VO Workshop with Mary Mac and Nick Omana!

All day this past Saturday I attended a voiceover workshop taught by Nick Omana and Mary McDonald-Lewis.  You've probably heard Nick's voice on Last Comic Standing or one of a hundred other commercials, promos, or video games like World of Warcraft.  I knew Mary Mac from being the voice of Lady Jaye on the GI JOE cartoon show I used to obsess over when I was a kid, but she's also been Wonder Woman, Lois Lane, Veronica Dean on Archer, and more.  She's also appeared onscreen as Frau Pech in Grimm and is a very successful dialect coach.  So as soon as I saw an announcement for this workshop I jumped at the chance.

From Left: My hairy mug, Mary Mac, our sound engineer Cama, and Nick Omana.

The workshop itself was almost all practical experience, getting tons of time in a professional recording booth over at Rex Production and Post here in Portland.  Our lovely and talented sound engineer, Cama, ran everything from behind the glass allowing Mary and Nick to direct us in a variety of commercial reads; emphasizing relaxed control, strong choices, and what Mary called your "heart voice", or the voice most authentic and truthful to you.  She'd immediately point out when she didn't believe what you were saying, and the little fine tuning and adjustment to get something that sounded great was immensely helpful in learning how to take direction well.

If they read this post, I want to again thank Mary, Nick, Cama, and everyone at Rex Post so much for the opportunity to attend this workshop.  I learned so much and I can't wait to put it into practice.  I'll definitely be keeping all three in mind when I'm ready to do my professional demos!

I think it was Dee Bradley Baker who I heard say that there were three or four stages to being an actor, or becoming a master at anything.  I can't remember exactly what he said, so this is probably horribly misquoted.  However, he said something like the stages are: (1) There's when you're bad but don't know why, (2) there's when you find out how bad you really are, (3) then when you can be good by accident, and finally (4) when you can be consistently good at it.  I think I can reasonably say that I've fully reached stage two after almost two years at this, and I'm making my way toward three.  Today was a big jump toward that end goal of being consistently good.

Check out this little dude guarding the hallway at Rex Post.

In other news, the new home booth has been fantastic so far and I've been auditioning up a storm for pay and for practice on many casting call websites.  I'll be posting the ones I thought were the best along with any casting news I might receive once they've closed.  Most likely it'll be the ones I didn't get, so I don't break any confidentiality with any new project I might get to contribute to.

Stay tuned!

I built a recording booth!

Hey, guess what!  I've (almost) finished my home recording booth! 

It's basically held together with gum, scotch tape, and feelings, but short of me fixing the acoustic paneling on the one wall I didn't have a moving blanket for it's done.  After fifteen trips to Home Depot trying to get the right lengths of 3/4" PVC piping, all the little T connectors and corners, having my irritated wife hold up the ceiling while I fixed the blanket covering the top, and endless futzing around with the new microphone and audio interface I bought, and having to deal with a couple of very curious pets, it's good enough to at least start auditioning some more.

You might remember my janky desk setup from before:

Well, now may I present the somewhat less janky PVC booth!  

Now I can scream out my feelings in the privacy of my very own enclosed space, with jaunty XMas lights keeping me from tripping over wires.  The building material was almost exclusively all purchased online through Amazon.com, with the PVC piping coming from Home Depot.  I used leftover XMas lights we already had for the lighting, and my wife's standing desk on a plastic storage bin to get the laptop up high enough to sit at for when I'm not recording.  The chair can be thrown out the moving blanket door curtain at my whim, which is itself being held to the PVC pipe frame by zip ties so that I can slide the curtain open and closed.

Most of the research for building this thing came from a VERY helpful YouTube video by Ken Tsurata (a.k.a. kenisinoregon).

Next on the to-do list is to further isolate the space by throwing even more blankets and acoustic foam and other such things on the inside surface of the two book cases and the walls surrounding it in order to soundproof as much as humanly possible.  My new mic, an Audio Technica AT2035 XLR condenser microphone, is pretty damned sensitive and I'm still hearing that mic hiss in the background of a lot of my audio tests and the couple of auditions I wanted to get started on right away.

If there's two things I've learned through this whole process it's one, I am NOT a "handy man".  There was a lot of trial and error that went into this thing, even with what I thought was a huge focus on measuring twice and cutting once.  I'm surprised the people in the PVC section at Home Depot didn't know me by name by the time I actually got everything I needed to build that simple, little 6x4x4 box.  And two, I know even less than I thought I did about audio technology.  The only thing that's gotten me this far is episode 116 of Crispin Freeman's "Voice Acting Mastery" podcast where he discussed basic settings for recording equipment.  But at least I never make the same mistake twice, and I'm having a ton of fun with these new auditions and collaborations that I can FINALLY START WORKING ON AGAIN!

That's it for today, folks.  There will be updates real soon on a training opportunity I had to jump on here in Portland.  Stay tuned or...reading...at...don't touch that dial or what have you.  Yeah, don't touch that dial.  [Finger guns.  Winks with both eyes]