Podcast Length: 4:19

There’s a common assumption in the talent industry that can easily trip up an actor by limiting your skills and therefore your employment opportunities. It’s the idea that you must dramatically alter your approach to act for voiceover, as if there are some deeply guarded secrets to this medium that no one will divulge to you upon pain of death.

Well, it may be liberating to learn there’s little if any real difference in acting for the camera compared to acting for voiceover.

Case in point, here are six similarities between the two that you might not have considered:

1. Both are recorded media which typically require multiple takes.

Only in live television (and stage) do you only get one take. So your ability to continually offer creative options with each take while remaining within the context of the moment /project, as well as meeting the needs and demands of the immediate production, is the goal.

2. Both voiceover and on-camera utilize a technical device to capture your performance.

Mastering mic technique is quite possibly the greatest difference you’ll likely encounter when transferring your skills from one medium to another. Yet, even then, ensuring your performance registers can be considered the equivalent to remaining within the frame when on-camera, or not upstaging yourself and others on stage. If you’re too far off-mic or out frame on-camera, your best performance efforts will be wasted.

3. Acting for the camera and voiceover both require point-of-view, skill and an interest factor that compels an audience.

In other words, you’re expected to perform as an actor, rather than a robot—regardless of the medium. We’re paid to have a pulse! In fact, all the same demands required in any other performance setting is required of you as a voice talent.

4. Your performance is best established with you becoming grounded prior to the take.

If you move toward a camera, you blur and go out of focus, and if you crowd a mic, your performance distorts as well. Both require you remain fairly static in front of either the mic or the camera, respectively, rather than moving around all that much.

5. Type matters as much in voiceover as it does with on-camera work.

Being yourself will yield the best results rather than trying to come across as something you’re clearly not.

6. Both require you place your performance just beyond the mic or camera, rather than between you and the mic or camera.

By projecting your performance just beyond the mic or camera you include the audience within your sphere of influence, which includes your imagination, your thoughts, your actions, and the story you’re intending to tell.

Certainly every dedicated actor must master or at least become familiar with multiple forms of media if you hope to be a value to a variety of potential projects. And, while there are some obvious differences between these two forms of media, knowing the similarities between them may make adapting your skills to either one an easier transition.

When it all comes down to it, whether you’re hired solely to voice a project or appear on-camera, or both as the case may be, you’ve been hired as an actor. And just as a writer writes and a painter paints, an actor acts.

In other words, acting is acting is acting, as the saying goes.

Copyright © 2023 by Kate McClanaghan. All Rights Reserved.

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