Riverhead voice actor takes magical voyage to the world of video games

In the world of voiceovers, what you see in the studio is definitely not what you get on air. And that’s probably a good thing.

“If you ever watch anybody doing a voiceover, we’re all flailing our hands around like crazy,” said Cindy Clifford, Riverhead resident and professional voice actor. “In order to really push out that energy, you’ve got to be moving around. I would never want to do this in front of a camera.”

Clifford, cohost of the weekday “Breakfast Club with Mark and Cindy” on WALK 97.5 FM, has been a professional voice actor for almost 25 years. She has narrated television commercials, documentaries, voice mail greetings and even an audio tour for a national park in Canada.

“You take on a different persona for every job,” Clifford said.

The demos on her website highlight a variety of these personas. A nasally, cartoonish “New Yawk” accent

answers the phone for a fictional oil company and suggests the caller would be better off using a deep-heating sports cream to get warm; in the next clip, a smoky, sultry voice flirtatiously asks a man to hit the town with her.

It is difficult to believe that such a range of characters is produced by a single woman’s voice.

“[Voice acting] is so much fun,” Clifford said in an interview this week. “I’m always doing something different, and that’s important to me. I really, really love it. It’s invigorating. It’s a creative outlet for me.”

Now Clifford can add “video games” to her voiceover resume.

Earlier this month, she finished recording the part of a character in an independent PC game called “Amaranthine Voyage: The Living Mountain” in time for its Jan. 16 release date.

Reading for a video game was a departure from much of the other types of work Clifford usually does. “It was far more acting,” she said. “I’m always playing a character when I’m doing voiceovers, but a video game was running all the gamut of emotions – shock and concern, fear and anger, retribution and consolation – all these different emotions that I needed to convey.”

The game, a sequel to its successful predecessor, is labeled a fantasy game in the casual genre, where much of the gameplay involves clicking around various illustrated scenes to find hidden objects and solve puzzles. Clifford doesn’t usually play video games herself, but she was downloading the file to her computer during our interview.

“It was very exciting to act for a video game,” said Clifford. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”

Her character’s name is Avelina Sunheart, the leader of the game’s Guardians. Avelina was described by game developers as “calm and serene” during the audition, “so when they sent me the lines,” Clifford said, “I delivered all of them being very conscious of her as this calm and serene person.”

She ended up needing to record them all over again. “Apparently she was only supposed to be serene for the lines in the audition,” Clifford said, laughing.

Clifford had to read about 30 lines for the part in total, but it took her about two weeks and several sessions in her studio to come up with something she was satisfied with. She can only work in increments of an hour to an hour and a half, she explained. “You start getting tired or sloppy. After two hours I need to take a break because I’m just not where I was at the beginning.”

Some lines are more difficult to deliver than others. Clifford recalled one part of the script where her character was banishing the game’s villain from the country. “She’s furious,” Clifford said. “It’s a huge line. I had to deliver it with all this emotion without over-modulating from a technical standpoint and killing the sound.

“The challenge is that there’s nothing else other than the voice that’s conveying emotion,” Clifford explained. “I’m waving my hands around and giving this great facial expression and none of that matters. It’s just got to work with the voice.”

In order to accomplish this, Clifford says she puts double the amount of emotion into each line to get the desired result. “It’s almost overacting,” she said. “If you want her to be happy, you need to be twice as happy, and then when you play it back, you say, ‘That’s where it needs to be.’”

Recording the same sentence several times over may sound tedious, but Clifford says she enjoys it, especially for a job as interesting as “Amaranthine Voyage.”

“Technically, I’m getting hired for a job, but because of what it was… it was like magic. Like getting to dabble in magic.”