Voice acting

From Pop-Cult Guides

Voice acting is the performing art of portraying characters exclusively with the voice. It is usually done for radio shows, animation, dubbed foreign language films, video games, puppet shows, amusement rides and whenever dubbing is necesary in a film. Save for sadio shows, the voice acting is usually complemented by animation or a physical performance.

Actor Alfred Molina defined and described the art with the following words:

[Voice acting] is all about imagination. It's like our director Andrea [Romano] likes to say, "Thank you for coming to play." And that's really what voice acting is. It's play acting at its most childlike, it's most free. There are no restrictions of costume or scenery or a set. It's about what's in your head, and that's the fun part.
The main challenge with doing a vocal performance is to find the way that the voice matches the image. Very often, in a sense, you're working ahead of the image. The image hasn't been finalized yet, so you get a vague idea of what the character's going to look like, but you don't see the character move, and you don't see the character physically behaving in any sort of significant way. So you rely very much on the director and the writers to help you find that voice. The nice thing is that chances are they've called you in because they like something about the quality of your voice, and from there it's very much a series of building blocks. You start off by some kind of generalized tone, some sense of where you might be, and then you just start refining it bit by bit. Less of a cry, more of a growl.
They're all very different in terms of material and what's required. But ultimately, it's in a sense the same gig because you're having to totally focus everything on what you're doing with your voice. You do have to think about things technically -- about diction, clarity, breathing. You have to be able to sustain your voice all the way through to the end of the line. So in a way, it's a very technical form of acting. But you also must counter-balance that with making it sound authentic. Because everything is focused on the voice, as far as the actor's concerned, you have to play everything at a much more heightened level. When you're playing violence or anger, you've got to find a way of really fulfilling it, but you haven't got the advantage of being seen to be doing it. It's got to be all in the voice. It's funny because it's very easy to think you're over-playing it or going over the top, but you have to remember that the whole focus of the performance is in the voice. ^[1]

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