Friday, August 25, 2006

Afghani voice-over.

I’m pretty enthusiastic about this gig. I won’t say very much about it because it’s obviously still in production and I won’t steal the thunder of what promises to be an excellent documentary (no, not just because I’m part of it). Suffice it to say, I auditioned and have been cast as the voice of an Afghani mother. Admittedly I was not very familiar with what Afghani accents sound like before my audition and did quite a bit of research to find out. What I found was a lot of variation in proficiency and degree of confidence in speaking English on the part of the native Afghani speakers, just as with any language of course, and felt I had a bit of leeway in what I could offer. Since there were 5 different parts to audition for I was able to show several styles of delivery, pace, and of course, accent. I had an email this evening that they “loved” my voice. We will be recording in New York in the fall.

In an earlier post, I wrote that Pat Fraley indicated that voice actors cannot expect a ton of accent work. That’s changing and he will be among the first to say so – in fact I got an email from him earlier in the week announcing that “More than any other time in the last TEN YEARS, accents and dialects are required for Animation, Games, and Audiobook jobs” and he will be offering a dialect class next month along with Larry Moss, dialect coach to the stars, Hillary Huber, renowned audiobook narrator and producer/recording engineer Andrew Morris. Now, I can’t be dropping everything and running off to Los Angeles every time Pat offers a class, much as I would love to, but it sure is a mouth-watering offer. Instead I will be taking a dialect class in the theatre department at the local university in the spring, and in the meantime hope to do a bit of private coaching with the professor who’s teaching it. I seem to be getting more and more opportunities to use the skills that I’ve been working on ever since I was a little kid and used to listen endlessly to my parents’ recording of British comedians Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett in Beyond the Fringe. I want to be as ready as I can be for every opportunity that comes along.

I have to say, I’m very proud to be working on this project on Afganistan and look forward to writing more about it as it becomes public. Hearing the news that I’m going to be a part of it was just a fantastic way to end the week.

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Discipline

Since beginning my study of karate over 5 years ago, I have had occasion to think about discipline in new ways. I’ve always chafed under authority, and here I am practising an art that requires something along the lines of obedience. Respect and courtesy are hugely important in Japanese culture, whereas Americans are known for being free spirited, possibly even rude and boorish. I have found that, just as I benefit physically from the exercise karate offers, my mind has benefited in many ways, not the least of which is that I can go onto the deck and try to turn off the part of my mind that questions authority- ideally, performing the choreographed series of offensive and defensive moves that make up the kata of karate is a form of “moving meditation”, and we can focus on it so completely that kata takes over and we in essence “become” the kata..

It isn’t that I accept everything I’m taught in karate without questioning it – it’s important to know what the moves are for and sometimes one is told to do things a certain way for a certain reason, but the moves and the reasoning are sometimes open to interpretation. But one of the challenges in karate, as well as in life, is to know when to let go and focus on one’s own training, not on what other people might be doing on the deck, how other people might be choosing to interpret kata, or courtesy, or focus, or any of the other components of the art or of life. Who is being asked to test for their next rank? Does that person deserve it? Have they been training as often as the rest of us? Is their technique good enough?

Whenever my mind starts going in that direction, I have to pull it back and remind myself that I really don’t “get it” when I allow myself those thoughts, and that part of the discipline and focus of this art is to turn inward and do the best I can to improve my practise of it, to help other people when it’s appropriate (e.g., if I’m conducting the class), and to otherwise ignore what other people are doing. A friend of mine who is now a second-degree black belt told me that although she used to get worked up about some of these things, she now tries not even to have the negative thoughts. That made a big impression on me. It’s a good aspiration for karate and for what happens to you every day on the street. It’s also helpful for voice-over and any kind of art or life work that requires you to offer your work up for criticism and rejection. Every day you send out emails or make telephone calls and attend auditions or record auditions at your own studio. All too often you get no response at all, and if your mind is overly active and you have a tendency to analyse everything to the hilt, you can overindulge in speculating about why. Why did that producer contact me personally for a custom read ASAP and then never even acknowledge my response, let alone hire me? Would I get more answers to my marketing queries if I timed them differently? Maybe I should have interpreted the copy differently. Maybe I was slightly too emotional when I should have gone for calm authority. Maybe I would have gotten the gig if I hadn’t had that cup of cocoa for breakfast. Maybe...

Enough already. Let it go. No, it isn’t easy, but it’s essential if one is to keep one’s balance and achieve a life of serenity and happiness. Clear negative thoughts from one’s mind so that the good thoughts have more room to grow. Keep them out of conversations with other people. Okay, maybe I’ll have to rush into a closet and shriek for a minute every so often to get it out of my system, but maybe after a while I won’t even need that. I want to be happy and I want the people around me to be happy too. Negative thoughts bring civilisation down. Can’t have that. I would like to have the discipline to do my life’s work to the best of my ability, to take direction where appropriate, and to move on when my goals don’t match those of the people on intersecting paths.

I'll report back in a few months, if I'm not too embarrassed about it.



Artwork by Christine O'Hara


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Thursday, August 03, 2006

Finding Colleagues.

I recently found a treasure trove on the internet – a list of this year’s winners of advertising awards in one of the industry sectors in which I specialise. Although my approach to marketing in the early months in the voice-over business was of the shotgun variety (e.g., compiling a database of production companies and ad agencies by region, or even just using huge free lists that I found for the entire U.S. and beyond), now I have a much more targeted approach. The awards list is a way for me to learn with relative ease which agencies are serving my market and get me together with the people who need what I have to offer.

Plenty of voice talent are able to do some of everything, whether it’s commercials, corporate narration, audiobooks – but marketing to everybody is probably not in one’s best interest. There is something that each of us does best; why not develop that and market to that strength? Everyone needs a way to rise above the crowd and the people who need us need to see a reason why they should choose us over someone else. Similarly agencies need to make it easy for clients to see why they should choose them over another agency – which will also make it easier for satellite professionals to find the agencies to whom they can be of most use and determine quickly when we don’t need to contact someone.

I’ve looked at literally thousands of production company and advertising agency websites in the last year or so. It’s amazing how many different ways people have thought of to present the basic elements such as Clients/Specialties, Services, Portfolio, Staff, Testimonials and Contact Information. A (I won’t say “the”) majority do a good job. Then there are those who like to hide the information in layers so visitors have to dig for it, using names that do not immediately conjure up the thing they’re supposed to represent. And how about the sites where information just starts whizzing around and you have to grab what you’re looking for before it disappears and you have to wait until it comes around again, like toy ducks at a shooting range?

Somebody stop me! Relevancy check…. What would make life easiest for me as a colleague-scrounger would be the ability to tell within the first minute of landing on a website whether this is a company that uses services like mine, with the specialties that I have to offer. I guess nobody ever said it was going to be easy. This is Darwinian selection. Anyway, I’m growing fat on my list of awardees–I have nothing to complain about (it’s the heat-sorry). I marvel that after months of scouring the internet almost daily I’m still turning up so much good information. Hard to imagine life before the World Wide Web.

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