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VOICE ACTING A Little Girl Asked For My Autograph, But I Learned: It's Not About Us May 11, 2015  By Dan HurstVoice Actor It’s Sunday afternoon and I’m going over the next week’s assignments and workload. While doing that I have the Kansas City Royals on the TV. I suddenly hear my friend Mike McCartney, the Public Address announcer for the Royals call in a batter, and I am transported back to 14 years of my stint as the PA announcer for the Royals. It was, for the most part, a magical tour. Oh, not all of it. Dealing with some of the head cases in baseball upper management positions is always a challenge. Not all. But some. All in all, it was one of the highlights of my career. "YOU'RE THE ANNOUNCER?" For some reason I recalled an incident that changed my career as a voice talent. I don’t even remember who we were playing at the time, but as normal, after the game, fans would gather by the exit doors where the players would walk out to go to their bus or, in the case of the Royals players, their cars. Those were the same doors that the rest of the staff used to exit. Most of the time when I walked out, no one said a word to me. I hardly look like a baseball player. But this one time as I walked out I noticed a little girl, probably about five or six years old, standing next to the ropes by her father. She was teary eyed, and I figured it was because it had been a late night and she was tired. As I walked by she held up her ball glove and a Sharpie. I noticed and smiled. Her dad said, "Would you sign it? She hasn’t been able to get anyone to sign it all night.” I said, "Hey, I’m obviously not a ball player. I’m just the public address announcer.” He suddenly got rather excited. "You’re the announcer? Honey, this is the guy that says ‘Now batting’ when the ball players come up to bat!” Then he looked at me and said, "That’s awesome! Would you sign her glove?” Within minutes, I was surrounded by a crowd asking for my autograph. CONNECT WITH THE LISTENER It was all rather embarrassing. But I learned something special that night. The late, great Kevin Gray, the guy who hired me for the Royals once told me, "You’re job is to be part of the fan’s experience. As far as you’re concerned, it doesn’t matter if we win or lose. The important thing is, did the fans have a good time? Every time you open that mic is an opportunity to make it a better experience for the fan.”I soon realized the wisdom of those words. Even beyond that role as the public address announcer. Our job as voice talents is to be a part of the listener’s experience. It’s really not our job to sell anything or hype anything. Our job is simply to connect with the listener. And in doing so, to connect the product or service with the listener. WHAT I LEARNED ... Let me share three things that I learned from that encounter with that little girl. Three things that relate to our job as voice talents. 1. It’s not our job to create emotion. That’s the writer’s job. It’s simply our job to say the words in a way that the listener can choose to create emotion. We often confuse ourselves with music. Yeah, music. You know how during certain movie scenes the music enhances the action on the screen? For some reason, many of us think we are like that music - that it’s our job to enhance the action on the screen. Well, we’re not like that music. What would have happened if I, as the PA announcer, had opened the mic during a fly ball and in dramatic terms announced, "It’s a loooong fly ball to center field! Will he catch it and will the runner on third base score?” I can tell you what would have happened. I would have been fined by Major League Baseball! In voice work, it’s not our job to create emotion. It’s simply our job to connect the information with the listener without interfering with the event. Let the action create its own emotion. 2. As voice talents, we’re not the story. Anything we do that detracts the listener from the story is a violation of our responsibility. Kevin Gray once told me, "I never want to hear from a fan that we have an awesome P.A. announcer. Because if I hear that, I know that they were distracted from what was happening on the field.”Yeah, that hurt. A little. But I understood what he was saying. If I may use the metaphor of a painting, all we are as voice talents is a brush stroke. If we draw attention to that particular brush stroke, the painting is ruined.” 3. What we do as voice talents really is magic. Just like with that dad and his little girl, it was special because of his experience. It had absolutely nothing to do with me. It was all about him and his experience. The same thing is true with what we do as voice talents. It’s not about us. It’s about the listeners, their experience, and their connection with the product or service. But we have to remember, we don’t create that experience. We reflect it. --------------- ABOUT DAN Dan (Daniel Eduardo) Hurst is an experienced bilingual (English and Spanish) voice talent operating out of the Kansas City area. His business now extends internationally, with clients including Maserati, Boehringer Ingelheim, British Petroleum, Kimberly-Clark, McDonalds, Volkswagen, Telemundo International, Shell, Hallmark, TransCanada, Walmart and many more. When he’s not working, he spends his time cheering for losing sports teams and getting kicked off of golf courses. Email: danhurst@danhurst.com Web: www.DanHurst.com |
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Thanks! You bet. I’d be happy to address that.
A friend of mine from an ad agency shared some auditions that he had gotten for a PSA.. The tag line he had written was “Water. Flowing with life.” No one seemed to get the meaning of that tag.
Almost all of the auditions read the copy as (emphasis capitalized): “WATER...FLOWING with LIFE!” Or WATER. Flowing with LIFE!”
The problem was that in the context of the copy, the idea was that as life flowed along, water is a part of it. What my friend had been trying to convey, among other things in the copy, was a very simple, low-keyed word picture of water flowing along as life flows.
There are power words and there are action words in every piece of copy. It’s been my experience that most voice talents tend to emphasize both, but the truth is that almost never do those words really need emphasis. Maybe a little love. Maybe a little space. But they don’t really need to be dramatically expressed because the words speak for themselves, and the listener already has a concept and interpretation of those words - that's why the writer uses them. It’s not our job to interpret those words for them. Rather, we are to deliver the contextual meaning of the phrase. Let space and timing bring the copy to life, not necessarily volume or pitch.
Hope that helps!
You state -- That’s the writer’s job. It’s simply our job to say the words in a way that the listener can choose to create emotion. -- Is there any way to clarify what you meant by that? Or maybe someone can chime in and clarify?
Thanks!!
Dan nails it... over the fence.
"Anything we do that detracts the listener from the story is a violation of our responsibility." — This includes sounding like we we're seeing the words for the first time. If we don't connect with the copy, there's no way the listener will.
"I never want to hear from a fan that we have an awesome P.A. announcer. Because if I hear that, I know that they were distracted from what was happening on the field.” — Well... you *might* hear that from someone who was less interested in the game but more interested in becoming an excellent P.A. announcer. ;)
Excellent points made in a terrific story. Thanks, Dan.
(30-ish years ago, I was doing spots on New York radio promoting the rock and dance clubs in the NY-NJ-CT area when a clerk at a deli counter recognized my voice. My embarrassed response: "Thanks. May I have a taste the seafood salad, please?")
Big compliment! They identify me with the news...or the viewer experience during that half-hour. Yeah, they might recognize the face or the voice, but it's the "news" they mention.
'Makes me happy.
Dave Courvoisier
You bring so much to your voice work. Continue to set the bar high for the rest of us.
Gracias,
Rosi