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Voiceover Genres: Are they even real?

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Are voiceover genres even real? I know that's a weird question, an existential question, but I've been thinking about it lately. Yes, voiceover genres are real. However, I'm gonna put some qualifiers on that.


The First Big But


Every genre of voiceover requires specific muscles that you must flex to be able effective.


BUT voice acting is acting. All voice acting is storytelling. A lot of people who come into the voiceover industry don't consider storytelling.


All voiceovers have a beginning, a middle, an end, an arc, and a message of some sort, which means that there is storytelling required. You need a solid foundation of storytelling skills first before you can layer your voiceover 101 training on top of that, and then layer your genre training on top of that.


The Second Big But


My good friend Johnny Heller (an award-winning audiobook narrator) says that you can't act a genre, you can't perform a genre. A character in a sci-fi audiobook doesn't realize that they are in an audiobook, much less a sci-fi audiobook.


When you're narrating something, regardless of the genre, you can't contrive the genre, you can only tell the story.


You need to be grounded


You need to have storytelling training, voiceover training, and genre training, especially now that AI is here.


In Summary


You need storytelling ability. You need voiceover training. You need genre training. So yes, voiceover genres are real, but they can only be realized if you have good storytelling training and good voiceover training, too.



Keep Going - Watch this Trailer:




Genre Exploration

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Tom Dheere

He's the VO Strategist, a voice over business & marketing coach and demo producer since 2011. Tom Dheere is also a voice actor with over 25 years of experience who has narrated just about every type of voiceover you can think of. When not voicing or talking about voicing, Tom produces the sci-fi comic book Agent 1.22.



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