Sorry, folks- I’m too tired and too full to get anything useful out of a session behind the mic tonight.

I hope everyone is enjoying their Thanksgiving holiday! Best wishes, and I’ll be back for tomorrow’s fun.

Tonight’s menu: A character named Saladin Kader from World War Z is the character I have chosen. I am working on developing an Arabic accent, which is not easy. I believe my accent actually sounds more Russian than Arabic. Give it a listen and let me know what you think. I’ll be continuing to work on Mr. Kader’s voice and we’ll see how I improve when I do characters again next week.

Thanks as always for listening!

Tuesday is audiobooks, so for today’s piece, I chose a passage from Dzur by Steven Brust (part of a really fun series, by the way. You should read them).

Earlier tonight I was cleaning up the catboxes in the garage and practicing character voices as I did so. The more I get into the voice acting craft, the more I think I run the risk of being seen as a lunatic mumbling and gesturing to himself all the time. When I came back into the house, I was trying on a “Loiosh” voice for size. Loiosh is a character in Dzur who is a small reptile familiar to the main character. He needs to sound reptilian and sort of nasty, but in a good way- I think of him as being kind of like a character from Goodfellas or maybe The Godfather. Nasty sense of humor, reptilian, but, you know- loyal.

Anyway, I was coming back into the house saying various lines in the voice I was trying out for him, and my wife gave me The Look. If you do voice work, you’ve probably gotten it yourself once or twice. I told her “It might be a good idea to get used to me saying odd things in strange voices, because I need the practice.”

Anyway, enjoy Episode 12!

Voiceover artist Mahmoud Taji recently announced the creation of The Voiceover Wiki. It’s a wiki site dedicated to the world of voiceover and from my so-far brief perusal, has a lot of promise. I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of it, and probably contributing some myself.

Good stuff, Mahmoud!

Episode 11- this is Monday, so per my previous post, it’s “Commercial Copy” day. Given that we’re near the end of the month, I’ve elected to just revisit the previous stuff I did, specifically the Sears ad from Harlan Hogan’s book VO. I think I’ll have one more episode with this one, then on the first Monday in December will be switching to something new.

Thanks to all the folks listening for your feedback, it’s invaluable!

I’m ten episodes into the voice blog, and I’ve realized that I would benefit from some more structured use of the process. Basically this far has been feeling things out, and just doing whatever comes to mind; leaping in and running with it. That’s by design, of course- I wanted to be able to improve my improvisational skills, which is still something I’m working on, but I think there’s more to be done.

content rhythym

For lack of a better term, anyway. What I’m going to do is break my voice blog up into the days of the week and use each day to focus on a specific area. For a given month, I’ll repeat the same copy or subject each sucessive week. That way, I can track my progress on something over the course of time and then reset with something new.

 For example, I’ll be doing commercial copy, like a radio or Internet ad, on Mondays. For a given month I’ll be focusing on improving my read of that copy on my Monday edition. Then on the following month, I’ll choose another piece of copy to work with. This gives me a rhythm and also lets people who are kind enough to listen and provide feedback an opportunity to hear how my delivery changes over time.

course schedule

Here’s how it’s gonna be laid out:

• Monday: Commercial copy, such as a radio, TV or Internet ad.
• Tuesday: Audiobooks. The same passage each Tuesday.
• Wednesday: Character voices. I will choose a character at the beginning of the month, such as “old Irish woman” or “crotchety Japanese guy” (maybe I’ll come up with a D&D-type table and roll dice for the characteristics), and focus on developing that character for the month.
• Thursday: Commercial/Corporate Narrations. Presentations, product demos, that sort of thing.
• Friday: Improv. Ad-hoc improvisation, exposition, general wierdness. This will probably be the most challenging part for me.
• Saturday/Sunday: Potluck. Whatever I feel like, or nothing at all if I don’t.

This process will give me a range of content to practice with. I think this will be a very good addition of structure to what has been pretty wide-open thus far.

Episode 10, for your edification. I read another passage from World War Z and discuss the challenges with creating characters that are believable, but don’t get in the way of the story. I also touch on the challenges I’ve experienced trying to create accents that aren’t hackneyed.

Thanks, as always, for listening and I welcome your feedback.

Tape-Delayed in your broadcast area (I know, I’m old). I try to take some of Justin’s advice to heart in this one.

Enjoy!

I’ve recorded the next entry in my ongoing Voice Blog series, but sadly can’t post it as my podcast host is doing maintenance, preventing me from uploading it. However, I’ll be able to upload it first thing in the morning.

Sorry about that, folks!

In which I read a commercial copy piece from VO, Harlan Hogan’s book on the world of voice work.

For reference, the final read was 13.78 seconds, although I didn’t like the delivery much.