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You want your voiceover demo to stand out! But in the right way. Is adding a character to your commercial demo a good idea? Will it separate you from the crowd or will it make you look unprofessional?
Should you put character spots in your demos?
Should you put character spots in your demos? Well, let's say in a short answer, no. Well, mm, no. Yes. I'm going to explain. No, I'm not gonna do that. Probably not unless it's a character demo or an animation demo. So let's talk a little bit about what a character is or what a character spot is. Character voices in a traditional sense, what most voice actors think about when they think about character voices is maybe something that's on an animated cartoon or maybe in a video game.
And so if you are looking to put those types of voices or spots on your demo, then I would reserve them for those particular types of demos. I've had, I've heard demos like where in a commercial demo, where there's a character spot. And I'm going to say, try to avoid doing that in a commercial demo or in any kind of narration demo, unless of course it's a real world application. So a lot of times in commercials, we can be characters, but we're character versions of ourselves, not necessarily dynamic and animated characters.
You want to, for each demo, stick to the genre that you're marketing, and so make it realistic for the genre that you're marketing to. So in commercials, you're not gonna see a whole bunch of dramatic, cartoony characters unless of course the commercial is written in that vein. In a commercial demo, instead of a dynamic, over-the-top animated character, you wanna show a shade of a character or a version of a character, which I am a firm believer in whatever genre you are in, you do have characters. And even in corporate narration and a medical narration, you are a character. For example, you could be a doctor, uh, speaking to another doctor in a medical narration. You could be, uh, a corporate employee speaking to a potential client.
And so there's always versions of characters in every genre. However, I feel that it's much more nuanced in, let's say, commercial, um, and any type of narration, corporate narration, even e-learning, your character is a teacher. But it's not, again, an over-the-top cartoony character or necessarily dramatic, uh, you know, video game character where there's lots of, you know, action-packed adventure. So should you have that character spot in your commercial demo? Probably not. Try to keep your character spots reserved just for the genre that really work with characters.
Thanks for reading!
Keep on rocking your business like a #VOBOSS
About Anne Ganguzza
Recipient of multiple Voice Arts Awards for Outstanding Narration Demo - Anne Ganguzza is California-based Voice Over Coach and award-winning Director & Producer specializing in target-marketed voiceover Demo Production. Anne's production team creates SOVAS-nominated demos across several genres, including Commercial, Corporate Narration, and eLearning, and her VO BOSS podcast is the winner of SOVAS Outstanding Podcast in 2022.