Modifying actors sound of voice - on set

Mile Bozicevic

Mile Bozicevic

Well-known member
I'm making a short film. I found an actor who's perfect for a role except one thing - his voice is soft, almost feminine. His character should have this deeper, stronger voice.

I wouldn't like to cast another actor. I might go ADR on him. But, my question is - does anyone has any ideas how to tackle this problem during shooting?
 
that's a tough one, I'd talk to him, don't just say you want a deeper voice, discuss the character and how you see him moving and speaking and draw him to the conclusion you want. Don't expect miracles, no actor can drop a couple of octaves and sound like Stalone at will but you might get closer two what you want
 
I don't see any reason to tiptoe around wanting him to deliver lines in a deeper voice.

In all honesty, though, if the tenor of the voice is that important, you might simply need a different actor.
 
Definitely worth asking whether he can do a deeper and louder voice - some people can do quite a few different voices, and it even helps their acting by getting them into character.

Pitch-shifting to raise or lower a voice is common enough in post, so long as you can isolate the relevant voice track, but I've never heard of anyone trying to do it live.

ADR can be a whole lot of effort and cost, but would certainly be the traditional solution. Quite a few action/outdoorsy movies ADR pretty much all their dialogue, as actors just can't compete with the sound of fans and other electrical equipment like generators, traffic etc etc.

Or the creative solution would be to rewrite his character slightly so that the unexpectedly soft voice becomes an advantage, e.g. deflecting suspicion or causing people to underestimate him.
 
Modulating the voice is part of the process for actors. The difficulty with speaking in a much lower register than your natural one is physically sustaining it for a long period of time. If the dialouge doesn't contain long speeches this shouldn't be much of a challenge on a film where the actor can rest the voice between takes. I would meet with the actor, explain how you hear the character and play around with that a bit to see if he can work with it.
 
Some good advices here, thank you all.

There are also some videos and articles online explaining exercises how to use 'mask' while speaking and breathing from diaphragm to get fuller, rich voice. The whole point of these is to avoid overusing throat area and get the most of our natural voice.

We're doing table reading tomorrow so I'll talk to him about this and monitor his progress over the next couple of days. Hope we won't need that cigar. lol
 
Let us know how it turns out! I spent 4 hours doing voice overs yesterday, and though it wasn't my decision, I would rather have had the actor attempt to lower his voice (non-paid student actor, so results might have been poor with the long time required, though each clip was a max of 30 seconds).
 
Short update - it turned out his voice was my least concern. His acting, contrary to what I saw (and why I picked him in the first place) turned out to be terrible.

The guy can act, but only in a certain spectrum, so to speak...

He didn't like his character. While others were being very creative and just having fun exploring their characters, he was struggling all the time. Over-acting, flat, empty, you name it. It didn't work so we separated. He took it ok, I mean, he's aware this particular role is not suited for him.

There's new, I'd say better actor in his place now (no problem with his voice lol).

No harm was done, there's still plenty of time before shooting. Gotta love table readings/rehearsals...
 
Wow. I wonder how you could determine that ahead of time (that's not sarcasm or snarkiness, I genuinely wonder)? So nailed the audition, not so good at table read? Maybe the key is doing scenes with different emotions/acting styles played for the audition (angry screaming scene, happy scene, subtle, expressive, etc. do a range to see what actor can do)?
 
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