Voiceover tips from actress Michele O’Brien ▫︎ transcript

I am Michelle O'Brien. I was a member of the second cohort of the Kasama collective. I'm a freelance podcast producer with a background in theater.

I wanted to talk to you specifically because you did. Truly wonderful voiceover module, not just with the cohort that you are a part of, but the cohort after you, I actually invited you back as a guest speaker to share all of the goodness that you shared with your cohort.

But before we get into that, how do you think about voice when it comes to podcasting as somebody who's coming from that acting comedy background? What do you bring to podcasting in public?

So it's interesting. I was an actor for many, many years before I pivoted to writing, directing podcasts, producing

and so when I think of voice, it, takes me back to my voice and speech classes that I did starting in high school and all the way up through adulthood and all of those classes, the way they focused their kind of. Was about the connection between the mind, the body, the breath and the voice. So for me, there's no talking about just voice without talking about that whole system.

The most important, teacher that was shared with me was this woman, Kristin Linklater, who was a brilliant vocal coach and acting coach. And her whole thing is about the breadth and the bottom. Being used to convey meaning, and basically your voice, the way you convey meaning in your voice is to feel the feelings deeply and connect to the intention.

And I think what it speaks to in the podcasting realm is that listeners have a really, really good BS detector and listeners can tell when you're not feeling the thing that you're trying to convey. And though it wasn't. And so it's all about what do I actually mean? What feeling am I trying to engender?

And all of that can come through the voice.

So I would love for you if you were to share with us some of the specific things, ways to kind of get more in your body and the way that you're talking about.

Yeah. So the first and most important thing before you sit down to do anything physical, which voice acting and voice vocal recording is physical is a warmup. So my favorite warmups are starting with things like stretching. So whether that's like giving yourself a facial massage, right. Making sure you're talking, you're touching on the temples and like all of the different parts of your facial mask.

And I would say. Try it now give a little tap. I don't know if you could probably hear my mic. It just, it, you can really sort of feel the resonances in your skull. So that's one of my favorite ways to warm up, you know, some massage the jaw, right? Ho my favorite it looks really weird, but feels really amazing.

Clasping your hands together, shaking them in front of you and just holding your mouth open on an awe like

Michelle, I'm totally done this. I do this all the time. Right. All the time before I do my video, it's probably the one that I go to the most. Oh, I'm so

glad. It just like it loosens everything up. It allows you to be like great clean slate.

What can I put in it today? So that's my favorite and then my best one. And I think this one's especially fun to do with kids. Is lemon face lion face. So it's basically the lion face. As you make your face as big as possible in the lemon face, you make your faces as small as possible. So lemon face lion face, rather it would be like like roaring and lemon face

and just kind of going back and forth between them in lion is a really great way to, to move those facial muscles, move those articulates. So that's like getting the sort of face it, part of the instrument ready. And then in terms of getting the voice ready, there's a couple of different things.

First. You want to make sure that there's nothing constricting your breath, right? Like right now, if you can kind of hear in my voice, I'm a little tense and it's, it's tightened. Whereas if I put my shoulders back, I am allowing more resonance in my chest area. Right. And so my body is allowing the sound to reverberate a little bit better, and I will be in better voice or at least more intentional voice that way.

So I'm moving through the body is a really helpful thing, making sure you're physically situated and then warming up your articulators. So things like the, the, the teas and the bees and making sure you're as nimble in your mouth as you want to be for whatever words that you've written for yourself.

So couple of my kind of favorite ones. The lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue, the lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue, which is a really good one to remember and a very, very tough tongue-twister, but really insert your favorite tongue-twister. I also like red leather, yellow leather, cause that really goes like to the whiteness that you're trying to stretch out things like lip trills, just like.

Either in one, in one kind of long line or even going, like going up to the top of your range and then back down that can be really helpful. And I, I noticed, like I kind of can't help, but move my hand. And I do that part of that is from my acting training of like, we're trying to hit the back of the room.

Right. We're trying to project, but I think it's also helpful as a visualization and remembering like, this is another thing that like, Audio you'll recognize the sound has a visual to it. There is a, a way you can think about it and it, it does kind of roll in crash in a wave. And so like, thinking about that as you're making the sound can also be a really helpful way of shaping it.

So those are some of my favorite some of my favorite warmups and just getting the body ready.

So. That's super helpful. And I would also love to hear from you. I asked my brother Daniel when I talked to him the same question, but I always think it's interesting to hear different people's perspectives, breath, support.

I know breath support is huge as a singer. I know this, I know it now in a slightly different way. Although similar as a podcaster, when you think about breast support, are there any specific things that you're thinking about for yourself and then also. What advice would you give to people about breast support about improving that area and things they may be can do whether or not they're familiar with the idea of speaking

with breast port?

Yeah. I think anybody who's who's sung or acted is familiar with, with a vocal coach or someone yelling at them to breathe from your diaphragm. Right. So remembering that your breath doesn't come from your chest, it actually comes from. Your stomach and this, the space between your, your chest and your stomach.

And so really making sure that physically you are freeing up that space to move feels really important. Again, that's about like allowing resonance, allowing like a clean path for all of the air. Also, I think making sure that you that you leave yourself enough room to breathe, you know that when you're, this is true for writing, right.

As podcasters, we're usually writing the stuff that we're saying. Right in shorter sentences, something that looks amazing on the page and is a beautifully crafted sentence. You might not have enough breath to say it. The other thing is like, you can increase your endurance on breath support. That is a muscle to be worked.

It's not a, it's not a definitive thing that you have it's growth mindset versus fixed mindset. Right? So things like inhaling on a count of four and trying to exhale on a hiss on a count of four and then six and then 12 and then 20 and right. And seeing how long you can go. That's the thing you can do every day with over your morning coffee, it's part of your yoga practice, right?

Whatever, whatever have you like, that's a muscle to be worked. So for me, breast support is both like allowing myself the space to do it. And also remembering that I can still train for it.

I love that. Anything that I didn't ask you about that you feel like is crucial advice that people should have about.

Yeah. Well, I think that the biggest thing about voice is your everyone's instrument is their instrument, right? You, you you've been given this body, you have been given this set of resonances. And so it's not about like, changing what that is. Cause that's impossible. Your goal when you're voicing something is to use your body and your resonances and your particular way of speaking to transmit the feeling you want to transmit.

And so the. I took a voiceover class with with some casting director at one point. And he, he had this tape, which I don't know if I believe in, but I think it was a helpful sort of framework, which is basically, he's like, yeah, When you're doing a commercial, there's only seven different emotions that exist in the voice.

And that's, you can care. You can be upbeat, you can be sarcastic, you can be professional, angry, sad, or afraid, that's it. And obviously like there's over Richard tapestry of emotions. When we're trying to tell a story, then when we're trying to sell cereal or whatever, but having in mind, like, what is my intention?

What am I trying to do with this word? Like, am I trying to. Set up suspense or am I trying to make sure that the listener feels cared for, because I'm about to share something difficult with them, right? No matter what you do with your own resonances in your own body, if you have that intention and you're thinking about the person you're speaking to, right, it's going to come across and you don't have to push it.

The microphone will pick up what you're putting into it as the truth. So make sure what you're putting in is the truth.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm so glad you brought that up. Something that I loved that you shared with us that I'm going to include as an attachment for this module is these what, what's the.

What are they called? These series that are called like little pilot seasons open scenes. Thank you. So can you talk a little bit about, cause people watching this video, they will see this attachment after they're done watching this video and they'll see these open scenes. Can you just share sort of a framework for what these are and how they can be useful to people as they're learning to kind of find their own resonance?

Totally. So open scenes which I first encountered when I was taking acting classes in like middle school. Right. They're really, really great for young people, but they're also incredibly useful. In a lot of different ways. Basically you have scenes that are back and forth between two people usually labeled as like a and B one or two intentionally.

There are no character names. And there are conversations that they're like, I don't know, 10, 11 lines right back and forth. And intentionally, there is no detail in them. Right? It's all about the relationship. And you can put on them and put infuse into each character, any number of different emotions or any number of different circumstances and the meaning of the scene.

So it's a really, really helpful tool. I find invoice to say, okay, you know, I am going to play this character. She's gonna play, I'm going to play this character sad. Like, in my mind, this is someone who is in love with the other person, but they don't know it. Right. And like the scenes kind of mean nothing.

They're often like, how are you? I'm okay. Are you really. I don't believe. Right. They're often that vague that whatever intention you put on, it changes the meaning. And you'll see, as you do it, if you like grab a buddy saying, okay, great. You're going to be sad. I'm going to be angry or like, you're going to be caring and I'm going to be afraid, right?

Like that's going to change the dynamics. And so basically the takeaway from these, the reason why I think they're so fun is they really put the point across that, no matter what the text is, your voice can bring another layer to what you're saying. And so it's a really helpful way of seeing yourself.

In any text,

Something I've noticed is that when I get into my little voice over space, you know, in my blanket forward and I'm standing up nice and tall, and I'm reading my script that I've spent so much time thinking about. The intention, the thought, you know, all of these things that I have really fine tuned in that scenario. It's very natural for me to go into that resonance. At this point have to think a whole, I mean, I do think about it still, but I don't have to think about it now.

The way that I did when I was starting out and I find that in regular life, it's very hard actually for me to go into that resonance, like it's, it takes real focus in even in a conversation like this. I can't quite get there in the same way that I can when I'm reading my VO. And it's something that. I have theories about why that is, but I would love to hear from you if you have any ideas, because I think it's just sort of a fascinating thing to observe about how our voices can really come out in different ways and find different registers depending on what we're doing with them.

Yeah. I

think my first gut instinct, when you said that it's like, oh yeah, well real-world Laura has like stuff and other people, or, you know, a real world gray isn't in this. Beautiful studio or the blanket Fort or whatever the situation is, depending on where you're living at the moment like you, and it's not a precious space where it's just you and the words, right.

There's something really beautiful and precious about the ritual of like, And now this is what I'm doing. And like you said, these are the words I've thought about. This is a story I want to tell as opposed to like real life when you're like, I'm getting stimulus from all sides. There's things I need to do.

There's other people, right? It's never that same kind of like Zen pristine place. That's my theory.

Anyway, I love that. I think that's true.

It's so interesting to just realize that we have these voices that are instruments that can really do such different things depending on the situation.

Totally. And it's a gift, right. And having a voice as a wonderful gift and using it is a delightful chance to play.