Voice Overs Of The World: Pop Secret
In this week’s Voice Overs of the World, I want to take a look at Pop Secret’s new ad campaign. I have to admit that I really do love these commercials. Not only are they clever and funny, but they’re well-animated and feature some terrific voice overs. And the best part is, each commercial uses multiple characters, meaning that each one also provided work to multiple voice actors.
In the first commercial, a family of popcorn kernels are watching, of all things, The Dark Knight. There are four different voices at work here, and what I like is that the Mom and Dad characters are both normal, average, everyday voices. They could be you or me. These voice actors happened to fit the casting director’s idea of what a middle-aged mom and dad should sound like, but there’s really nothing unique or unusual about their voices. It goes to show that, more often than not, animation doesn’t require over-the-top character voices. Sure, some animated characters have crazy voices, but a lot of the supporting roles and such in animation are done by people with regular, everyday voices.
Then you have the grandmother and young Bobby getting into what basically amounts to a voice-over contest, as each one tries to out-impersonate the other as Batman. Obviously, these two voices were cast a little differently, as they needed to sound like a grandmother and a young child trying to impersonate Christian Bale as Batman. It’s very probable that the voice actors portraying those characters weren’t a grandmother or a young child, but they both do a terrific job.
The second commercial sees an oafish roommate completely obliviously muscling in on his friend’s date night. Again, the character of “Herb” (the kernel with the glasses) is a pretty average, everyday voice with just a hint of nerd-iness (or should that be ‘nerd-osity’?) thrown in for good measure. Meanwhile, the character of “Simon” is a definite character voice, with the actor in the role playing it big and over the top, which is just how it should be. Any roommate who would smash a bouquet of flowers with an umbrella just to re-enact a scene from a movie is clearly meant to be portrayed as a big, dumb oaf, and that’s exactly how he comes across.
Additionally, notice the tagline for the commercial, “For a great movie night, make it pop.” It’s just a single line, but the female voice actor has a nice, smooth tone of voice, and a delivery that conveys a touch of excitement and energy without being loud and booming. It’s actually a pretty sharp delivery.
Word has it that a third commercial from this ad campaign will pop up (pardon the pun) during this year’s Super Bowl. I can’t wait to see what creativity the voice actors bring to the table in that one. Keep your eyes peeled during the big game!
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Average every day voices work best for characters, like these “Pop Corns”, when the idea is to give them an every-day human attitude. In the Second commercial the every day voice is given to the nerdy roommate because he is the center of attention.