The ABCCCs of Doing Character Voices

Written by Ginny Kopf

April 17, 2017

Finding the perfect voice for your animated or live action character will make him, her (or It!) jump off the page and come to life.

1. Explore freely and fearlessly with your voice.

Try all kinds of things with your amazing vocal instrument. Play, play, play. You can create a voice that not only fits the look and personality of the character but is also memorable and thrilling to the listener.

The ABCCCs of voice and dialects for doing characters are CONTRAST, CONSISTENCY, and CLARITY.

CONTRAST

2.  Character voices that contrast will expose the characters’ differences.

Even if they are sisters from the same village, they need to contrast to show their different personalities. Ensembles need to contrast so we don’t get them mixed up.

3.  Explore contrasts in:

Pitch range (make one use higher notes, another medium, another low), tone quality (make one breathy, another scratchy, nasal, whiny, pushed, richly resonant, etc.), rate (slow to fast speech), inflection (their melody, from monotone, to conversational, to using very enthusiastic, sing-songy range), rhythm (from smooth to choppy), diction (quite intelligently articulate, to casual, to sloppy speech), and volume (make one soft, one medium, one loud).

4.  Be very specific with your choices.

Literally map it out, not leaving it to chance. Write down next to the characters’ name what you are planning to do with their pitch range, tone quality, volume, etc.

5.  Be sure to change the body language of every character.

This means facial expressions, mouth shape, gestures, eyes, head moves, posture, and walk. Your characters will contrast visually if it’s live action. Plus, even if for voice-over, changing the body actually triggers the voice. This will also help you to switch quickly from one character to the next. Make specific, bold choices.

CONSISTENCY

6. Be consistent!

Once you’ve established a voice for the red-headed soldier, when he comes in twenty minutes later, he must sound like the same guy. This is consistency of character.

8. Pay attention to similarities in characters.

Consistency also means you must score out how characters within the same family, species, and locality would speak. It has to make sense and not be forced. Just because you can do a really cool Australian accent, don’t just throw it in there if the rest of the village speaks in a Brooklyn accent.  Only do it if you can justify it in the script.

8. Tell the story.

The point is not how clever or skilled or amusing you are:  it’s about telling the story through the characters. You don’t want the voice to call attention to itself, at the risk of the audience’s mind wandering away from the story to think about how cool you sound.

9. Don’t overload on character voices.

Don’t have too many wild and crazy dialects or voices either, or the audience will get confused and overloaded.

CLARITY

10. Be clear with your words.

This is an absolute. The audience must be able to understand you. What good is a funny character voice or thick dialect if they can’t understand you?

So, for characters that boldly leap to life off the page, be CLEAR, be CONSISTENT, and aim at CONTRASTS.



Need some advice? We’ve got you covered.

Ginny Kopf is well known in Florida as a vocal trainer to singers, actors, business professionals and media personalities. For 20 years she has given private lessons and taught courses on Voice, Diction, Dialects, Accent Reduction, and Professional Image at L.A. Acting Studio, UCF, and Valencia Community College. Ginny has done extensive speech and dialect coaching for Disney, Universal Studios, and numerous theatres and corporations, locally and nationally. She has a Masters Degree in Theatre Voice and an MFA in Vocal Science, and has authored a textbook, The Dialect Handbook and a CD series, Accent Reduction Workshop.