the same characters over and over again and that just won’t work.

If you listen to the voices in your head, make sure one of them knows what’s going on.