Animation Voice Acting Monsters vs. Aliens
Oscar winner Reese Witherspoon plays Ginormica, a 50-foot tall superwoman in Dreamworks’ new animated movie, Monsters vs Aliens. She provided some great insight to the voice over/ voice actor industry. We wanted to share it with you.
The Times asked Reese: What was it like to provide a voice for Monsters vs Aliens?
It was an interesting process. I went in to meet Jeffrey Katzenberg, just as a general idea, once I started seeing the Dreamworks animated movies over and over again with my children.
He walked me through the process of what they do and I ended up seeing the boards for this movie and I got very excited. It seemed like a good idea, revolving around a great image of my character sitting on the roof of a gas station. It was really cool. So I signed on, and about a year later, I began doing recordings — which I like to call “actor in a box”.
I had never done voice-over work before, so it was really helpful to have [directors] Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon there to walk me through everything because it is sort of stop and go. You pick up scenes here and there and you double back and get them again. It really is a very director-focused medium because they have to inform the actors where they are at, otherwise they would be incredibly lost. It is also ever evolving, the narrative is always changing.