Drop the mic!

I don’t know what’s going on with me and the “hellos”.

Whenever the script of a voice-over starts with “hello” the bastard never comes right the first time. Not even in the second time! It’s either too effusive, or it’s too serious, or it’s too false, or it’s too singsong, or it’s too confident… I’m not saying it isn’t a bad first “hello”. It’s a really nice one, but it’s not perfect. I know what I’m talking about. I’m a great “Helloer” when I meet people on the street.

Maybe it’s a trauma… It probably took me a while to say a natural “hello” in one of the first voice-overs I ever made, many years ago, because whenever I look at the text and see that it starts with the greeting I instantly get afraid of saying it. I bet that every voice actor feels the same when they think a lot about failing to say a word… They will eventually fail, anyway.

The same thing happens to me with the credit card PIN. I can’t think about the PIN when I’m going to insert it. It has to comes out naturally and unconsciously. If I go to an ATM thinking “what if I forgot the PIN?” I usually fail on it, at least in the first attempt. But it also happens to fail twice, and I give up on collection money from the machine. That’s because it has also happened failing three attempts and the ATM withheld the credit card. At the worst case scenario I have to say to myself “what if I forget… Don’t think! Don’t think! Simply do it!”. But with the “hello” I can’t help but think about how to say the word… And in Portuguese it has only three characters: “Olá”.

The strangest thing is that if the “hello” appears in the middle of the script, by surprise, it even works out for me. But if it’s at the beginning of the text, and if it’s well highlighted at the top of the page… Damn it…

Goodbye to perfect hello…

Now that I think of it, I started to listen to a Beatles song in new way…

“You say yes, I say no,

You say stop and I say go, go, go!

Oh, no…

You say goodbye and I say hello.

Hello, hello,

I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello”.

😉

And then there’s the case of having a “thank you” at the end of the script…