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I already had a healthy respect for animators +voice-actors, but now...

posted 15 years ago by LiamABC
3 replies | jump to latest

Like I say, I already have a healthy respect for both the animators and the voice cast on any cartoon, but after the last week that respect has increased exponentially, and here's why:

Animators - last monday I started putting a radio sketch to pictures to upload to YouTube. Timing the pictures to match the words is something of an art. It's taking something like 4hrs of work just to loosely "animate" a sketch that lasts less than 2min (it is my first time of so doing, admittedly).

Voice-Actors - I had an old friend over on friday, and showed him a Thundercats annual I had picked up at the end of last year. I offered to read the text story, "Thunderdogs Ho" out loud for him, just to have a go at it - he agreed, and I had to try and approximate the voices, and, in the case of "guest villain" Imperious Rex, invent a new one. I think the characterisation I chose for him was based on the Demolisher, but in any case, between Rex and Mumm-Ra, my voice was pretty much packed in by the end of the tale! Having listened to an interview with Peter Newman where he mentioned the same symptoms after playing the Demolisher, I can well believe it!

[–] corey-walker 15 years ago

Yes, both groups of people are pretty remarkable. I don't know how they manage to get the animations' lip movements to be so accurate, especially in shows like the Thundercats, which were traditionally animated. I think it would be neat to be a voice actor, but I certainly don't have the talent to do dozens of different voices. But then, two of the most famous voice actors, Sterling Holloway (Winnie the Pooh and Kaa) and Lorenzo Music (Tummy Gummi, Garfield and Peter Venkman from The Real Ghostbusters) used the same voice with all their characters, despite their voices being so strongly associated with one character.

And then, of course, you have people like Frank Welker and Peter Cullen, who have done more voices than I can count, and very few of their many different characters sound the same. These two are probably among the best voice actors of the latter twentieth century, and provided the voice of key characters in some of my favourite cartoons growing up in the 80's.

Corey

[–] LiamABC 15 years ago

You have a point about Lorenzo Music and Sterling Holloway! Although Holloway doesn't quite count because they didn't tend to "characterise voices" in the same way back then.

As for Frank Welker and Peter Cullen, agreed again. I'd add Jim Cummings to that list, he's done so many different things, although you can tell how good he is by hearing the two voices he did on Visionaries and trying to get your head around the fact that it's the same person.

While I'm on the subject of "I can't believe he did this voice when he did that voice" - here's a couple more to raise your eyebrows at:

Larry Kenney - our own Larry, until he slipped from Lion-O to Jackalman on the DVD interviews, I couldn't believe that one person did them both.
Pat Fraley - regardless of whether you like the shows, who can believe that the voice of Krang from Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles was provided the same actor who did Bravestarr? Not me!

[–] vultar9999 15 years ago

I can tell you how they do lip sync in animation, if you care. Basically, you get what they call a dope sheet (a paper that has columns and rows that represent the frames in the animation) and you mark the sound (not the actual letters) on the right frame. This gives you a plan to animate from. You also don't animate every letter, mostly you pay attention to the vowel sounds and the strong closed sounds like M and N.

So for example, say I'm animating for the phrase "My name is". The letters on my sheet might look like this "Mm I n a-a mn eh ss" depending on how the VA said it. What frame you put them on depends on when they're said. You figure that out by knowing how many frames per second the animation has. Finally, once you've figured out what frame you think the sound is happening on, you mark that sound on your dope sheet about 2 to 3 frames ahead of the actual sound. If you don't the lip sync will appear out of sync.

Other than that, you pretty much have 4 mouth positions (open, closed, wide, and narrow) and thier combinations. You don't really have to, and animators don't, animate everything, what's most important is that you're hitting those open and closed positions with enough time to make them register. Your audience will fill in a lot, and actually because you're just listening for constenents and vowels, for the most part, it's really no more difficult to animate to a foreign language than to your native one.

As to VAs, they're the only kind of actors I know anything about. I love seeing if I can guess a VA, and I'm right most of the time, by voice alone. Don't know how they manage to do what they do, but I sure do appreciate it.