The Salt Lake City Voiceover Workshop with Scott Shurian is the longest, continuous, voice over workshop in Utah having been started in 1998. Since its inception, Shurian has facilitated some 300 Utah voiceover workshops. These events are designed to introduce participants to the acting techniques used in bringing life to the printed word. Voice-over projects are many and varied from talking cars, DVD games, to book reading, e-learning...and the list goes on...not to mention radio and TV commercials and narrations of all kinds.
In addition to the beginner workshops, we offer intermediate private instruction designed to prepare client for the final stage in the teaching process, the production of a demo.. The demo is the business card of the voice over actor... We are a one stop shop for the individual wo wants to learn, then do, acting voiceovers.
How long have you been doing voice-overs?
Scott: Well, I'm dating myself here, but my first freelance narration was done long ago in Munich, Germany and it was about the Winter Olympics in that neck of the woods that year. You figure it out.
How many of these narration things have you done over the years?
Scott: By my count, I've passed the five thousand mark.
You of course, do commercials as well?
Scott: Oh sure, but I started out with the narrations early on so the count there is higher than it would be for commercials. I don't really know how many radio and TV spots I've done over the years. It gets sort of blurred. And now, of course, I find myself voicing things for multi-media and the internet that don't really fall into either the commercial or narrative format.
What is the difference between an announcer and a voice-over person?
Scott: I'm glad you asked. A good announcer is a person who reads well and within set time retraints, most often, 30 and 60 second commercials. It is almost always a game of beat the clock. A voice-over actor is also a good reader but one who has been trained to take a piece of copy, long or short, and speak life and meaning into the words rather than simply read them. If you listen carefully to radio and television, you'll be able to hear the difference.
Another comparison question here. What is the difference in the delivery of a narrative script and a commercial script?
Scott: Well, they both have only one thing in common: they each are usually directed towards a specific audience. A commercial may be designed to entice a woman to buy a certain baby food, or a man to drive a specific model car. Most narrative scripts are designed to tell a bigger story to a widespread audience. Or, in the case of industrial and educational scripts to a specific audience. So, in both cases you have to know your audiences, believe in your product whether it's real or an intangible and go from there.
What have you done here recently that we might have heard on National TV?
Scott: A very interesting project last year was a joint production between BYU, the Discovery Channel, and a company in Sweden. It was an hour long documentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls. A most interesting program.
Do you find interest in all of your voice work?
Scott: I'm a wishgranter volunteer for the Make-A-Wish foundation and I'm taking classes in writing fiction. I like to write as well as voice. And I teach voice-over workshops in Los Angeles, and Las Vegas and Salt Lake City, to name a few venues.
And that's that?
Scott: And that's that.
