what it's like doing voiceovers

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I’ve been doing voiceovers for a while and last week someone asked me about it so I thought I’d do a wild, uncensored, no-holds-barred expose on what really happens when you say ‘please buy this thing’ down a microphone for money.

To be clear, we’re talking about a very specific type of voiceover; while friends of mine voice huge videogames and films, I mainly tell people Black Friday is coming (I’m sorry, you missed it) or become emotional about banks. Once, I did the voice of an orange trying to get an apple to party with me for a well known rum brand (I had to shout ‘hey captain’ a lot, if that gives you an idea).

Another time, I had to get upset that my partner was having a heart attack for an NHS radio advert, but the voiceover actor playing my partner was my actual partner, so I spent the afternoon watching my actual partner have a heart attack over and over again, before consequently experiencing a period of very relaxing, not at all traumatic dreams.

Basically I only know adverts, and that experience might be totally different for other types of (fancier) voiceover actors. OK cool let’s gooooo.

You don’t get picked up in a limo

When I was younger (and a journalist) I interviewed Redd Pepper, the movie voiceover man. You might wonder which movie voiceover man I’m talking about, but it’s the one you’re thinking of: deep voice, really good at saying ‘In a world where…’, did every film trailer up until the 2000s, you’ve got him. Anyway, he would be picked up in the morning and get ferried around studios in a stretch limo all day, so when I got signed to a voiceover agent I thought it would be like that.

Instead, I get a text from one of my agents (there’s a team who all look after individual departments - some do videogames, others do ad campaigns etc) saying ‘are you free next tuesday?’ and I say ‘yeah between 2 and 6’. I then never hear about it again, which means I’ve been put forward and rejected, or I get ‘pencilled’ which means it’s between me and a couple of other voices.

The job won’t be confirmed until the day before, and it will have changed from Tuesday to Friday to Thursday to Monday around 147 times. I’ll then make my own way (travel not included) to the studio which is always in Soho and always called Balloon.

You do get free drinks

Because it’s a throat-based job, you get unlimited free teas and coffees for your throat. If you’re mildly lucky there’ll be a fruit bowl in Balloon’s reception bit, allowing you to yoink a pear. For later, of course, it’s not advisable to do the voiceover while eating said pear, unless the direction is ‘sound like you have a fruity mouth’.

NB: caffeine and dairy are meant to be drying for the pipes, so I opt for a mint tea; there’s something about the warm water that loosens everything up. I also drink about twenty-four litres of water while in the booth and spend the rest of the day weeing like a champion. This has nothing to do with my throat, I just like to be hydrated and love weeing (as longtime readers of this Substack will know) (I started this Substack in June).

There are lots of people involved, like Toast of London

In the Before Times (pre-pandemic) the studio would be filled to the brim with twelve men called Chris eating lunch from Wagamama, but now it’s done via zoom so you’ll probably only be with the sound engineer and one Chris, if that. Really sad to see the decline of in-person Chrises actually, but that’s modern life for you.

The sound man is always friendly, and a man, and will settle you into a little booth with water, the script plus pencils/pens. Sometimes the in-person Chris will play you a guide voice saying the lines so you can get an idea of timings, and this voice is usually Chris. He’ll say ‘hopefully you can do a better job than me haha’ and you’ll say ‘I think you should use your voice! I’m irrelevant here! Haha!’ which is a funny joke in the advertising world because everyone in the industry is so stressed they’ve forgotten what genuine humour is.

The guide voice does, however, give me an idea of which words to emphasise and when to quite literally make my voice go up and down (I write little arrows next to words so I know which ones to hit when I have my first go at it).

It’s tricky to keep track of who everyone is.

The first wave of Chrises work for the ad agency who wrote and shot the advert you’re voicing. They will say things like ‘Let’s get some in the can before the client get here’, the client being the second Chris wave who work for the brand (American Express or Billington Sugar to name a few of my exes), and who have the final say over everything.

They will arrive at the end when you’ve done some takes, or maybe the ad agency Chrises will email some takes they like about halfway through the session and you’ll make polite small talk while awaiting feedback such as: ‘no’.

Important to note that there is always one Chris who can’t log in, or has sound issues aka the Absent Chris. Once, an ad guy zoomed in from Berlin (Kris) but was sat near a clocktower. It was exactly midday when he unmuted himself, so there was this ominous bonging noise behind him while he gave feedback, as though he was Death. And nobody found it funny! They just pretended it wasn’t happening!

This is why I could never have a normal job - life’s too short not to enjoy a deadly serious German man suggesting how to read the tagline of a yoghurt brand while bonging.

The client is the scapegoat

Everybody treats the client (eg the brand) like they are a mad baby about to start shitting everywhere the moment something interesting happens, so there’s a lot of ‘I like that, but it’s probably a bit much for the client’ or ‘Let’s get a safe one for the client and then do some actually funny options for us yeah???’. Be warned: these ‘actually funny'‘ options will be stuff like ‘try saying OMG instead of ‘oh my god’. Another example of the advertising industry’s humour-levels, there.

Doing voiceovers from home is a pain in the arse.

Unsurprisingly this has really taken off since the pandemic, and even more unsurprisingly, it’s stressful. When done properly, the agency will pay a sound engineer to check your equipment/levels remotely, but usually they’re cutting corners so you end up having to be responsible for the sound yourself and there’s a lot of ‘Is the gain on this mic okay?’ and ‘what does ‘gain’ mean?’ while you sit underneath two towels in a cupboard.

Last time I did an at-home recording, nobody could hear me for fifteen minutes and I pretended there was a technical fault I’d managed to sort out when actually I’d forgotten to plug my microphone in. Then, to add insult to injury, it sounded ‘muffled’ so I told them I’d altered the controls when in fact I’d had the microphone the wrong way round. This sounds like I’m making it up for comic effect but you can literally email the guy and ask him (chris@chris.com).

Also, you’d think a towel over the head wouldn’t make any difference, but it deadens the sound so effectively that they often think I’m in a proper home studio - unless they can see me because I look mad. I make a little tent over the laptop screen, and try to resurface every five minutes to prevent suffocation.

My dream is to have a home studio, but my dream is also to have a second home in Italy; we can’t always achieve our dreams. When I was in Australia visiting my sister, I had to do a voiceover in her (Australian) cupboard at midnight and thankfully her husband Jordy works for an audio company so brought mics home for me to use. They didn’t have pop shields (this is so the mic doesn’t peak when you say Ps and Bs) and to get round it I put a pair of tights around a wire coat hanger and spoke through that. I’m not saying I deserve a Nobel Peace Prize for Technological Innovation but I’m not not saying that.

There are so many different types of voiceovers

Even just for adverts. Yesterday I did a BVOD, which is for a show on a streaming platform, but broadcast while you’re watching a different show on that same streaming platform (I think? Please comment if I’ve got this wrong). I also did a similar script but for YouTube, Tiktok and O&O (nobody could explain this one). You get TV ads, radio ads but also radio ads that only play in the north of England. Or across the whole of the UK, but only on one radio station.

I once did a cinema ad where my voice was dubbed over an American woman and I got shitloads of money. I also did one of those cool ‘Coming soon: A Brand New TV Show’ announcements that got played everywhere for weeks and got paid basically nothing.

Often I do jobs that aren’t going to be seen by the general public, known as ‘internals’. For example, if you got hired by JustEat in 2019 you’d get shown a video of me telling you about the company’s ethos over a cartoon of Snoop Dogg. I wasn’t doing Snoop Dogg’s voice, to be clear, he was acting out what I was saying about Just Eat’s key performance indicators.

You get to know your voice very well

Nothing like hearing yourself played back loudly for hours on end to really get to grips with your timbre. Despite being hired constantly for my warm and friendly tone, it takes a lot of physical effort to achieve this because my voice is naturally cold and sad.

I know this because my most common note used to be ‘can we get a bit more warmth and a bit more smile?’ before I figured out how to hit that every time by maniacally smiling until it looks like my head is going to explode and gesticulating so aggressively you’d think there were bees in the booth (and I’m euphoric about it). Sometimes I have to take a paracetamol after long voiceover sessions because my head hurts from smiling so much.

But sometimes your voice can surprise you.

I was the voice of a bank for years and then one night, while in an Uber, I heard another woman saying the words I’d spent ages recording a few weeks earlier. Sadly that’s how it happens; nobody lets you know they’ve ‘decided to go in a different direction’, you simply hear another person doing your job and feel the warm rug of financial security being whipped out from underneath you. And put under another woman. And look, fair play to her.

I got home and messaged my agent explaining what I’d heard and thanking her for getting me such great work over the last few years. I told her it made sense - the new voiceover person was much more authoritative and impressive - and she messaged back: ‘Stevie I’ve listened to the advert, and it’s you?!’. So I suddenly had two rugs: one of financial security and one of being mental.

Eventually you’re able to speak fluent Chris.

For example ‘Can you do it less voiceovery?’ means I need to go up at the end of the sentence and make my voice less breathy. ‘Lighter’ means I make the pitch of my voice higher, smile more and give some bounce to the words. ‘Get sexy with it’ means I leave the voiceover studio (Chris has never said ‘get sexy with it’) (Actually I did a chocolate bar ad and had to pretend to have an orgasm in the shower thinking about my husband unloading a dishwasher, so I suppose he did say that. And I did do it. Because there’s nothing I won’t do for money).

Even in the easy sessions, you’ll get asked to say a line one way, then another way, then a third way - which is basically the first way - and when you do it there’ll be a chorus of Chrises going ‘wow yeah that’s the one!!!!!’ and you have to bite your tongue, mouth and entire head not to reply ‘I did that half an hour ago Christopher’.

Just sip your mint tea and remember you’re being paid by the hour, so the longer it takes, the more hot cheese you make. I need to stop referring to money as ‘hot cheese’ because it’s getting confusing in my day-to-day life.

Sometimes it can be preeeeettty painful

The worst is when they’re not happy with what you’re doing, but they don’t know why or how to explain it to you.

During a job for a makeup brand that we won’t name but I’ll call B’Oreal, the ad agency woman (Christine) kept making me do the tag line (‘B’Oreal Paris’) over and over for an entire hour, sounding increasingly frustrating. As in, she sounded frustrated, not me. Although when she started saying ‘Can you make it more throwaway, but like you really mean it?’ I thought I might punch the glass. I heard the advert a few weeks later and she’d substituted me for a Russian woman, which felt terrible in the moment but is just part of the job. And crucially, not my fault.

Ad agencies select your voice ahead of time from your reel, so if you turn up and they’re all ‘wtf is this’ then that’s very much on them. In this instance, I was saying ‘B’Oreal Paris’ the way I’d said it in every campaign I’d done previously for them, given her 400 options she could have used, and at the end of the day I think she just really wanted me to be Russian.

Other times it can be really fun

Sorry but there is nothing like hearing a bunch of Chrises say: ‘shall we get her to do the terms and conditions bit and just speed them up in the edit?’ before promptly nailing it at top speed in one take with no need for editing. Magical. Also, it’s always cool to say taglines like ‘the powerful backing of American Express’ or ‘only on BBC One’ and I really enjoyed being the voice of B’Oreal before they switched agencies to the Christine who loves Russia.

It allows me to do what I actually want to do

Not that I don’t want to do voiceovers, but it’s not my passion. It did, however, fund my first two Edinburgh Fringe runs and meant I could stop doing maternity cover at celebrity gossip magazines to focus on making silly sketches online. Which has, without wishing to exaggerate, totally revolutionised my entire life.

It’s not just a financial benefit, either: I had a little period of crushing acting rejections a few years back, and there was something so refreshing about shaking it off, going in the voiceover booth and smashing the shit out of a Boxing Day Sales advert for window blinds. I’m aware that some people see this kind of stuff as selling out, but to those people I’d say: congratulations on your generational wealth!

Trying to stop ending all my substacks with ‘I’ll leave it there’ but I will leave it there, so I’ve failed miserably. Just pulling into Glasgow Central on the train and am quite excited because I’ve never been to Glasgow before! Am on a job (not a voiceover one) so probably won’t be able to hang out much but nice to, y’know, get a Glaswegian deliveroo to my hotel later on. Or Just Eat (I’ve heard the company has a great ethos).

If you’ve got any more voiceover questions (or Glasgow-based takeaway suggestions) then feel free to pop them in the comments and please enjoy this picture I call Spot My Dog Piper In The Voiceover Studio The Other Day While I Recorded Some BVODs’.