Why Your Narration Sounds Good but Falls Flat
Paul:
Thom Pinto has been one of the most prolific documentary and docuseries narrators of the last 25, 30, or more years. His credits include the History Channel, Smithsonian, Paramount+, the BBC, Warner Brothers, and the Weather Channel, along with decades and decades of promo and imaging work for outlets like CBS News, CNN, SiriusXM, and, most famously, KRON in San Francisco.
He’s also, as you may know, a respected coach whose Colors of Your Voice and Think Visually, Act Vocally techniques have helped hundreds, maybe even thousands, of voice actors become more specific, spontaneous storytellers.
On October 20th of this year, 2026, Thom’s going to release his legacy project called Primetime Narration: Mastering Documentary Storytelling. It’s a course that brings together the lessons, the techniques, and the hard-earned wisdom of this extraordinary career in voiceover.
Thom, it’s so great to see you. Thanks so much for stopping by the VO Pro Podcast.
Thom:
Paul, I appreciate you honoring my career, but I can hear it in your voice because you work very hard in this industry as a talent, bringing other people together and interviewing others. I think you understand that this is a passion project for me.
I had people encouraging me to do it, and I’m going, “You know, whatever.” I have to give Tina Morasco the credit, because I said, “I’m trying to find the time,” and she goes, “Well, you don’t have to have it done at any particular time. Just take your time and do it.”
So, in terms of writing and taking a look at everything I did, I feel as though over the last five years I kept coming back to certain basic tenets that are critical for good storytelling. There were particular handouts that I would give to people, and I found that I was that much more structured in the world of TV narration coaching than I had ever been when I would be coaching commercials or promo.
Maybe it’s because it’s long format, Paul. Maybe because there’s more meat on that rib, so to speak.
I must admit that Natasha Marchewka also said, “Well, I was a student of yours, Thom. I’ll tell you what I learned, and I’ll tell you what I think other people should learn.” And she cranked out about five pages.
And I guess I said, “Okay. I guess I should be doing this.”
Paul:
Guess we’re doing this, right?
So maybe that dovetails into the timing. You’ve been doing this for a long time, and that’s not a veiled way of calling you an old man, because I am too.
But my point is, you’ve been doing this for decades. Why did now become the time to put all this together in a way that you can package it and teach it to other people in a course?
Thom:
Well, part of it is, you know, do it while you still have brain cells that are firing.
But I’m also at a place in my life where I’m more selective about what voiceover work I audition for or do. I also only have so much time for long-format coaching sessions.
I know there are commercial coaches who are able to do several lessons a week. I can only do a few a week because I feel as though I have to dig a little bit deeper.
So I felt like this was a time to maybe put together some basic tenets. The course is a little more than three and a half hours. I don’t have the exact time because there’s some final tweaking going on right now.
But it was the right time for me to do it because I’m hoping it can be, I’m going to use this word, an adjunct. If I’m able to coach privately with somebody, and my waitlist is not like Bob Bergen’s, which is out three years — and I’m not critical of Bob. Bob’s just very popular with his animation coaching — some people don’t want to wait four or five months.
So this is an opportunity to say, “Here. It’s a course. We’ll be up to speed.”
I also think that with the practice scripts that are in there, there are people who are going to be able to work on their own.
And based on comments I’ve received from former clients of mine who’ve said, “This would have been really great to have earlier on,” I think there’s a place for it.
One talent — and I don’t want to embarrass him — said, “I don’t get a lot of these auditions. Then sometimes I get one and I go, damn, I wish I had Pinto in my pocket.”
He says, “With this, I’m going to have you in my pocket, because I can look at the considerations, I can look at the script, and I can say, ‘Okay, what would Thom tell me to do here? What are the considerations? What are the different aspects of the analysis that I should work on?’”
So I think it was time for me to lay this down.
I enjoy writing too, Paul. I think it nurtured my creative soul to communicate. And the other thing is, I had an opportunity to write it, record a module, and then go, “You know what? That was a little vague,” or, “That wasn’t right,” or, “Is there a more economical way to say that?” Or, “Gee, maybe we should show something there as opposed to me saying it.”
So it was a real process.
And as a writer, because I still say I’m an aspiring writer, a couple of my writing mentors say a good writer is a good rewriter. So it gave me joy to work on this and say, “You know what? It’s not done until it’s done.”
So I’m excited. I’m excited to do it.
I also had a project that I was working on, and yes, it was a writing project and a voiceover project together. It was a horror show. I was cast to be the narrator and some ancillary characters. Then I ended up writing four of the twelve episodes, and then I ended up helping to produce and pull together clips.
It really got involved. The creativity was great, but I was serving somebody else, so I had to put the course a little bit on the back burner in order to work on that.
Paul:
I think the timing is divine now.
We waited, we’ve been patient, and I wouldn’t redo the journey for anything because I think the journey was what it was supposed to be.
When you talk about timing, let’s jump in the time machine and go all the way back to the beginning of your career as a narrator.
If you could have a conversation with that younger Thom Pinto, the brand-new budding narrator, what did he miss? What did he misunderstand? What didn’t he know that now, to present-day Thom, seems so damn obvious?
Thom:
That’s a great question.
During the pre-digital time, if I was doing — I’m going to start with corporate narration — there were certain things where they would say, “Well, we need a more 30-sounding corporate voice,” as opposed to a deeper, older-school, dare I say Ernie Anderson, Don LaFontaine, Chuck Riley, those kinds of guys.
I would look at 30 pages and I’d get nervous, because clarity, focus, enunciation, all those things. I was looking at the micro as opposed to the macro.
And the biggest thing that I learned on my very first documentary project that I booked — it was a docuseries — I remember being a little nervous going into the first session.
As we were going through the 48-some-odd pages, they said to me, “Okay. We’ve broken this down here in cells. So we’re going to be doing this a cell at a time because I want to make sure I have options.”
And I realized, “My God. I don’t have to be like an audiobook reader and just keep going on and on for fear of editing.”
They wanted specificity. So I leaned into giving more variety on the different cells.
I wish I had known that before I even started. I probably would have embraced it a little earlier.
But on top of that, I was also starting to do writing. And it was: writer’s intent, writer’s intent. What is the purpose of this? What makes this show different from other shows?
You can’t just say, “This is a Civil War-based theme.”
The second series I ended up doing was a show about guns. Every time I found something interesting, I remember one producer would hit the playback — he was a Southern guy — and he’d say, “Thom, I love the way it just sounded like you were learning that for the first time.”
So I decided, you know what? They wanted me to discover so the audience would discover.
I have probably hung on to those kinds of morsels from different producers and directors. I think that’s probably number one or number two on the list of things I wish I had known a few years earlier.
But that’s okay. The journey is the journey.
I narrated my first docuseries in 1994, so I don’t feel too bad that it’s been only 32 years working in this particular genre of voiceover.
Paul:
You mentioned this concept of, “What makes this show different?”
Let’s flip the script on that for a minute, because you’ve done everything from nature programming to historical documentaries to the supernatural to lighter docuseries.
What are the common storytelling skills? What’s the common thread, no matter what the subject matter might be?
Thom:
Good writing is going to set the table. It’s going to enumerate the reason we’re talking about the subject matter we’re talking about. Then we’re going to put a pin in it.
Then we’re going to stick the landing with some kind of discovery, some kind of morsel where we go, “Wow, that was fascinating.”
So it draws us to move forward.
I know it’s an oversimplification, but it does boil down to beginning, middle, and end.
And some people say, “Well, how do you always know beginning, middle, and end?”
Sometimes there’s a beginning, middle, and end in just a sentence. Subject, verb, direct object.
“Paul Schmidt fell off the gondola, and his recovery was brutal.”
Beginning, middle, end.
A lot of people would go, “Paul Schmidt fell off the gondola and his recovery was brutal,” because they want to be smooth.
No. Lean into the character. Lean into, “Here we go.”
Even if it’s lighter material, there are challenges.
Every good story, talking from a writer’s standpoint, is built on challenges or conflict and surprises.
My buddy Reed Shelly — and I want to give him a shout-out because he was also a director on one of the reality series I worked on when he was doing a lot of that for GRB Entertainment — would say, “You’ve got to lean into the give-a-shit factor about this. You can’t just go with melody and everything.”
If he’s looking at my writing, he’ll say, “Okay, this is going along very well. When is something bad going to happen?”
Or, “You know what? They’re not buddy-buddy yet. Their character arc is, they’re not together. They’re still prickly.”
And it reminds me of a great movie. If people love to write, if you ever want to aspire to write a good, funny, yet believable buddy story, purchase a copy of not just the movie Midnight Run, but the screenplay. Read Midnight Run with Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin.
The journey of those two characters and the challenges — two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back.
I think documentaries are the same.
If everything is hunky-dory 20 minutes into the doc, why the heck should I be watching it to the end?
Paul:
There’s no dramatic tension.
Thom:
Exactly. No dramatic tension.
And tension should ebb and flow.
Paul:
I mentioned it in the beginning, in the open, this idea of Think Visually, Act Vocally.
Can you walk us through what that actually means? What changes in a voice actor’s performance when they can start to visualize?
Thom:
A lot of commercial coaches — and there’s nothing wrong with this — will say, “I don’t know who you’re talking to. Who are you talking to?”
So many times people say, “Well, I’m talking to a good friend of mine,” or, “I’m talking to…” blah, blah, blah.
That’s all well and good. But how would you talk to that friend?
How you talk to that friend would depend on what the situation is.
If you’re looking at a sentence that’s talking about a polluted river, if you can take a chance and visualize what you think that polluted river would look like, it will probably have just a little more gas factor, as I like to call it, instead of “give a shit,” just in case people are upset about language.
It just happens. It puts us more in the moment.
Now, somebody says, “I have difficulty doing that.”
Instead of just trying to keep going and running into a brick wall, go a little bit at a time. Go two sentences at a time and allow your creativity to come through.
And the other thing, Paul, is there are people who are brilliant, who can just weave a story with a cold read. People like Peter Coyote or Liev Schreiber.
But the rest of us have to work a little harder at it.
My success is via immersion. The more you watch, the more you develop a template.
If you watch a documentary and don’t worry about narrating it, but take a look at it from the standpoint of, “My goodness, the narrator slowed down there because the lion was in slow motion taking down the wildebeest, but he also still had energy in his voice.”
Great. The talent got something from watching that.
If you just let that somehow find its way to your cerebral cortex, you’ll remember it the next time you see a script that looks like that.
Immersion is easy because all you have to do is click on the show. Even if you don’t have cable, buy something for $2.99. Click on the show, click on your closed captioning, turn the volume down a lot so you’re not totally distracted, but you can hear where the narrative thread is going, and follow along.
People say, “I can’t afford lessons.”
Well, you can afford that lesson.
Paul:
Yes, you can.
Thom:
Self-lesson, you know?
Paul:
Absolutely. And I think that’s true no matter what genre you aspire to be really good in.
You’ve got to know what good looks like first, right?
Thom:
Yeah.
And let’s face it, Paul, when I say Think Visually Before You Act Vocally, it’s amazing how the radio industry — the creativity in radio advertising — and I want to be careful how I say this. I’m not going to say it’s nonexistent, but it’s not what it was 10 or 15 years ago.
There was someone — and again, I don’t like to use names — who won so many awards as a writer-producer. Creative stuff. Not just funny, but inventive.
Nobody wants to pay for that anymore.
Hence, people want to go to TV or utilize social media. So we’ve really gotten into a visual thing.
You turn on the radio, and a lot of what you hear is direct-response stuff.
Wouldn’t you say that’s not really why a lot of people decided they wanted to get into voiceover?
They wanted to get into something that was a little more creative.
So when I say Think Visually, Act Vocally, I think it’s even more pertinent now because of the lack of opportunities for creativity in radio ads.
Paul:
And in the name of efficiency, Thom, I think too often we repurpose things from one medium to another without really giving thought to what the strengths of each medium are.
So you’ve got repurposed television ad audio running on the radio where it wasn’t intended to run, or wasn’t written to run, without pictures.
Thom:
Right.
I notice that sometimes on a major news network that also has a SiriusXM channel.
You hear the ad that’s on TV, not the local drop ad. You hear the ad that’s on TV, and you’re absolutely right, Paul.
Without the pictures, they’re missing just a little something.
Paul:
Our friend Terry Briscoe often says, quite bluntly, “Nobody gives a shit about your voice.”
And I think he’s right, right?
Everybody in this business, much less in narration, Thom, has a beautiful, mellifluous voice.
What’s the difference between somebody who maybe even has really solid training with that nice voice and somebody that a network or a documentary filmmaker is going to trust with an entire program or documentary or docuseries?
Thom:
I’m going to say it is about the voice sometimes in documentary and docuseries work, and here’s the asterisk.
It’s not about how beautiful the voice is. It’s: does that voice radiate the content?
Which is part of the reason why, when larger companies have the money, they may go to a celebrity, because the celebrity has a flavor.
Even if you don’t recognize — I’m going to say the late Paul Sorvino — him doing a documentary about Alcatraz. You don’t even have to say, “I know that’s…” But he’s got that New York, “I grew up in that neighborhood” sensibility about what prison life might be like.
So in the world of TV narration, I tell people that, sure, we’re all looking for variety, but know where you fit subject matter-wise.
I have a woman I’ve been working with — I think three or four lessons already — and she has an artistic background and a very strong musical background.
Her voice, I think she’d be the first to say she doesn’t necessarily like her voice. It’s a theater-voice type of thing, and she’s trying to find the nuance in it.
But I’ve said to her, “Yes, we can work on that. But you know what? If I am casting for a documentary about Monet, the way you can go on and on…”
Her phrasing becomes very instinctive.
Instinctive translation. Conversational. I like the word instinctive better.
She’s finding her niche.
A beautiful voice can unfortunately lull us to sleep if — and that’s the condition — they don’t provide variety.
So even a beautiful voice should have the highs and the lows. Otherwise, it can be a little hypnotic.
You find yourself sitting there on the couch on a Sunday afternoon, totally interested in this doc, going, “This is going to be great. I can’t wait.”
And then suddenly my wife’s doing this: “Honey, you fell asleep.”
“God! What did I miss?”
Because variety — as an old psychology student — variety reengages the rat to keep hitting the little bar in order to get his or her food.
Variety in exercise.
So you see, Psych 136A, circa 1974, does work.
Paul:
There you go, Mom. Using the degree for once.
Thom:
My point is, there are certain voices that are great voices who are also great storytellers.
For example, there was a doc I saw two or three months ago. It was Jeremy Irons, and it was about Romania.
I think perhaps they chose him because he has an exotic flavor to him and a great sense of history because he’s played a lot of historical characters.
But even within the Jeremy Irons thing, there was one section where he was talking about a catastrophe that happened in one part of Romania during the Second World War, and I’m going…
Exactly.
Paul:
On that thread, I want to learn more about this technique you teach called the Colors of the Voice, which is about helping the actor find the different emotions as they roll through a story.
And my question to you is, it sounds like a fairly involved process. Maybe it is.
So if it is, how do you avoid overthinking all of that and getting way up in your head?
Thom:
Paul, this is an excellent question.
Mastering use of the Colors technique involves a lot of practice.
Everyone has their rainbow.
Your yellow might be different from my yellow, but your range from your yellow to your black — it’s important that you know what those colors are to you.
It’s not about, “Okay, well, if it’s black, I’ve got to be James Earl Jones black,” or, “I’ve got to be Willem Dafoe kind of dark black.”
No. It’s your black.
But when you’re talking about thinking too much, Colors is best as a primer that you look at and say to yourself at the beginning, “If I think the emotions I’m looking for…”
And obviously people may not get this, and that’s totally fine.
But if I look at this piece and it is kind of natural green, but kind of earthy brown, so it’s a combination of green-brown, the entire 60-second spot is not going to be green-brown, because every spot has a journey.
Eventually, new colors are going to be layered as we continue to speak without us even thinking about it.
If I say, “I’ve got to stay green-brown, I’ve got to stay green-brown, I’ve got to stay green-brown,” then what do I have?
I’ve got monotony.
It’s just like a song. If a song starts with an acoustic guitar, then suddenly in the second eight bars the bass line comes in, then in the third one the kick drum comes in, and then suddenly the lead guitar player…
We’ve got multiple colors.
I think music and colors work very well together. They work in conjunction.
But it’s a cheat. It’s an emotional cheat to get to something, to again Think Visually Before You Act Vocally.
I can tell you, I’m not trying to pimp Colors, trust me.
Chuck Kourouklis, who was a student years ago but now he’s a 20-year veteran voice actor and co-owner of VoiceTrax San Francisco, is the one who now teaches the introductory Colors class there.
He knew Colors so well. Every time I would work with him, or he would engineer a class with me, he’d say, “Sounded like that was a little yellow with a brown bow on it.”
And I’m looking at him going, “Whatever.”
So when it was time for me to start prioritizing which classes I could teach, I passed the baton to Chuck.
The very simple button to this story is this: sometimes when I’m coaching on Zoom with a VoiceTrax student, it could be whatever, and I won’t ask, “What color?” because I don’t know. Some people relate to Colors, some don’t.
So I’ll say, “Well, what was your MO on this?”
And the woman might say, “Well, it wasn’t exactly blue and green. It was sort of like an aqua, almost a chartreuse, that I was going for.”
And I’d say, “Listen to your specificity of your visualization there.”
It isn’t just red, orange, pink, and all that. It is all the nuances of color that make us different.
That’s about as short as I can do, because otherwise it is something where, when people say, “I’d love to learn more about your Colors,” it’s usually a couple of lessons just to go through the handouts and get the person going on their own.
But I’m flattered that you asked. That’s very kind of you.
Paul:
But like any process, it takes practice. It takes development of the skill, right?
Thom:
Yeah.
Paul:
You said something earlier, Thom, that really piqued my curiosity.
I guess it was a producer who made the comment, “Wow, Thom, it sounds like you’re learning right along with us.”
Talk about that relationship to the audience.
How do you figure out whether, to stretch a metaphor a little bit, you’re sitting next to them in that case, or whether you’re sitting across from them teaching them something? You’re the expert, they’re the student.
How do you figure all of that out?
Thom:
The content many times dictates who you think your potential audience is.
There are skeptics. There are people who are willing to learn. There are people who are just looking for good fluff. There are people who lean into humor. There are people who are okay with walking on the dark side because they’re just fascinated by that stuff.
If I think about the specific audience a little bit more, that will tell me: am I side by side? Or am I quasi-lecturing, à la a TED Talk situation?
The other thing, Paul, is the degree of shot.
A lot of close-ups — if people are trying to learn how a doctor goes in and removes a tumor or something like that — you can’t be talking like this about removing the tumor.
I’m joking here, of course.
It’s usually in here.
The other thing is: is there movement or energy within the shot?
I think the more energy that’s in the shot is going to affect how casual you are about sharing that information.
If it’s sad information, then it’s about respect as well.
If it’s something about people who love breaking rules, maybe you don’t need to worry about how outlandish you are.
It’s like when I talked to Scott Parkin. I said, “You want to narrate a Civil War documentary. Why don’t you narrate a documentary about the stupidest things people do when they’re studying for their driver’s license?”
And he goes, “I could do a whole hour on that.”
I go, “Well, yeah.”
That lends itself to your irreverent style.
And yes, we don’t want to dominate the material. We want to support the material.
Some material, if the material isn’t great, we may have to do more with it, Paul.
If the material is excellent, maybe we don’t, because people can learn from just going along, and all you’re doing is sort of threading one topic to the next topic.
Sometimes material that’s a little more scientific involves a narrator who can master certain technical terms.
It’s interesting, because I was teaching a webinar a few weeks ago and there was one particular audition script. They had put in three different audition sections.
There was the cold open, the tease to pull people into the show.
Then there was the beginning of the story, telling the overview of — I think it was about the history of cars.
And then there was a long paragraph talking about manual transmission, automatic transmission, and the person who invented it happening upon a way that would make it easier.
It was rather technical.
There were technical terms, and you just couldn’t leave people hanging out. You had to lean into it to say, “Wow, here’s what I learned. Here’s what you can learn,” and do it without disrespecting your audience.
So I think respecting your audience is important. Helping them understand without being pedantic.
Paul:
I started this chat, Thom, and mentioned that you’ve had a long career.
Your career, whether you realize it or not, started way before the internet.
Five 30-year-olds just passed out when I said that.
My question is, you’ve been doing this for a long time. Tastes have changed. Networks have changed. Creative directors have changed.
How have you become a talent — with all the great pipes and the technique and all the stuff behind the mic aside — who keeps getting called back, keeps working, keeps enduring through all of that change over the decades?
Thom:
Well, not to use a baseball metaphor…
Paul:
Love a good baseball metaphor.
Thom:
I’m not a starting pitcher who’s going to go eight strong innings and fan 12 people.
But at this particular point they may say, “You know what? Seventh inning, lefty versus lefty. I’m bringing in Pinto to pitch to this one.”
Of course, you can’t pitch to one batter anymore.
But I’m going to bring him in here.
In other words, my range isn’t what it used to be because of age and style.
But I stay on top of what’s out there to see the trends of how someone would narrate.
I’ll start on a personal level.
Since I’ve narrated a lot of history that has to do with war — World War I, World War II, Civil War, Vietnam War, that type of stuff — you can look at the direction and the writing and say, “Okay, this is less bombastic.”
Because there’s a lot of older-school stuff that is very vertically structured, almost like a bullet-point type of delivery.
I’m laughing because when life gives you lemons, make lemonade.
“Hi, we need a guy who sounds like he’s narrating a World War II documentary about MacArthur’s battles.”
You know what? I wasn’t surprised that I booked that.
It was a part for a movie: be a documentary narrator talking about that.
But that’s obviously not where it would go today.
As my agent Lisa said to me — and I’m laughing because Lisa knows how to tell the truth — I think it was maybe four or five years ago. I had just revamped my TV narration demo, and it’s a video demo on top of it too.
She was looking at it and she goes, “You know, let’s lose the beach countdown thing.”
I said, “Really? I’m just trying to show variety.”
She goes, “You know what? I’ll probably still let you audition for that, but if somebody is reaching out to me looking for five men and five women for something about the best, coolest beaches, they’re probably skewing younger.”
So there you go.
Knowing when to let go of certain things and saying, “I’m the voice of wisdom. They’ll listen to me when they’re looking for the voice of wisdom.”
So I’ll go there.
It’s a far cry from 1994, where it would have been something like — I’m just going to fake this off the top of my head:
“These fish find their way down to the bottom of the sea, but they have to look out because this guy is hungry.”
That was a World of Wonder kind of read.
Obviously my voice was probably not as resonant, but that’s the kind of phrasing I would use to talk to that particular audience.
Well, guess what?
That ship has sailed.
And it’s okay.
You accept what is.
I say I’m staying in my lane, but I’m staying in my lane with gusto.
Paul:
Bring it back, Thom, before we go, to the course: Primetime Narration: Mastering Documentary Storytelling.
Who is that course for?
And if I were to take it, Thom, what would I hear, perceive, or maybe even perform differently after I take the course?
Thom:
Reminders, Paul.
For someone of your ilk, okay?
The course is not designed for someone totally new to voiceover.
I would say the prototypical person would be somebody who’s one or two years into voiceover and working.
Of course, most people are saying, “I need to know how to be a facile commercial talent.”
They’re also understanding that there’s a lot of work in the non-broadcast world, as you know, in terms of marketing on that kind of narration.
Maybe they’re exploring whether they want to get into video games.
Even audiobook people who are decent at telling the story can learn to bring this kind of specific storytelling.
But for someone like Paul Schmidt, and some of my people who have studied with me, they’ve got demos and they’re auditioning for pieces.
It’s a refresher.
It’s also there. You can go back and rewatch it and say, “You know what? When I was coaching with Thom, I remember him saying that, but now it’s landing more with me because I’m able to lock this down, maybe rewind it, maybe listen to him again, maybe look at the scripts side by side.”
That’s part of the reason I wanted to do it.
When I was talking about going back and rewriting or going back and retracking, I kind of put myself in that position of: Did I — and I’m going to use a term that’s insulting — dumb this down enough?
Not “Did I dumb it down?” Did I make it clear enough for people without being pedantic?
I think some people also forget this, Paul.
People think, “Okay. Beginning, middle and end. Be a good storyteller. Find the drama. Try to be memorable. Let the drama ebb and flow. Really know what that specific audience is. Try to be distinctive.”
Those are all good things.
But what’s funny is that some people have de facto phrasing or de facto vocal placement.
And sometimes producers don’t want that.
If you lean into your legato phrasing all the time — not you, but anybody — it might be something that needs something a little more methodical.
It might be something that needs a little more throwaway.
It might need something that’s higher-end staccato.
Or people who de facto use their chest voice can use the mask more. They can use the tip-of-the-teeth thing. They can use more of a diaphragm thing.
Their diction: decent diction, average diction, slurry diction almost, because you’re trying to sound like somebody who works on a fishing boat.
Just reminders.
I’ve stopped saying, “The devil is in the details.”
Well, I just said it.
But my phrase for the past two or three years is: excellence is in the details.
And with so many people wanting to do it, you’ve got to raise the bar for yourself so you don’t do de facto Paul Schmidt or Thom Pinto.
Paul:
Absolutely.
You describe this course, Thom, as a legacy project.
So if this is the final, definitive record of—
Thom:
No more. So the obituary’s coming. Go ahead.
Paul:
Here’s my question.
If this is the final record, then what do you want people, voice actors, to take from it?
What’s the one thing, if you could teach everybody in this course one thing, that you hope they get out of it?
Thom:
That they have to have enough self-esteem, enough self-worth, to deliver their — I’m going to call it — special something.
Whatever the other considerations are.
That you’ve analyzed what the purpose of the documentary is.
That you have a certain attitudinal flavor.
That you’re honoring the visuals.
That your phrasing is specific.
That you honor the fact that there are various interviews in between, and you’re using those interviews to thread the story.
That you’re envisioning what kind of music is behind you, which gives you just a little more emotional texture.
That you’re considering which network it could possibly be on.
The difference between, “This is going to be on a kids’ network,” or, “This is on Discovery,” but is it Discovery regular or Discovery Kids?
Is your energy level not a de facto energy?
All that stuff put together, and then saying:
“Who am I?”
“I am worth putting my stamp on it to be distinctive, just like any other actor when they’re doing an on-camera role, to say, ‘You know what? This is how I roll. This is how I do that part.’”
And to be confident enough to leave something out there that is you.
Because then, if they don’t hire you, it’s not because, “My God, he was all over the map. He sounds like he was doing a poor man’s Peter Coyote,” or Angela Bassett.
Instead, they go, “Well, you know what? He was distinctive. I’m not sure it’s exactly the right fit for the show, but I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we keep putting him in the hopper and listen to him again with the other finalists?”
And even if you don’t get it, maybe they’ll remember the next time they hear your audition.
“Paul Schmidt? Yeah, he read for us on that El Chapo cocaine thing. Let’s hear what he’s like here.”
So: self-worth.
Leave your stamp.
Be confident about leaving your stamp.
But the only way you can do that is to do the work for how all of those building blocks work for you.
Paul:
Every time we talk, Thom, I come away more inspired and smarter. I’m just so grateful that you were able to spend some time with us today.
The course again is called Primetime Narration: Mastering Documentary Storytelling. It comes out on October 20th.
The great Thom Pinto. Thank you so much for joining us today, Thom.
Thom:
Paul, thank you.
It’s always enjoyable, and it’s always not long enough, but it’s okay.
Best to you, my man, as always, in continuing what you do to help the VO community out there.
Paul:
Thank you, sir. It’s very kind of you.