Rand Unwrapped by Frank Catalano

the thinking behind it was a gentle nudge against my butt was going to make the line move more quickly. He pushed up against my butt, once, then twice and on number three I turned to him told him to back off and that brushing up against my butt wouldn’t make the line move any faster. I might have said something a little more explicative but you get the point. Characters like people have a specific relationship to the space they move in. In my case, Rand took a lot of space and wasn’t afraid to get into with it with any Invid that stepped into it.
    This may seem a bit too complicated to create an animated character. However in a series such as Robotech we were playing real people not cartoony voiced grasshoppers and ants. It was important to me to capture how the character filled the space that was created. Also, how the other characters responded to my character. I remember voicing the first episode of The New Generation when Rand meets Scott Bernard. There was a competitive spirit set up in those first few scenes on the mecha. When they drive, their mecha are close to one another competing for the same space and who will take the lead. That’s how it was in the beginning but then the relationship between Rand and Scott Bernard would evolve into something much more complicated. Scott Bernard would go on to teach Rand to be a true Robotech warrior but at the first moment they see each other, their relationship starts off as competitive. While their relationship evolved, that competitive spirit was still evident throughout the rest of The New Generation . That evolutionary change in the relationship of these two characters and every character in the series had to be reflected in the voice characterization. Now I will confess that when you’re in the studio you don’t have any time to contemplate these character choices. You have only to rely on your individual talent and the choices that come from your true intuition. If you have lines to respond to in your head set then you have that hook to work with. If you don’t, you have got to make the choice based upon your observation of what’s up on the screen and what if anything the director in the room can tell you. This is how I approached creating Rand. But there is more to it than that.
    The creation of just the right voice for an already drawn character is a best like a sonar reading on a submarine. You never get the whole picture. You have the visual animation and if you’re lucky a voice to respond to in your head set and hopefully a good director. But then you have to connect those character choices to something inside of you. This is not to say that every experience Rand had I had myself. But it was important for me to connect the core of who Rand was and what he did to something that I could understand and relate to creatively. While I’ve never had to take out an Invid, I have socked a nun. If needed, I could have used this frightening experience to help me to connect emotionally, intellectually and physically to the Rand character. In many ways to “act” a particular character you must connect to your self. You may be thinking, am I a method actor? The answer is no.
    Method acting attempts to create character choices by connection to the actor’s own emotional history and experience. While I have done this and it is an effective way to find the core of a character in a film or play, it doesn’t fully address the challenges of creating a voice for an animated character. While I value the method acting technique and the work of Stanislavski, much of my training as an actor was in Asian Theatre. Specifically the performance of Peking Opera and Japanese Kabuki. The character approach in these forms of theatre is primarily external in that the actor absorbs the external qualities of the character. The technique is more about the appearance of the character quality than the actor actually making an internal connection. For