After four weeks of toiling in my dialects and accents workshop, here’s what I’ve discovered: My British accent isn’t too shabby. I did a credible Claude Rains riff for the final exercise. And in Prototypes class last evening, my Hugh Grant takeoff favorably impressed some of my fellow actors, who didn’t even realize that it [...]
Archive for the ‘Characters’ category
Internationally speaking…
August 14, 2009In the game
August 9, 2009Confession time… I kissed a video game, and I liked it. For the past several weeks, I’ve been eagerly anticipating Pat Fraley‘s Game World event in San Francisco. Three reasons: (1) I had a blast working with Pat during a previous event; (2) Pat’s guest coach was Darragh O’Farrell of LucasArts, about whose directing I’ve [...]
Studied prototypical
August 5, 2009Given that I’ve been working so much on character acting of late — I’m three-fourths of the way through a class on dialects, and I just wrapped a workshop on acting for animation and video game projects, with another of the latter coming this weekend — I haven’t been working much in my natural voice. [...]
Blimey!
July 24, 2009In an effort to expand my vocal repertoire, I’m taking a four-week seminar on accents and dialects. One might suppose that this aspect of voice acting would come easily to me, given that (a) I’ve lived on three continents, as well as in both Hawaii and the polyglot Bay Area, and (b) I have friends [...]
Who says I’ve got no class?
June 4, 2009The incomparable Shirley, the office manager at Voicetrax, called this morning to review my course schedule for the upcoming term. I managed to score most of the classes that I wanted to take. I’m on the wait list for one course that was rescheduled, but aside from that, I’ll stay pretty busy through early October. [...]
If it’s free, I’ll take three (hours)
April 24, 2009More often than not, you get what you pay for. This is not one of those stories. The ever-thoughtful folks at Voicetrax are doing a golden favor for their students this month — offering a selection of one-session group lessons on a variety of voiceover subjects, free of charge. When the schedule of free classes [...]
The song is ended, but the melody lingers on
April 17, 2009Sad but true… I now have Friday afternoons free. As I was preparing this morning for the final session of this six-week workshop, it struck me suddenly how much I was going to miss this weekly gathering, and the people with whom I’ve shared the experience. The baker’s dozen of us — plus Samantha, of [...]
You do me, and I’ll do you
April 13, 2009We did an interesting exercise last week in my Friday afternoon workshop. During our first meeting five weeks ago, we were each secretly assigned another participant to “shadow.” For our fifth session, we were to bring a script perfectly suited to the person we have been observing, and perform that script in the booth as [...]
Game on!
March 23, 2009Last weekend, I participated in a two-day workshop on voicing video games. Now, you have to understand — when I was actively playing video games, they rarely included voices. I’m from the era of Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Donkey Kong here. The most sophisticated item in the arcade back then was Dragon’s Lair. (You young [...]
