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Voice acting is an art form where people can take a fictional character and bring them to life, typically in animated fashion. This is a profession that takes time to develop, train, and to master. If you want to know where to go to get started, here are a few websites you can visit in order to begin dabbling.

 

Where to Start?

 

Voices.com

 

This website specializes in providing beginning voice actors with sample scripts for them to practice with. In order to get better at voice acting, you must be able to read loud, clearly, and with a sense of personality. There are a plethora of different categories of scripts you can choose from such as, car commercial scripts, healthcare scripts, movie trailer scripts, video game scripts, and so on.

 

Voice Over Road Map.com

 

Before you begin reading scripts, you must have a warm-up routine. This website provides you with 7 tips from professional voice actors on how to warm up your voice before you begin recording. It goes over different warm up techniques, how long you should warm up, and the different stretches you can do to help loosen your muscles in relation to your diaphragm.

 

City-Academy.com

 

This is a more general website that gives you pointers on how to improve your technique, breathing techniques, and many more pointers that can help you. This website is not just for beginners, it is for voice actors of all experiences. Now that we’ve gotten the websites for voice actor beginners out of the way, now let’s discuss websites that can take you from Point A to Point B (Hint: Most of it is job/career related).

 

Where to Grow?

 

Website Planet.com

 

The purpose of this website is to provide freelance voice actors with opportunities to find work. The websites they provide are Fiverr and Fiverr Pro, Upwork, Freelancer.com, Guru, and People Per Hour. This website gives the viewer detailed information about each website, providing the basic functions, how to grow your portfolio, and how to navigate the job world.

 

Backstage.com

 

This website is meant to help aspiring voice actors grow their portfolio. This can vary from script reads, to vocal performance, what material to select for your demo, to expressing your vocal variety. This website also helps you develop your demo reel from scratch while making sure to remind you that your demo reel is never completed. No matter how far along you are in your voice acting career, it is important that you constantly add your work to your demo reel, or create multiple reels.

 

Voice Shop Coaching.com

 

This website provides those who have the resources to take an online voice acting class. There are classes for beginners, for intermediate voice actors, and for experienced voice actors. There are classes based on technique for all levels. There are also master classes for those that want to branch out into things such as animation, podcasting, audiobooks, and auditioning. Private classes, webinars, demo reel creating, and gift certification classes are also offered on this website.

 

There are also tips for voice actors to use in order to improve their skill set. Fortunately these tips are free, so feel free to take full advantage of them.

 

Where to Master

 

Backstage.com

 

Back to backstage.com we go! This time this gem of a website provides more detailed tips for the experienced voice actors to improve their characters. This specific article focuses on using your voice to develop your character.

 

One of the two major tips in this article that I feel any voice actor can use for future progression is, “Consider your character’s emotional center and intelligence.” This is crucial because it forces the actor to be one with the character they are voicing. Voice acting is more than just trying out funny voices and seeing which one sticks and this article makes sure that this is explained.

 

The other important tip that this article provides is the consideration of the sound placement in your body. This can determine what your character sounds like. Whether it comes from your nasal cavity, your diaphragm, your chest, if you get creative with it, you can create a character with an iconic voice.

 

If you are an aspiring voice actor but you don’t know where to go, take a look at the websites mentioned in this article. If you already have your foot in the door, you can always check out the other websites to build your skills.

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