Looking Back.
I’m someone who tends to focus on the future. I try to be better about being “present,” but it’s not easy. I also don’t want to neglect the past…so in that spirit I’d like to share a memory of my first steps into voice acting. As Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music would say (sing), let’s “begin at the very beginning, it’s a very good place to start,” with a story about my first voiceover.
Kidding and musical references aside, it was part accident and part kismet. In 2017, I worked full time managing a public health HIV services program, and I was looking for ways to incorporate personal stories to improve health outcomes and reduce health disparities. I found an opportunity to participate in a digital storytelling (DST) workshop with StoryCenter and signed right up (after it was approved by work, of course – if you’ve ever worked in a bureaucracy you know what I mean). In case you aren’t familiar with them, StoryCenter are the founders of the DST movement and have helped over 20,000 individuals tell their stories since 1993; they do great work – you should definitely check them out.
Finding Voiceover.
The DST workshop was an amazing, unique experience. Here’s a very condensed summary: over the course of several days, participants (with the help of facilitators) write a first-person narrative story, record a voiceover of their story, and select images to appear with the voiceover. They put it all together in a video, which results in a 2-4 minute digital story.
During my workshop, I went through this process, and without knowing it at the time, I recorded my first voiceover. A few weeks after the workshop, I was at home, shopping online (as one does), and the MP3 file from my voiceover started playing out of nowhere. I was so confused. I’m not sure how it happened (I must have accidentally opened the file without meaning to), but as I sat there and I listened to my voice play, I realized for the first time, that this was a field, a profession, and something I wanted to pursue.
Building Community.
Right away I began looking for training. I have a theater background, so I knew I had the acting chops, but I also knew that voice acting is a craft all its own and I wanted to learn and develop my skills. So, I started by doing research and took a few local and online classes; I got some good advice, made connections, made mistakes, listened to a lot of podcasts, found good coaching, and found a voiceover community.
Over time, I made friends, learned to edit audio, built my home recording space, and in 2020 (after lots of training and preparation) I had my commercial demo made. I launched my website in January 2021, and I study my VO skills every day. I am even working on several additional demos – K-12 narration and medical narration. I have come a long way from that first voice over in my DST workshop and I will continue to grow and succeed because I am committed to excellence and quality in both voice acting and storytelling.
Telling Stories.
Yes, storytelling. I see voiceover as a mechanism for telling stories. Storytelling is an essential communication tool because it paints the picture of the messages we want to convey. For example, in public health, messages are often framed in terms of statistics, graphs, rates, cases and maps. While these are important pieces of objective, factual information – on their own they do little to impact individual behavior, thoughts, feelings or opinions. Storytelling fills in the gray area in between the facts. It offers a personal, humanized perspective on the public health issue, and puts the message into a real-life context for the listener.
As a voiceover artist, I do not tell my first-person narrative, as I did in my DST workshop, but I do communicate a message, a mission, a purpose and a story. Thankfully, I am a natural storyteller, as well as an excellent listener, and to be a great voiceover artist, I need to be both. As my friends at StoryCenter say, “Listen Deeply, Tell Stories.”