0626 – The Limits Of Line-Reading

2022.09.18 - 0626 – The Limits Of Line-Reading

Second, in asking you to “sound like this” it’s likely they will be putting other elements into their read that they may not realise. And you as a professional will be copying not just their tone, but their speed, pauses, intonation, phrasing and so on. Which they may not have intended.

And, think about it: you’ll end up doing an impression of them, doing an impression of you reading the script! That way no-one knows what’s going on and what’s actually you, and what’s them, and what’s them trying to be you or you trying to copy them being you, being them…

At best line-reads are a quick fix. Instead of having the director say what you are doing ‘wrong’ and what they want you to do ‘right’, it may be better to have them explain the concept of what they want to achieve, have them build the voice characterisation from the ground up, with proper structure.

Penny was a well-known national newspaper journalist who’d been following a long-running story over several years. One of the BBC’s flagship TV news programmes commissioned Penny to help them make a documentary on the same subject.

She was great at the interviews as you might expect, and in helping the editors piece together the filmed clips for the final show. But inevitably, the schedule slipped and the day before transmission I got a panicked phone call from the producers: they were in the studio where Penny was recording the voiceover links and she was simply not up to the job. It just wasn’t her forte. So, could I go down and help them meet their fast-approaching deadline?

I would have loved to have spent time with Penny training and explaining coaching and coaxing, guiding and advising on the nuances of intonation, but there simply wasn’t time. Instead there was a crash course, and then a series of ‘line reads’: I read a line and she repeated it back parrot-fashion. For hours. We finished at about 2am on the day of the transmission… Penny sounded great but parroting a script is not the same as having an understanding of it. And it won’t help you the next time you are in a studio.

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