What Skills Do Actors Need For Audio Fiction?

  Quick. Name some of the greatest actors of all time. Olivier. Garbo. Streep. Nicholson. Those GOAT actors are movie actors. How about the best actors in audio fiction. You know, podcasts?

Let me toss out a name for you. Tal Minear. Tal is an Southern California-based actor, sound designer, and producer. They're the creator of Sidequesting, What Will Be Here?, Someone Dies In This Elevator, and several other productions, and Tal can be heard in audio fiction shows such as Tales of the Echowood, Circles, Deconstructive Criticism, and more. They do sound design for Seen and Not Heard, Surreal Love, Wizard Seeking Wizard, and their own podcasts. They also write about audio drama production on Medium, The Simplecast Blog, and Discover Pods. 

 Podplane is a monthly newsletter from Tal Minear spotlighting podcasts by trans, nonbinary, and non-cis creators.

Tal has been called "a creative force to be reckoned with" and "one of the best sound designers currently creating.

Audio fiction is becoming big business. It's attracting name actors who several years ago would have replied when asked to do a fiction podcast, "OMG! Is my career that bad? Doing a podcast is even lower than doing a car commercial!"

Now, not so much. Actors of note and talent -- sometimes mutual exclusive categories) are leaping into audio fiction. These actors are not thespians who are desperate for work. No, these actors are well-known in the acting community. 

Here's a brief list of well-known actors now acting in audio fiction podcasts: Anthony Anderson (Black-ish, Law & Order), Alan Cumming (Instinct), Betty Gilpin (Glow), Helen Hunt (Mad About You), Justin Min (Crazy Rich Asians), Will Sasso (Mad TV), and Billy Zane (Titanic).

The questions driving this article are straightforward. Do actors in an audio fiction podcast need specific skills that they may not have learned or encountered during their non-podcast acting careers?

 What specific skills does it take to succeed on audio fiction podcasts? 

"It takes, like with most things, a lot of patience," begins Tal. "Auditioning is really the job. Beyond that, I think being able to portray emotion with your voice and finding different ways to read the same lines will really help you go far! If you have the option to send multiple takes for an audition, do a read for the second one that is different, weird, or simply out there. Variety flourishes in audio fiction!"

A Sheperd to her flock

In 2019, a scripted sci-fi podcast, Cryptids, was released to strong reviews and healthy audience numbers. The podcast was developed by Wild Obscura Films (WOF) and produced and directed by Devin Sheperd and written and created by Alex Thompson.

 WOF's 2021 feature film, A Nightmare Wakes, a psychological thriller about Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, was a selected participant in IFP's Narrative Film Lab.

"The audio medium allows the imagination to take over in ways that no visual medium can, so there was a lot of fun and tension to be mined in letting the listener fill in some of the blanks for themselves," says Thompson, who was interviewed during the podcast's initial release.

The podcast director, Devin Sheperd, knew it would be a challenge.

“As a director, it was definitely different," Sheperd says. "A lot of the actors haven’t worked in the audio space before. Our actors are based in theatre so with a podcast these actors are now working in an enclosed visual space.”

Alex Thompson also acted in the Cryptids podcast, and he notes, “As an actor, I’ve done some voice-over work so I’m comfortable with the mic in front of me. The continuing challenge was to make sure that the acting came through in my voice. So in the visual medium, I can use acting mannerisms and physicality to get into the role but in the podcast that had to be channeled into my vocal chords. Even then, is the story you’re telling in the room the story the audience is hearing on the tape? It was more akin to a theatrical performance than film acting.”

As the director of a podcast, Sheperd found that she would have to turn away from her actors while they were performing to ensure that her eyes weren’t influencing what she was hearing.

“Often, I would listen to the actors with my headphones on, looking away,” continues Devin. “In the audition process, we found that the actors we loved in the audition room while watching them, we didn’t love as much when we listened to just their voice later on. Their physical performance would give us a totally different read than the audio performance. That was hard to adjust.”

Becoming an audio fiction actor

  When asked, "What's the hardest part of having to act via only your voice?" Tal Minear smiles and repsonds, " This is going to be silly, but my answer is hitting the mic! When I act, I gesture a lot. I record standing up, and you can find me jumping, leaning, waving my hands around, you name it. Your voice changes with position and movement, and I take advantage of that a lot. The only problem is... my mic gets in the way sometimes. The worst thing is ruining a great take with a THUD."

Tal got into audio fiction acting by first becoming an audio fiction producer.

"Which is a weird way to go about it, I admit," begins Tal. " I started making audio fiction, and acting in it primarily because I didn't know how to cast voice actors at that point. It was simply the easiest thing to do, performing the words that I wrote. But in doing that I sort of fell in love with acting for audio fiction, and began auditioning for other shows. And now I've been in over 50 and counting!"

Tal recounts this story about audio fiction acting: "One time I was recording for a multi-hour at-home session (we were knocking out the entire show over the course of a weekend), and it was then that I learned the true cost of recording while standing up - it gets really hard on hour four! Anyway, now I bring a chair into the booth for things like that. Sometimes you learn the hard way!"

Acting doesn't stay in Vegas

 At the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) students and faculty have taken the college podcast concept to a new level of theatrical drama, creating a witches’ brew of ever-shifting realities, art converging with illusion and sonic wizardry.

In June 2020, the UNLV podcast, called POD 115: Kessel Run, was released to superb reviews and impressive download numbers. The audio fiction podcast's tagline was “Where science fiction meets real science.”

The podcast was written by Rae Binstock -- a playwright and NYC-based TV write and UNLV Adjunct Professor Adam Paul. 

Adam Paul is an actor, writer and director best known for playing Mitch, 'The Naked Man' on the CBS hit How I Met Your Mother. He is also the creator and star of the Starz original series Hollywood Residential, and has appeared in the films The Informant, One for the Money and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

Paul, with his years of experience in acting observes: "As a professor of acting at UNLV, where I’m also teaching actors voice over skills and content creation and self-production skills in the podcast arena, the fundamentals are always essential. Any character an actor is playing, regardless of medium, is still a human character in a story."

 

"So, the rules of conflict, change, action, verbs, relationships, objectives, obstacles, tactics - all must be readily available to the actor at all times," says Paul. "As an actor with a long career in voice over, I’ve learned that with 'audio-first' productions, the advantage any actor has is their imagination. Being able to visualize and physicalize the action of an audio script with your voice is the key to bringing the material to life. Scripts will seem to be just a little expository or narration-heavy as dialogue aids the visual creation of the action of the story, and an actor needs to be able to justify that exposition."

Paul further explians that there are subtle, quick shifts an actor needs to make in audiobook narration - from narrator to character to another character, or several other characters, in conversation with one another in real time while recording. That skill takes some time for most actors to master, but the opportunity to play all the parts is delicious for most actors. 

 

Paul continues: "The overlap for all of these media is that the collaborators on these projects have to consider the listener in a way visual stories do not. We have heavier lifting as we ensure the audience knows who’s talking and can track the story. It’s one of the fascinating ironies of 'audio-first' media that it’s extraordinarily visual."

Currently, Paul is producing season three of POD115, and it is on track for a Halloween release. Paul is proud of being a Webby Award Honoree for the second season of POD115. You can check out the podcast at POD115.com.

 

Paul has also been producing and co-hosting a movie review podcast with a close friend and his stepson, debating the merits of current and past favorite films. several other podcast projects. The podcast is called, Les Idiots du Cinema. 

 

"We consider ourselves “idiots” because we’ve always followed legendary screenwriter William Goldman’s maxim 'Nobody knows anything,'" says Paul.

 

Becoming an audio fiction actor 

 

When asked, "What's the biggest mistake experienced actors make when entering this audio fiction space?" Tal responds this way: "I think the biggest mistake actors make when entering the space is assuming it's the same as theater, film, or TV acting. I've found that with most audio fiction, grounded, realistic, and intimate acting really thrives. 

 

"There are exceptions of course, especially in comedy or children's media - this is just a general observation! I'd recommend that folks who want to enter the audio fiction space start by listening to audio fiction shows and see for themselves how it compares to the medium they're experienced in."

 

If you listen to Tal, Devin Sheperd and Adam Paul and other successful audio fiction producers/actors, you will quickly realize that the craft is more than simply voice-over. Audio fiction acting is tasked with creating images in the listener’s mind, as opposed to creating it on a screen and presenting it directly. That task is delicate and subtle, but allows for much deeper engagement of an audience when done right.

 

Audio fiction producer and actor Tal Minear.