Yikes… it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted here. This occasion, however, warrants the resurrection. On January 19, I recorded my new commercial demo at Voicetrax San Francisco. That’s Samantha Paris, my beloved mentor and coach, in the director’s chair; voice actor and technical wizard supreme Chuck Kourouklis manned the sound board and video [...]
Archive for the ‘Strategy’ category
The Mic Guy at the mic (where else?)
January 31, 2011In 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. [...]
Making it do what it do
July 30, 2009If I’ve learned anything in my recent voiceover workouts — and let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that I have — it’s about the essential importance of acting over voice quality. Or, as Sirenetta told our accents and dialects class, “Play the scene, and the voice will follow.” It’s taking a while — [...]
Magic Monday
June 22, 2009I went on an audition today. Already I can hear you asking, “How did it go?” If you mean from the perspective of booking the job, who knows? I’ve never been any good at judging these things. So I’m learning to evaluate from a different POV: Did I do everything I went there to do? [...]
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. [...]
Carnegie Hall, and step on it
June 2, 2009Last Saturday, my chorus — Voices in Harmony, northern California’s premier men’s a cappella chorus (thank you, Blatant Plug Department) — presented its annual spring concert. Yours truly had the honor of narrating the chorus segments of the show. It occurs to me that if I was as comfortable behind the mic in the studio [...]
Call me Ignatz
May 29, 2009I’ve encountered my first obstacle in choosing a text for my entry in Scott Brick’s audiobook narration contest… …finding a good book that Scott Brick didn’t narrate. That’s not as inconsiderable a task as one might think. It is, from my perspective, an important one. After all, if you were a contestant on American Idol, [...]
Positive direction
May 22, 2009My four-week workshop on self-directing skills has concluded, and what have I learned? That my self-directing skills need work. Not that that’s a shocker. Actually, I’m proud of the work I did during these four weeks. My script analysis, though still light-years from perfection, is improving. I’m getting better at asking the right questions about [...]
What’s your chain?
May 20, 2009The other day, I was musing about the fact that, even though I hold a four-year degree in broadcast communications (from San Francisco State University‘s acclaimed Broadcast and Electronic Communication Arts department, no less), my technical skills are rudimentary, to be polite. Okay, I’ll confess… I sleepwalked through my audio production classes. (Ask Professor John [...]
