Brian Dreger wants to know…
I am reading your post about Lorenzo Music, and I’m curious about why the voice actor scripts do not have any descriptions of what the scene is about. Is an animation script not like a traditional movie or television script? Is there a reason why it’s better for the actors not to know what’s going on, requiring the director to explain it to them? Does a traditional formatted script exist for an episode but the actors just don’t get to see it? Just curious…
There are exceptions to all of what follows but generally, an animation script is full of descriptions of the characters, suggested camera angles, notes to pan from this to that, all sorts of details that are irrelevant to what the voice actors do. They don't need to know when their character has a close-up. So what generally (there's that word again) happens in that someone prepares a script for them that strips all that out and just gives them the dialogue.
This enables the Voice Director to control the flow of information to them and not overwhelm them with information that doesn't impact what they do. The Voice Director can describe the actions to them where that is relevant or show them the appropriate pages of the storyboard if the storyboard has already been done. (On about 95% of the cartoon shows I've voice-directed, work has not yet commenced on the board when the track has been recorded. In part, that's because I usually wrote the script and I wrote it the night before the recording session.)
You can give more information to an actor but once they know something, you can't take it away. That's one of the reasons I usually don't give the actors the script in advance. I don't want them deciding how to read a line before they have all the info I intend to give them. There is a value to a largely-cold read. On a lot of the shows I voice-directed, I had Howie Morris in the cast and Howie was the kind of actor who, if you had him read a speech seven times, he'd give you seven totally different readings…and often come up with a reading I had not imagined but loved.
Sometimes, there'd be another actor in the room who I felt needed more explanation so I'd send Howie out to the lobby while I explained a scene to the other actor. (This was back when we recorded with all the actors in the same room at the same time, obviously. These days, more shows work in what they call "splits," which means that you record one actor at a time and then the editor makes it sound like conversation. Also these days, even when you record all the actors at the same time, they're usually in their home recording studios.)
You just do what you think works for the particular recording with those particular actors…generally.
