It’s a Living : Hollywood Words of Mouth : WHEN THE ACTING IS ALL IN THE VOICE, PRODUCERS OFTEN CALL GINNY MCSWAIN

Seated at a control board, flame-red hair on end, hands moving expressively, Ginny McSwain resembles a whirling dervish in a Saturday-morning cartoon.

Separated separated by a glass booth from McSwain stand eight actors--Ed Asner among them--with mikes dangling from the ceiling in front of them. Vocal director McSwain and her cast are laying down tracks for a “Disney Afternoon” cartoon.

“Good read, but faster.”

McSwain shouts in a precise, rapid-fire staccato as one round winds up.

“Exactly right, but faster.”

She reminds the actors that not only is this a cartoon , but their faces can’t be seen.

“Same read, but faster.”

The acting is all in their voices.

“It’s like a radio show,” she explains later at her Toluca Lake home. “It’s about finding that balance, between too dramatic and bringing it up.”

McSwain, an animation dialogue casting director, is one of a handful of creative technicians in Hollywood who don’t belong to a union or get residuals.

“I have to make the most of what I can in the three to four hours we have for each episode,” she says of the studio time she has to shoot a 40- to 50-page script.

Paid only for the time she spends in the studio, McSwain must “present everyone’s vision in a few hours--and that’s the most difficult part.” That vision includes input from the writers, producers, animators and actors.

Often, they sit on a couch--quietly--behind McSwain.

In 12 years as a director, the much-in-demand McSwain has logged in some 2,000 shows for Disney, Film Roman and Danger Productions, among others. Of those episodes, 450 have been for Walt Disney TV Animation: “Tale Spin,” “Darkwing Duck,” “Goof Troop,” “Bonkers,” “Marsupliami,” “Aladdin,” “Return of Jafar” and the company’s latest syndicated effort, “Duck Daze,” to be released in the fall of 1996. She’s also done Film Roman/Fox’s “Bobby’s World” and DIC/ABC’s “Sonic the Hedgehog.”

Since McSwain’s not tied to any specific studio, she can simultaneously work on several shows. Once she was involved in five shows at the same time; she’s worked on as many as 78 episodes a season for a client and as few as 13.

In addition to “Duck Daze,” she’s currently in the midst of Film Roman’s upcoming “The Mask,” based on the hit movie, and Danger Productions/ABC’s “Bump in the Night.”

When projects come to McSwain, “the shows have already been developed and usually a bible (general story lines) has been written and, possibly, a script.”

McSwain puts together a casting session, often culling from what she affectionately calls “The McSwain Repertory Players,” about 20 actors she knows she can count on. “After being in the business 18 years, I know a lot of actors,” she says. She’ll also see actors recommended by casting agents. “My job is a potpourri of sounds, from high to low to textured voices, an orchestra of sounds.”

She and her actors use “a cryptic Rolodex translation with each other,” she says. “They spit out sounds and keep creating and I grab onto the one that fits. It gives the actor freedom to bring something into the character.”

Voice actors “come from many walks of life,” McSwain explains. “They just have great voices and have agents. Demo tapes are very important. They have to know how to get to demo-tape level, because if it’s a crappy tape, no one will listen to it.” Word of mouth about an actor can also play an important role.

It’s imperative that actors she hires take acting classes, says McSwain, who began her career as an actress, but found she “didn’t have the stomach for rejection.”

“You need very strong actors, improvisational ones. Singing is good, dialect classes pay off. All of the stuff you learn in classes pays off for animation voiceover.”

Once actors are selected and studio time allotted, McSwain occasionally holds a 45-minute “green-room rehearsal” to work out the kinks in the script.

Or she may decide to pass on rehearsals altogether. “I like the spontaneity and do what I call ‘rehearsal on tape’ and often decide to go with it,” she explains. “I’ve wasted too many good reads that never come back to me. But if the client insists, I’ll do a rehearsal.”

McSwain can record off a storyboard (a pictorial with dialogue) but more often uses a shooting script. “I prefer that,” she says. “Things haven’t been blocked yet” and the voice track’s not written in stone.

Over the years, McSwain--who’s done some voice work herself, including playing Lois Lane in CBS’ animated 1988 “Superman”--says she’s gotten good at translating the story’s intent, the writer’s vision to the actor.

When she’s successful, that’s the most rewarding thing for her: “This is totally nuts, a crazy pace, a total crapshoot, but watching the actor grasp his role and breathe life into the show, into a brand-new project, it’s just wonderful. Life’s never dull and there’s always some wonderful, eccentric thing going on.”