My Experience as an Amateur Voice Actor
Voice acting usually isn’t the sort of thing people find themselves stumbling into. From my point of view, it’s really rather a niche career that some people daydream about getting into but then hesitate due to the realistic considerations like schooling, agency fees, etc. For me, however, I stumbled right into my career as an amateur voice actor began when I became a teacher. Teachers, in their own right, are really voice actors that bring the voices of books alive when they read to their children. Voice acting really became more formalized for me as the school I was working at in Beijing particularly requested me to start reading children’s books for my classes so that they could read along to pictures. At first I would read with maybe a few voices and I would certainly read with enthusiasm, but it wasn’t until I actually started researching the matter that I realized how deep the field actually was. With each new story I’d try harder and harder to formulate and synthesize the characters in it with my voice, all of course while keeping entertainment and education in mind.
Eventually my students enjoyed listening to these so much that one of the parents of a child in my class had messaged me on WeChat about an opportunity to help voice an entire textbook. To take a step back a bit, let’s keep in mind that I was in Beijing for around 2 years at this point and at no point had I in my whole life done anything with voiceovers or voice acting other than the experience I had reading for my kids. Although slightly hesitant, I said okay and before I knew it my weekend came and I took an hour-long taxi ride across Beijing to an office that clearly belonged to an English education company. After going into a smaller room, we sat down for around 10 minutes talking about where I was from and where I had learned Chinese. After that little chat, the boss had finally come in admittedly a bit late.
The director of content and ultimate creator of the textbook opened his sleek professional bag and pulled out a nice microphone and laptop. At first I was definitely a bit nervous as I wasn’t sure exactly what they wanted in terms of voices. The textbook was going to be an EFL textbook and I was going to be the overall narrator and main character behind the voice - Brainy Bear. Through a decent amount of trial and error, the boss and I came to an agreement on how he thought the voice should sound and we were off. The first session was around 3 hours long and man you never realize how tired of talking you can feel until you try being a voice actor. Numbers, letters, animal, fruits, I said it all. The hardest part had to have been the singing because no one told me about that, but hey we all learn to go with the flow. Afterwards I didn’t say anything for the rest of the night.
The next session we end up doing a week later. At this point I was all settled into the situation, so I felt much more comfortable. Even though we had a few unfinished sections of song and a few technical hiccups along the way, we finished the second 3 hour session. The interesting part about this time was just how much more well the voice felt like it fit on me. Though I can only say through personal experience, it’s my premonition that all voice actors have a certain kind of special feeling when they really get into a character. Although we all know the character isn’t actually real, you still have to give it a soul like it is. In that sense a lot of these characters only live inside the voice actor themselves. The point here being that I think I can take a slight credit for the creation of this character and that he has a part of me in him. Knowing that this has and will help children around China learn English is most definitely a rewarding feeling.
If there’s anything I want people to take away after reading this is that even if you don’t feel like you’re qualified to do something, at least give it a try because maybe you’ll be a lot more qualified than you realized you are. Certain skills and knowledge are things that are universal and dynamic so even if you didn’t learn it in one way, maybe you’ve learned it in another.
