Character Voiceover Tips: Ad-Libbing

Ad Lib in Character

So part of being able to have a character voiceover sound genuine is to ensure it sounds natural, when someone is “putting on” a character voice you can hear it a mile away and it immediately breaks the illusion and the character is no longer believable because you can “hear past” the character.

It’s important to remember that when you’re creating character voices, you’re actually creating characters which you can then modify and tweak to fit the story and character you might be auditioning for.

One way to make your characters sound more natural is to ad-lib in the character voice, by doing this and not working from a script you are forced to think as the character and the speech should immediately become more natural. Give your characters a back story if you find that helps, give them a history and some life story! If you then find you can’t sustain the voice or that you don’t know what to say then you know you need to work on the voice and character more. Any voice you have should be the end point, not the beginning point of creating a character.

Check out the video below to see this is action!