Remember to Bring Yourself!

I just ran across a fascinating example of interactive multimedia.  The thing that kills me is that I didn’t know that it was interactive until the “show” was almost over.

It might have helped if I could read the text used throughout the piece.  I have a hunch that somewhere on the splash page are simple instructions that explain how visitors can play a part in the presentation of the work, but everything is in Spanish.  Even though I took a couple of years of Spanish in high school, what little of it remains in the ol’ noggin after (*gulp*) twenty years didn’t help.

It might have helped if I’d paid closer attention to a couple subtle visual cues.  They were there from the very start, but I initially viewed them as merely part of the “show,” even though I couldn’t quite figure out how they fit with everything else that was happening.

Near the end of the presentation, I realized that the mouse cursor still sat in the middle of the view, right where I’d left it after clicking “Play”.  As I reached for the mouse to move the mouse cursor out of the way, a series of thoughts shuffled through my mind in rapid succession…

“Interesting.  The cursor happens to be sitting right where….oh…wait.  If I move it, does that mean that…..ooohhhh….it does!  I’ve been passively watching it play out when I could have interacted with this thing all along, making myself a part of the experience!  Now that’s pretty aweso-……….aw, maaaaannn.  It’s over.”

I kicked myself for not seeing the cues for what they were, and for my poor recollection of Spanish that likely would have helped me learn about the piece’s interactive nature sooner.  Then I took the natural next step.

I reloaded the page and tried again.

Looking back at my earliest attempts at reading commercial copy for my first voiceover coach roughly two years ago, I cringe at how naive I was about the voiceover business.  Similar to my initial view of this interactive piece, I’d say that my initial reads would fall under the category of “passive”.  I somehow had the idea floating around in my head that the bulk of what I needed to do was give a clear and clean read, and that was it.  The same could be said for my initial approach toward narrative work.  I’d begun a solo project for Librivox a few months prior to my first coaching session, and my primary goal when reading was to keep it clean and clear, without rushing things.  I’d also begun creating spoken versions of a weekly family letter that I’d been writing for a couple years.  Yep, you guessed it.  Same goal.

Give me a character to perform, though, and all the stops would come out.  Mr. and Mrs. Clean’n’Clear were there, along with their pal August Dontrush, but I also invited a bunch of other folks to those sessions who I’d been ignoring for the commercial and narrative reads: Madame Texture, Monsieur Character, Li’l Miss Attitude, and the most important contributor of all.

Me.

Why did I feel that these folks had no place in a commercial or narrative read?  Beats me.  What’s really strange (and somewhat sad) is that I still didn’t “get it” for many months after those initial commercial coaching sessions.  During those months I continued soaking up voiceover info from blogs, podcasts, forums, etc., but for some unknown reason the stuff that I read and heard didn’t touch on the one key idea that I somehow needed to break my preconception that it was “voiceover vs voice acting”.  When I finally heard/read someone share that key idea, though, it jolted me awake:

“Voiceover is voice acting.”

What?!  You mean to tell me that I could have — and should have — been applying my passion for acting toward all areas of voiceover, not just the fun character parts?  That I should have brought my soul to all those reads, and not just my voice?

Yep.

Why did I not see this sooner?  Were there subtle cues pointing to this truth all along?  Did I miss something in the instructions that would have led me in the right direction sooner?  Did I not have the proper interpreter to help me understand the instructions that I’d been given?  No matter.  I had the answer.  All that I had to do was take the next natural step, a step similar to the one that worked with this beautiful piece of interactive sight and sound:

Reload the page — replacing the one in my head that contained the mess of my former misconceptions with a clean one that began with this new discovery — and try again.