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REX ANDERSON

VOICE OVER ACTOR

VOICE ACTOR SELF CARE

Ten Daily Activities For Maintaining Voice Over Health

VOICE ACTOR SELF CARE

1. Drink a lot of water. With lemon, especially first thing in the morning. Stay hydrated all day long. You gotta stay ready to work at all times.

2. Yawn. Yawning builds up your throat muscles, which will ultimately give you more control over that area.

Warm Ups, Stretches, and Singing

3. Warm up before doing any significant amount of speaking. Sirens (google it) are the best thing to do if you only have a minute. You’ll save yourself the trouble of fixing damage afterwards, plus it makes you look like a crazy person! Super fun to do on public transportation.

4. Sing! Singing has tremendously improved my tone and clarity. By utilizing different warm-ups and encouraging the exploration of my face cavities, I now feel much more confident about my instrument as a whole. I highly recommend exploring local teacher options in your area, or even asking a friend who can sing to help you out. There are also a lot of great online resources for warm-up exercises.

5. Stretch your body out, and engage your hips to center yourself and get your energy flowing. Runner’s stretches and other similar yoga moves are great for releasing the hip sockets, which tend to hold onto a great deal of stress. A loose body is a relaxed body, which then produces a relaxed voice.

6. Practice moving your pelvic core. This is more useful for singing than talking, but it helps to align your body and make long form reading easier.

Deep Breathing for Long Form Voice Over

7. Deep breathe as many times as you can stand. There are more detailed tutorials out there, but basically, lay on your back with your knees up, and breathe out until your air is completely gone. You’ll achieve a weird hissing noise then go totally silent when it’s all out. Wait a few seconds, then slowly breathe back in from the diaphragm. A few of these should open up your lung capacity and allow you to breathe deeper breaths while holding onto air longer. Be careful not to stand up too quickly!

8. Tongue twisters. Commit a bunch to memory. I do ‘red leather, yellow leather, lavender leather’, ‘unique New York’, ‘blue blood black blood’, and a few others. Rodney Saulsberry has a ton of these out there, and they’re great.

9. Obstruction exercises. Stick an object with a decent diameter, maybe an inch or two, between your teeth and try to enunciate words as normal. I use an old wine cork that I don’t wash often enough. You’ll hear the difference in diction immediately, and your jaw should feel a little looser.

Practice Makes Perfect VO

10. Go to work. Do your books, turn in auditions, practice being on top of the things you need to be on top of. Blog. Otherwise, you’ll start storing up the regret in your body until you need to see a chiropractor. Embrace routines, relax the body, and your voice will likely benefit in some way…and drink a cup of throat coat at the end of the day. There.

<3

Rex

Step Into the Light

VOICE ACTOR SELF CARE

If your day is anything like mine, you pretty much grind away in front of a computer all day. Searching for leads, auditioning, improving your website, making connections, on and on, playing the numbers game day in, day out. It’s isolating. It’s lonely. And on the days where the inbox is barren and the phone is silent, it starts to feel like you’ve locked yourself up and thrown away the key. Your own personal Chateau d’If, especially if you’re prone to depression and anxiety spells like me.

Get Outside and Be a Social Creature

It might just save your business.

I have a long history of isolating myself; however, I am also not forced into being social, which for a lifelong introvert can be dangerous. In an effort to increase my productivity, I’ve started scheduling everything I do, from auditioning to marketing to waking up to when I eat. I made sure include exercise and social time in my calendar, and not just drinking with buddies. As soul-searingly awful as my old day jobs were, at least there was some sort of social interaction so I didn’t feel as though I’d disappeared off the face of the Earth. And since our industry is all about recreating real human moments, having those moments on a regular basis seems fairly crucial to acting believably.

So make sure you build in time away from your dungeon. Jog around the neighborhood. Grab lunch with a colleague. Go shopping if you’re lucky enough to have spending money and you’re into that sort of thing. Long hours and hard work are certainly admirable feats, but don’t sacrifice your social side in the process. Or else you might turn weird.

Get Out of Your Head

This can be an odd industry to navigate. You can be told, by the same person in the same breath, that you need to find your one true “money voice” and also that you need to be as versatile and far-reaching as possible. And they’re both correct statements. However, those qualities may apply more to one area of the industry than another. For example, in animation and video game work, the further away from your own voice you can get and the more truly original, different styles of voices you can make, the more useful you’ll be. But, in commercial work, you really only have to be yourself. And be as “yourself” as possible.

But, being yourself doesn’t mean “don’t try”. It means being able to really let your personality shine through in any read, with bold choices that only you would make. I look at voiceover training like karate: you work on the mechanics (script analysis, inflection, diction, posture, and on and on) and when it’s game time, you put it all out of mind. You don’t want to get in your own way when you step up to the mic. Your money voice is easier to find than you might think. It’s really a matter of training yourself up then letting it all flow naturally when it’s time to do the work.

Your Relaxed, Natural Voice

The next time you read a spot, think to yourself, “Am I reading this as me or as a voice in my head?” The casting directors want to hear you, not you doing an imitation of what you think they want. It may feel weird at first, but trust me: it’ll feel more natural, genuine, authentic, and believable in the end. And guess which direction keywords show up way more often than any others?

<3

Rex