Some years ago I was called into a production company for a voice over audition. <\/p>\n
When I asked for the script they said it wasn’t ready yet. They were just looking for the voice of a Mom and were auditioning for voice quality.<\/p>\n
The producer looked around, pulled a book at random from the shelf and handed it to me. “Here,” he said, “Read a little bit of this.”<\/p>\n
The book he gave me was In Cold Blood<\/i> by Truman Capote.<\/p>\n
If you don’t know it, the book reconstructs the brutal 1959 murder of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children. Hardly Mom material.<\/p>\n
I mustered up my sweetest voice and started reading\u2026<\/p>\n
“The scrape of the scuttling tumbleweed, the racing receding wail of locomotive whistles. At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them-four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives.”<\/i><\/p>\n
I stopped and looked up. <\/p>\n
The producer seemed oblivious to the discrepancy between the gruesome text and the nurturing voice type he was looking for.<\/p>\n
It was plenty weird alright, but not as weird as the voice over job I’ll tell you about in this week’s Inside Voice Over training video.<\/p>\n
Watch It Here Now<\/p>\n