Hello! 
See? As promised, not too much time has passed since my last blog. Okay. Today, I’m going to write about something that comes up quite frequently with actors when starting off commercial copy - whether it be on camera, or voice-over. I get things like “I know the first sentence was terrible, but then I settled into the copy.” Or “How do I start this off and sound natural?!” There are three things I teach my students that completely help get the most natural sounding, and clean start to a piece of commercial copy.

Here’s an example, but use these suggestions with any copy. Say your first line is “Don’t let painful arthritis flare-ups keep you down.” And you’re thinkin’, okay. How do I make this sentence sound real, genuine, informative, but empathetic, etc.

You can:

Imagine someone asking you a question, or telling you what their problem is, specific to the product you’re selling. So, you imagine your friend, a co-worker, family member, patient  -if you’re playing a doctor - anyone who’d fit in with the circumstance or situation you’ve put yourself in for your audition, and in your head, just before you start saying the copy, you hear something like “when I wake up in the morning, my hands are so stiff, I can’t make a fist!” or “the arthritis in my knee is killing me!” and you start off your copy with the line “don’t let painful arthritis flare-ups get  you down”. Now you sound authentic. You can also answer a made up question. You hear “did you know my arthritis is so bad that I sometimes can’t walk? Or “isn’t there anything I can take for these aches and pains?” and you answer with “don’t let painful arthritis flare-ups keep you down”. So in fact, you’re setting up the set-up. A made up question or problem has been stated you’re answering and thereby setting up the commercial with the spoken problem, which sets YOU up for giving the solution. Geez. I hope that made sense. But I digress. Again, this topic is focused on getting a clean entrance to a piece of commercial copy. 

Another way to get that authentic, real entrance, is by implying a “hey” or “Ya know”. In this case, I think the “hey” might work better: you imply “hey”. Then start with “don’t let painful…” so, here’s how it would sound when put together. “hey, don’t let painful arthritis flare-ups keep you down”. See? As my husband would say, “easy-peazy, one-two-threezy”.

The last way of getting a clean and noticeable start to a piece of commercial copy is something I refer to as “falling leaf”, which I’d have to either try and draw for you, or show you physically. I teach it to all my students, and they, agree, it works like a charm. The only way I can describe it to you, is - imagine a wind kicking up, and a leaf gets blown up off it’s branch, and then falls down (and then up a bit) and lands on the ground (which would be the end of the sentence.) I know this sounds so way out there and weird, but I promise, it’s as simple as all get-out, and is an awesome way of starting a sentence. I wish I could show you. Well, come on in for a lesson or a class,  and I’ll teach ya more tricks of the trade than you could ever imagine… hope this helped,

Over an’ out,

Dor
http://www.dorianeelliott.com