Viva Brighton Issue #84 February 2020

TRADE SECRETS
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Elsie Lovelock
Voice actor
Elsie Lovelock has lent her versatile vocals to
numerous video games and animations. She
tells Viva what it takes to make a living voicing
demons, witches and Pokémon.
In a typical day I’ll provide the voices for multiple
characters. You really have to inhabit each
one to make it convincing. If a character is falling
off a cliff I have to scream like I’m falling off a
cliff – even though I’m actually at my house in
Patcham in a closet I’ve converted into a soundproof
recording studio.
Sometimes games developers will send me
a lot of information about a character and
occasionally visual references too. Other times
they just give me a short description and I have to
decide what the character is like for myself.
I’m a gamer so I appreciate the importance of
good voiceovers. You can have a game that’s brilliant
in almost every way but if the voice acting is
off it really affects the experience of playing it.
Dubbing from another language is one of
the hardest things to do. You get a timedin
beat and have to match your vocals to the
mouth movements of the character on screen.
The dream jobs are pre-lays, where you do the
voice first and the animators work around your
vocals. It’s how most of the Disney films are
made. You have far more creative freedom and
fewer time restrictions.
The indie games market is booming so it’s
an exciting place to work. Wargroove, one of
the games I voiced, was recently nominated for a
Game award – which is the Oscars of the games
world. I also worked on a musical animation
called Hazbin Hotel, which was released at the end
of November and has had 20m views already.
I originally wanted to go into animation,
because I love to draw, but when I was 17 I sung
in a youth opera at Glyndebourne called Knight
Crew and decided I wanted to be a performer instead.
I did a lot of am-dram and had a band. I set
up my own YouTube channel to share my singing
and voice work. Then I started auditioning for
specific projects.
It takes a lot of mental energy to bring a
character to life with your voice alone. It can
be draining when I’m working on a horror, for
example, and I’ll have spent the whole day voicing
a character that has had her throat slit and is
gurgling blood! I have to look after my voice –
and my health generally – because I can’t work if I
don’t sound like I should.
But there’s so much variety, especially compared
with live action performance where
you’re limited by the way you look. As a voice
actor you can play almost anyone – or anything. It
never gets boring. As told to Nione Meakin
Hear Elsie Lovelock as Jennifer in the forthcoming
survival horror game Remothered: Broken Porcelain
out later this year.
elsielovelock.com
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