Uncle Sam Speaks.

My friend and very talented colleague Rowell Gorman provided the voice of Uncle Sam for this extraordinary video, created by Josh Faure-Brac. Please watch it and ask your friends to watch it too.

I’ve been Bob Bergened.

A tornado hit my world last weekend and I hope that world will never be the same. After a weekend with Bob Bergen at his voice-over animation workshop, I feel like I want to live my life IN CAPITAL LETTERS!!! The energy and generosity of this gifted teacher are beyond words.

I was sorry to miss Bob’s earlier appearance in Boston last month, especially because several of my good friends were in the class. One of the good things about the Hartford experience, however, was that I had never met any of the participants so I now have a whole new circle of very talented voice-over friends, and several of them live close enough that we can have periodic workout groups to keep the energy going from this extraordinary weekend.

The thought of going back to business as usual Monday morning was not appealing. I have to say, the dry narration scripts that were waiting for me when I switched on the computer just didn’t know what hit them! I had to tone it down a little so my clients wouldn’t say, “Whoa!! What are you ON?” but I was glad to find that indeed, life is not the same! My profound thanks to Anthony Piselli for bringing it all together, to Planet of Sound for their hospitality, and to Bob Bergen, for being his amazing self. Bob, you rock.

Mike Hand with Bob Bergen at Planet of Sound, May 2008

Bob Bergen Workshop in Hartford, CT

Bob Bergen will be bringing his renowned voice-over workshop to Hartford next month and I will be attending. Bob has provided voices for hundreds of cartoons, games and commercials, but is best known as the voice of Porky Pig and Tweety, having inherited these roles from the legendary Mel Blanc. Of course, it wasn't a simple bequest - Bob had been in training for the job since he was 5 years old and it was well earned.

I've taken 4 different character voices workshops in the last 3 years: two at Edge Studio, one with Pat Fraley, Hillary Huber and Candi Milo, and one with Pat Fraley hosted by DB Cooper. I'm allowing myself this one more and then I am not allowed to take any more until I make a character voices demo - a real one!

If you're a voice actor in the New England area and are looking for an extraordinary educational opportunity, you can join Bob Bergen 17-18 May 2008 by contacting Anthony Piselli.

Creating Your Own Voice-over Career

Among the things I love about a career in voice-over: the endless opportunities to create. But I think life offers opportunities to create no matter what you do. In my previous career as a biologist, I wrote a lot of papers based on rather dry data. When I wasn’t generating dry data and writing about them, I wrote papers that weren’t based on data at all. In a paper on homology and the ontological relationship of parts, I compared historical pathways in evolutionary biology to the transformation of the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz from an all-flesh person to an all-tin person, or to the complete turnover of members in a baseball team that nevertheless does not change “the Yankees” into some other, separate historical entity. A paper on phylogenetic constraint was my favorite project ever, because it released me from the bonds of data and let me play with ideas to my heart’s content. Later, as a program director at the National Science Foundation, it was more challenging to find ways to have fun and create, but when I needed to give a presentation to discuss the history of funding in my program and the distribution of dollars across taxonomic groups, I made a huge “tree of life” that filled the conference room, with “apples” on the tree to represent grants awarded (it was quite effective, by the way, and paved the way for a major funding initiative at the foundation).

Tree of Life project, National Science Foundation

And whenever a poster or flyer was needed, I volunteered. So the panelists we invited to help us make the final decisions about funding grant proposals found their way to the conference room with this:

or this:

The point is, you can create your own opportunities for both work and fullfilment no matter what else is going on in your life. Whether your voice-over career is keeping you hopping, or whether you sometimes find yourself with down time, you can be creating something.

Casting director Bonnie Gillespie wrote yet another excellent article this week for The Actor's Voice called Back to Basics, covering the latest thinking on headshots, resumés, and the other tools of the actor’s trade. In it is a section entitled Put Yourself Out There – a call to action if you’re looking for ways to get yourself on the map. How do you get on the map? You put yourself there!! She writes about a talented actor-writer comedy team who produced their own short film, Girl's Night Out, to showcase their skills, which became a featured video on Youtube (thanks to additional legwork on the part of the creators – you don’t have to wait for that to happen either) and has led to some great opportunities for them. Bonnie is so right about the importance of creating your own work.

Ideas and opportunities come when you least expect them. A lot of the auditions and scripts I get are interesting, a lot are, well…. not. Last fall I got an audition script for Ariat boots that I really loved, and although I didn’t expect anything to come of this audition, I wanted to do something with it. I got my friend, voice-over talent & production wizard Ben Wilson to work on it with me and we came up with a piece we’re both very proud of. No, we didn’t get the gig (yes of course they were nuts not to hire us – thanks for mentioning it!) but we got a wonderful showpiece that we thoroughly enjoyed creating, and it has brought us other work. Sometimes I get nutty ideas for commercials. I know nobody is going to produce them, so I do it myself. Or I just stick stuff into projects I’ve been hired to do, just because. A long-standing client wrote me yesterday that he has left AuctionPal, the company he founded three years ago and for which he hired me to create the young and energetic, British-accented Piper as their spokesperson. AuctionPal is doing great, and he's still closely associated with them, but he needs new outlets for his own energy and creativity so he’s starting a new internet marketing company, Double Vision. He’s interested in hiring me to do the telephone answering system and wanted me to try out some voices, so this is what I sent him.

The next time you find work slowing down (not that you would ever admit to anybody that that happens – cuz that would be putting negative energy out there and it gets in your way and trips you), don’t wring your hands over it – do something about it! Send out more postcards, make more calls, write more emails, do more networking – but also, create something. Don’t know how to make Flash animations? Find a friend who does or take a class. Lack production skillz? Collaborate. Get busy. If people aren’t hiring, hire yourself to create a showpiece. It will keep you in tip-top creative shape, you’ll have a blast, and you never know where it might take you.

Chicken voices bring holiday cheer.

A few years ago, voice talent David Fuller and animator Daisy Church created a yuletide fowl extravaganza that is posted at David's website. Do visit and listen!

"Cluck of the Bells" by David Fuller and Daisy Church

While you're visiting, check out some of David's voice-over demos. His "Yahoo Hot jobs" is a scream.

Taking funny voices seriously.

I’ve written here before about my early voice-over influences – more specifically, the “funny voices” influences. They were, unequivocally, Beyond the Fringe and to a lesser extent Mike Nichols and Elaine May. These people were funny. Funny enough to attract the attention of a 9-year old and keep it for the next several decades & beyond. This attraction played a significant role in my eventual choice to leave my career as a biologist in favor of one as a voice artist specialising in character voices and accents (as well as medical/science & museum narration). Now that I’m getting more and more work doing accents, however, I’m finding my biggest challenge to be to get away from the humor and take the voices seriously. I have several humorous Hispanic characters in my personal acting troupe, but I had to send them away recently when I was hired for a serious and somewhat dramatic project for Oregon artist Daniel Dancer of ArtfortheSky.com. Mr. Dancer wanted a “light Spanish accent” to narrate a short film on his art. Although the project, in hindsight, went smoothly, there was a lot of hand-wringing on my part. I had to really throw myself into the role and try to take myself seriously –more accurately, I had to forget myself in order to do the job properly. Forgetting one’s self is key. And definitely, forgetting about being funny is a must.

Currently, I’m taking a university theatre course on dialects. Talk about bliss! When class starts we have to sit in a circle and speak to each other in the dialect that is currently under study. As Tito (Cheech Marin) said in Oliver & Company, “Man, if thees eez torture, chain me to dee wall!!!!” I had hoped to get away from humor at least some of the time in this class, particularly during our work on standard British, since I sometimes feel that Beyond the Fringe has destroyed my chances of ever doing a British accent for a serious performance. Alas, I ended up being required to memorise a speech by Lady Bracknell from The Importance of Being Earnest, so “serious” was not to be. We are currently studying American Southern accents and may yet be called upon not to be funny; we shall see.

Where in the world…

I used to love to watch Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego on PBS. The geography information on this long-running kids’ game show was great, but the big attraction for me was the matchless a capella singing by Rockapella. I attended many of their concerts over the years, and so have my children (they even attended 2 concerts before they were born). The show’s theme song, written by Sean Altman (formerly Rockapella’s lead singer) and David Yazbek, is deservedly well known.

I never dreamed that I might actually someday be Carmen Sandiego, even if only for a few minutes. Shortly before Christmas, producer Paul Jury called me on his way from Los Angeles to visit his family for the holidays, and asked me to lend my voice to a short animation for Panda Smash Productions. You can see the result at their website.

Rockapella has evolved considerably since those days. Scott Leonard and Jeff Thacher (Jeff joined the group when Carmen was in its last year) are the only singers from the Carmen days who are still with the group. Altman still performs in New York and elsewhere, as does Elliott Kerman. Barry Carl continues to sing and perform solo and also does a lot of voice-over. It has been years since I attended one of their concerts, and my Rockapella baseball shirt autographed by Barry, Sean, Scott, Elliott and Jeff is full of holes, but I still love the guys and still listen to their music (their Rockin’ Morning for Folgers Coffee is a great way to wake the family on school days). It was such fun to do this project with Panda Smash and to be associated, even if peripherally and unbeknownst to Rockapella, with this great group of songsters. Thanks Paul!

p.s. apologies to my public for Carmen's questionable language. Glad it got bleeped out :)

The MCMlets in their Rockapella heyday
(picture signed by all the guys! Rumor has it that Barry Carl
kept a copy of this picture in his dressing room on the Carmen set for years.)

AuctionPal.

Last fall I did a narration for a client who was launching a new online auction-assist service called AuctionPal. They have just launched. Great timing, since this is the season for reinventing one’s self, making resolutions, cleaning up & feng shui-ing. It sounds like a great alternative for anyone who can’t face eBay on their own.

You can hear the narration by going to their home page and watching the short animation.

AuctionPal’s Spokesperson

Talking funny is serious business... MCM in the News.

My local paper ran a story about me this morning. I think the photograph will allow me to continue to avoid autograph-seekers....

Link to article

Audio linked to the online version of the story

Voice-over heaven.

I’ve been in the voice-over business for less than two years. Certain aspects of the business take some getting-used-to, particularly the way people don’t return calls and emails. That’s probably true of all of business, but I come from an academic background so I’m used to a world where people communicate (although not always well) rather than diving for cover when the phone rings. One time when a producer did return my call and I marveled at that, he said, “Woody Allen said, ‘it's not a dog eat dog world, it's a dog won't return other dogs' phone calls world’ .” That made me feel slightly better.

But one must persevere or wither on the voice-over vine. I recently got an email from a Boston-area company asking if I would be available for a job. I checked my database and saw that I had first contacted this company by email in March 2005. They had never responded, but I sent them an email every three months telling them what I had been up to. I go back and forth about when it’s time to give up on a company, and there are a few circumstances for that:

• When they go out of business
• When they tell me they don’t ever want to hear from me again (this is quite rare)
• When I realise that they don’t need VO in my areas of specialisation and I’m trying to focus on “warmer” prospects

My point is, protracted lack of response is no reason to give up. Apparently, it can take at least 16 months of steadfast silence before a company is ready to hire.

Once a company has hired me, I always look forward to finding out what kind of a client they will be. Frequently, I do the work, send it off, and hear nothing. I don’t like to send an invoice until I’ve gotten word that the client has what they need, although I’ve learned that certain of my peeps don’t say anything unless they need a retake. This doesn't bother me a bit; it's all in a day's work. For them I just wait a decent interval and send the invoice. Then there are the people who are enthusiastic and appreciative, and they even write to me when they don’t have work, they just like to keep in touch. Of course, I especially like those people. They are friendly, interesting, and a joy to work with. I also really like the people who have never hired me, but who nevertheless respond when they get my quarterly reports, and fill me in on what they’ve been up to. That is greatly appreciated.

And then, there’s Mr. S.

The first reason to love Mr. S. is that he found me, rather than the other way round. Also, he needed a character voice, with an Australian accent. Character voices, and in particular, accents, are my very favorite thing to do. Pat Fraley had mentioned, just a few short weeks before Mr. S. came along, that accents make up about minus 2% of what voice actors are called upon to do, and although I kind of knew that, I hated like anything to hear it articulated in that way. Another reason to love Mr. S. is that he took half an hour to tell me what he needed. He’s in the educational software business and I like the feeling that each character he uses has to be well developed and somebody that he can trust to give children what they need. And after I received the script and sent in the work, he took the time to thank me at length. I was so pleased to learn, when I got home from France, that Australian Map Girl was going to be around for a while, her character would be developed further, and additional lines would be needed. I even got a humorous “press release” announcing that she had a name.

It’s great to have the work, and it’s great to have a new repeat customer. But the best part is knowing that this friendly and generous educator will be in my life for a bit longer. Sometimes it's the person who sends the script that "makes" the job. You know who you are. Thank-you.

Women In Animation

I'm on my way to New York today for a two-day workshop with Pat Fraley on Women in Animation.

I will probably have a few words to say about it when I get back.