CTFDN Evil Idol 2019 Entry is LIVE!

My entry for this year's Evil Idol 2019 is LIVE and voting only lasts until this Friday, 11/29!  I'm loving the comments and feedback I've gotten on the YouTube video so far, and I want to go as far as I can in this competition, so here's hoping I crest that 1000 like hurdle and get in to round two.  Check out my contestant page for this and any future entries if I get to move forward!

I haven't done a ton of narration before, but honestly this was tons of fun and I love storytelling.  Being able to spin a yarn for people and bring them into a world of spooks and goblins, leading them into a dark forest and then disappearing, is some of the most fun I've had in years.  It's very similar to running a D&D game only on a much larger scale.  I love it.

In other news, after the completion of my character demo last month I have been turning my attention toward being ready to produce an eventual commercial demo to go along with it.  At least for the moment, in this industry you need a professional demo for each sub genre of voiceover, tailored to the businesses and directors who you want hiring you.  My character demo is great, but it isn't going to work too well for getting a car commercial.  So I've been going back to school with my coach, Leslie, over at Inside Voice here in Portland.  Leslie is a great teacher, supportive but no bullshit, and really knows her stuff.

As the holidays move forward, I'm determined to stay active.  So check out my Twitter @StroudKyle for day to day updates and general shenanigans.  Recent changes in my survival job schedule have thrown a few wrenches into everything, but I'm not going to let little problems like "getting a new job because your old one is closing and laying everyone off" ruin the rest of my life.  Survival jobs are numerous and temporary.  Voiceover is eternal. :D

Stay tuned for news about Evil Idol Round Two!

Can't Stop, Won't Stop

I've done a lot this month that I'm proud of.  I've done a character voice a day for the Talktober 2019 challenge, put together in three YouTube videos.  I've finished the recording on my new character demo, which hopefully will be out by Halloween.  And episode 21 of Exoplanetary, where I had probably the second largest role behind the protagonist/narrator, was just released and it sounds amazing.  I submitted my entry for round one of the Evil Idol 2019 competition and I'm eagerly awaiting when it's time for it to go live. (11/22!)  I've worked with fantastic voice actors, script writers, directors, and sound people, and I've also gotten a slew of auditions out, probably more than I have any given month to this point.

Unfortunately, with very few exceptions people don't really see it.  As of writing this post I've got something like fourteen views and four upvotes on my Talktober "Day 1-4" video.  The others are about the same.  It really seems like the only people that actually listen to my stuff is my mom and a lovely core group of her close friends.  I think that not even my entire immediate family has taken the time to listen to everything, and hey you know they all lead busy lives.  But I can't even be sure if I'm reaching close friends who I interact with on a daily basis.  Certainly not more than a couple of them.  I don't even know if a tiny percentage of my 350-ish Twitter followers even slow down scrolling when I post something.

But I'm not going to stop.  People underestimate how hard it is to break through at all doing this.  You have to be screaming really loud (metaphorically) to get anyone to stop and take notice.  And it takes time.  It takes effort.  It takes commitment.  People have a lot going on.  Most of my friends and contacts are creatives just like me who are trying to get their stuff noticed as well and just have no time or spoons to give you a leg up.  I've got to do the climbing myself.

From what I've gathered, it takes bare minimum five years to even break into this industry in a minor way.  Some people are lucky and shoot straight to the top on a combination of talent and timing, but I don't believe in miracles.  It's been two, two and half, very good years training and working and practicing and experimenting and building and it's going to take at least two or three more.  I'm in it for the long haul.  I may not believe in miracles but I do believe that hard work and commitment leads to mastery and eventually someone will pick up what I've been putting down.

Let's be clear, I do not expect to be nor at all want to be a celebrity.  I just want to do what I love full time and make a decent career out of it.  This is something I'm good at, but more importantly it's something I can't NOT do.  It took me over thirty years to find that thing that feeds my soul, and for better or for worse I've locked myself into it wearing a shit-eating grin the whole way.

For all my rambling, the reason I have been going on about this is to say two things:  One, I'm not going to stop.  Not now, not ever.  And two, for those of you who do come here and read these or who stop by and leave a Like on my YouTube channel or give me a Retweet on Twitter.  I fucking appreciate the hell out of you.  Every one of you five or six astonishing, beautiful people.  And I won't let you down.

"Ever tried.

Ever failed.

No matter.

Try again.

Fail again.

Fail better."

--Samuel Beckett

Hello, Evil Idol 2019 and Talktober 2019!

Okay, so uh...wow.  I have been surprisingly busy.  I'm starting to get the idea that this is the new normal for me and instead of waiting for a chance to come up for air I should just plan to bring a SCUBA tank.  Scheduling and planning my time, especially with my ADD, is crucial for me or else everything falls apart and uh...explodes.

Real quick, here's a summary of what I've been up to before we get into some major
 updates.

AUDITIONS: They continue.
CLASSES: I had my ADR class with Tony Oliver and Bang Zoom!  We worked with actual, professional material and I have never felt more confident in my dubbing ability.  It was an absolutely amazing class and I learned a ton.
NEW DEMO: In progress. Voice actors and producers are incredibly busy and it is a bit of chore to schedule out the time needed for recording.  I hope to have the live direction with my director done by the end of the month.
RELEASES: The monster voices I did for The Protectors game mod for Warlords Battlecry 3 are now available, and I'm recording even more!  The episode of the Exoplanetary podcast I co-starred in should be out very soon as well!  Also, Existential Chris, where I play Grandpa Joe, is reaching its season finale!

(Art by Thunderb0lt)

Now, what I really want to mention is that I have been accepted into round one of the Evil Idol 2019 horror narration competition!  If you've come here from Chilling Tales for Dark Nights, the official contestants page, or links from YouTube, welcome to my little slice of the internet.  I've submitted my entry, but since only one contestant is going to be featured per day you won't get to hear my story until November 22nd!  Closer to that date I will remind everyone about it, and encourage you to vote for me if you liked it.  Audience opinion is super important and I appreciate everyone who stops by to read this.

Next, I'm also participating in the daily Talktober 2019 challenge this month!  I've already posted the first four days on my YouTube channel and Twitter.  I hope you enjoy it, especially as we get closer and closer to 31 unique character voices!  I'll most likely keep posting them in batches of four or five as I go.

Finally, I just wanted to touch on something else I'm really excited about -- I'm dipping my toes into the wonderful world of making audiodramas!  I've completed a draft script for a short, five to ten minute "episode" that I'm going to produce with some collaborating voice actors I know from Discord and/or Twitter.  I don't want to go into too much detail yet, but it's going to be real metal.  Just wait!

Make Good Art: Burnout, Imposter Syndrome, and Creative Anxiety

(Neil Gaiman, Photo from his Masterclass Series, Teaching the Art of Storytelling)

I haven't read nearly enough Neil Gaiman, and I think even if I had read everything he's ever put to paper it still wouldn't be enough, but nonetheless the man is a creative inspiration to me. In a 2012 keynote address to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, PA, the author told his audience of students and faculty the following:

Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. 

Make good art.

If you want to be a creative, make good art. He was being serious, he said.  Make art.  Make the art only you can do.  Expose your soul to the world and run (figuratively) naked down the street.  Do this especially when things have started to get difficult.

I don't fall into bouts of depression as deeply as I used to, due to a combination of proper medication and deciding to live the life I want to live not what I felt was expected of me.  But I do suffer from burnout and imposter syndrome.  That voice tickling the back of your mind telling that you aren't good enough, you didn't get enough training, you didn't practice enough, you're a fraud and they're going to catch you at any moment, or you should be working more and therefore you do not deserve to work at all.  The last one's a bit strange, I know, but I feel like more than a few of you know what I'm talking about.

I ran headlong into one of those walls this weekend.  I'd had a fantastic live recording session with a local podcast here in Portland that I will detail in a later post once the pictures and such come out, but then I came home and decided to look up the submission rules for the most recent round of Chuck Huber's Now Voice This on Twitter.  I missed the last round, so I was excited to fling myself into this one because why not?  Seemed like a great opportunity.  But then I saw what was being put to the test: Impressions.

My dog above, I hate impressions.  Not only have I been told by seemingly every professional voice actor and acting teacher in the entire world that they really don't matter all that much, I've just never wanted to do them.  I've dabbled in voice matching, but I thought in order to be a competent and competitive voice actor I had to bring something original to the table.  So beyond that bad Christopher Walken impression everyone and their mother does, I. had. nothing.

I had nothing.  My mood instantly tanked.  It should be simple.  Everyone else has a whole stable of these fantastic impressions they can whip out for so simple a task.  It was the first round, right?  If you don't make it past this one you have no business ranking yourself amongst the talented competition. I got irritated, depressed, self-hating, wanted to rant about impressions being a waste of-

Okay, whoa.  What is this?  What was I thinking?  I had to get a grip.  This was a fun, little competition not life or death.  More than that, I have plenty of voices I could tweak into an impression of someone else if I gave it a little thought.  "Make good art." I reminded myself.  It doesn't matter if you win, it doesn't matter if people like it.  No one else has your instrument.  You can't rate your talent by comparing it to others.  They're not scaled the same way.  So sit and think.

As with most of the solutions to my problems, the answer at least started with my wife.  We were watching cartoons before dinner the other night and I do that annoying thing where I start mimicking the characters onscreen without even thinking about it.  She laughed at my dumb jokes and stupid voices, instantly filling that soul-sucking void in that way only she can.  There's just one possibility.  Surely if I thought about it I could think of more!  I thought about the menagerie of NPC ("non-player character" for you non-D&D nerds out there) voices I pull out of my hat for my weekly games and jotted down a few more possibilities.

Getting to the other side of burnout, imposter syndrome, and creative anxiety almost always lies outside of your own head.  You're not going to find a light at the end of that tunnel if you keep spiraling down into it.  When I catch myself starting to head down that road, I find that the best way to combat it is to stop what I'm doing, get up, and walk away from it for anywhere from a few hours to a weekend.  Do something else that fulfills and inspires you -- a hobby, film, music, friends, family, pets, books.  Almost always for me it's not some grandiose obstacle I must conquer if I just take a step away to recharge.  The mountain always looks more like a molehill when I come back to it.  And more than that, getting out of my own head means getting second and third opinions.  Getting out of my dark, little padded booth and bringing in the people close to me helps to give perspective.

Now that I've come back to it I've got some ideas, and a hell of a fun time ahead.  I can't wait to see what I can produce to meet this challenge.  Even if I don't make it to the next round, any new aspects to my voice I discover during my playtime can be used in other things.  My journey never stops, and as long as I'm putting one foot in front of the other I can keep walking forward.  And I'm doing something I love no matter what, and how many people can say that?

Remember, friends, it doesn't matter how slow you're going.  It doesn't matter if you're jumping and leaping forward or you're inching along, pulling yourself the next inch with your fucking teeth.  Forward is forward.  The only way you can fail is by giving up and turning back.  Never stop.  Go farther.  Take another step.  Fly.  Swim.  Dig underground.  Break through.

"Make good art."






Footnote Episode IV, A New Foot: For the full keynote speech from the absolutely fantastic Mr. Gaiman, follow this link.  It's worth listening to, and not only because Neil has a voice and way of speaking that is just enthralling.  I heard him speak at a raconteur event while I was dating my wife (again, everything good in my life starts with her) and I could listen to that man read the phone book.  Seriously.

Footnote Episode V, The Foot Strikes Back: I'm still working on putting together a few talented individuals to help me create my next voice acting demo.  Scheduling being the way it is, I expect most of the work on it to happen next month.  Will keep you updated and irritate you with the end product endlessly when it's finished!

Footnote Episode VI, The Return of the Foot: If you haven't found this blog through it already, check out my Twitter in a day or two for what I end up vomiting forth for NVT4, Round One!

July Update!

So, I'm going to have a busy July!  This Saturday I'm going to be recording for a sci-fi podcast based here in Portland called Exoplanetary.  It's an opportunity that I'm learning to very much appreciate because I won't be doing the recording in my home booth by myself.  We'll have at least half of the cast there to record our parts together in a group instead of sending in everything separately and having the sound engineer and/or director put everything together.  This way I get to play off my partner in the scene and the director will be able to give us live, in person direction.  Very fun, very rewarding whenever I get a chance to record like this.


Nextly, I've been cast in a webtoon dub called Purple Hyacinth , giving me a chance to contribute to something alongside a bunch of VA's on Twitter that I've really wanted to collaborate with.  I'll be playing the part of a kind of mad bomber character and I am absolutely thrilled that I get a chance to do another voice that's...how shall we say..."high strung"?  My guy is front and center in Episode 0 so I'll post about it again once everything's finished.  Should be soon! 


I'm looking forward to some more anime fandubbing as well, one because it's great fun especially with "Abridged" dubs, and two because it gives me more much needed ADR practice.  You don't realize just how much extra work it's going to be matching your words to the lip flaps of already animated characters until you actually go to do it.  It's a skill that takes a lot of time and learning to do fast and easily, and if I'm going to keep the option open of marketing myself to places like Funimation in the future I'll need to practice practice practice!  The Bang Zoom! class in voice acting for animation I'll be taking at the end of next month should also help round out the basics for me.

But it's not all booth time, as at the end of July I'll be heading to sunny Miami with fifteen books and lots of sunscreen for a sort of family reunion my parents have been planning all year.  My brother is a photographer and he's already offered to help me out with some headshots that aren't taken with a cell phone with an Instagram filter.  But outside of that I'll be enjoying some much needed time off with the family.  My youngest brother lives in England and the other lives on the East Coast so we haven't all gotten to see each other in a good long while!

On a personal note, readers, I do apologize for not really posting all that much last month.  The way things came together, June was a lot of me being in between stuff I've already done and a mess of new auditions for future projects.  So while I was working pretty steadily there was just nothing to actually show anyone!  Going to try to make up for that by posting a bit more this month. :) 

Thanks for reading (and listening!) and as always, stay tuned for more!

Note: Exoplanetary logo belongs to Christopher Hart and Exoplanetary Media.  Purple Hyacinth art screengrab belongs to the webtoon creators, Ephemerys and Sophism.

Real Quick

Bigger post coming soon about what I've been up to this month, but real quick I wanted to note that the first episode of Existential Chris, animated by the fantastic Tthunderb0lt, just came out!  (I voice Grandpa Joe!)  Go give it a watch and a thumbs up on YouTube!

Moving Past Auditions and Collab w/ Jordan Rudolph!

Well, things have been crazy at the day job recently.  My schedule has been in flux and I'm looking into backup options for if the worst should happen and they close our branch of this nonprofit.  Still, I'm making the time to both honor the commitments I've already made to projects I've been cast in and audition for new ones.  Voiceover is the one thing in my life where I love being busy, and I feel listless if I don't have a full plate.  It helps me keep perspective and avoid getting too bogged down with worrying about the day job.  The goal has always been to have it be temporary anyway, not a career.  If I end up having to make a change, then I can always do something else to make rent.  Whatever I need to do in order to keep us moving toward our real goals!

But that brings me to the topic I wanted to touch on, just to remind myself if not educate anyone that might happen by this.  It's important, once you've finished an audition and submitted it, to just move on.  Not all projects make it past the casting stage, and even if they do the sheer odds are that you probably aren't going to get cast.  So treat the audition as the entire job, finish it to the best of your ability, and move on to the next thing.  If you get an email or a DM later on announcing that you got it, then great!  If you don't, then it's no big deal because you've already got other things on your mind.

I had to remind myself of this today, because there was an audition that I know I just nailed.  I think I did fantastic.  Just blew it out of the water.  But there have been no updates nor casting announcements for about a week.  Not even a "thanks for auditioning, we're going over them and will get back to you!"  So I kept that tab open, refreshing it every day, checking to see if they'd done anything with it.  I've realized that all it was doing was stressing me out and keeping me from doing other auditions.  It's a useless waste of my attention.  So I closed the tab and recorded ten more auditions and all the lines for Grandpa Joe this morning.  BAM!  Much better use of that energy.

If they go dark, or someone else gets cast in that project I was obsessing over, then I at least have a new voice I discovered during the process I can use elsewhere.  I also learned a ton about my audio software just by having to deal with a character that is VERY LOUD AND ENERGETIC ALL THE TIME.  It's a net improvement in my skill level no matter what.  I can be happy about that. 

(Thanks #VOLife Clothing for the new t-shirt!)

Another thing that I'm excited about is my recent collab with Jordan Rudolph that was released last week.  I tweeted about it, but I wanted to throw the link on here as well for Facebook and Instagram readers.  In her cover of Kiss the Girl from Disney's The Little Mermaid for her Patreon, which you should totally check out, Jordan asked me to contribute the spoken lines of Prince Eric!  I haven't done a lot of voice matching, but I loved the opportunity to practice copying the cadence and inflections of another actor -- in this case the amazing C.D. Barnes, who you may also know as the voice of Peter Parker/Spider-Man from the 1994 animated Spider-Man cartoon.  I think I got pretty close!

Looking forward to the Memorial Day Weekend, when I get to record for a podcast here in Portland (which I will tell you more about next time) and do some more auditions!