Reoccuring Nightmare

In the second part of our 4 part series on characters and their voices, I’ll focus this week on the reoccurring character and how you need to maintain integrity when using this characters voice in advertising.

The reoccurring character voice (for example: Nestle Bunny) has got to maintain that sound throughout the campaign, if you get a cold and you need to voice this character you should probably try to reschedule the session for at least a day maybe two, if you’re character has a cold and the client is good by it, work it into the copy, rewrite the script so that the obvious change in the sound of your characters voice fits the script. Easier said than done, because in most cases the client has already seen 5 revisions in the script,approved the one you are given and is a little leery about changing it again. But with a little coaxing and some tweaking by the creative director you CAN pull this off.

Keeping the reoccurring character fresh is just as challenging, many times we forget the voice if it hasn’t been used in a few months, I keep audio files of all my character voices and when I need to refresh it, I just listen back to a previous campaign and get warmed up by listening and parroting the voice until I get a match. You have to exercise your voices often, and I suggest that you do so in the shower, in the car, talking to your 2 year old, wherever you can and keep the creative juice moving forward.

Next time: Wow, you can do that?