Uncle Sam Speaks.

My friend and very talented colleague Rowell Gorman provided the voice of Uncle Sam for this extraordinary video, created by Josh Faure-Brac. Please watch it and ask your friends to watch it too.

MCM Voices' British Accents Mad Skillz Payola.

A few weeks ago, fellow voice talent and friend Philip Banks challenged his colleagues to a competition to see who could perform the best British accent (native Brits obviously ineligible). A few dozen souls took up the challenge, including me. At the end of the week a tie was declared between my dear friend Maureen Egan– and me! The prize was a box of fine European chocolates, which arrived this week.

The chocolates and their presentation are a work of art. From Chocolaterie Wanders of Virginia, they are packed in a wooden box and come with a small field guide to aid in identification. This is important, because subtle differences in morphology can make some of these little bon bons as difficult to ID as the “confusing fall warblers”. All are, of course, heavenly. Their elegance and good taste are a true reflection of the man who sent them. Thank-you Philip!

Red Letter Day at MCM Voices

Not getting that voice-over gig: You probably didn’t blow it.

You hear it all the time – do the audition and move on. If you keep track of all your auditions and how many days it has been since you did them and think necrotic thoughts like, “if I don’t hear by tomorrow then I’ll know I blew it” – you might find yourself with an ulcer.

Bonnie Gillespie wrote this week in both Actor’s Voice and Your Turn about the importance of not obsessing and about how you can be perfect for the role and still not get cast. And how it’s important to be process-oriented rather than results-oriented in this business in order to enjoy your life to the fullest and minimise stress. She tells the story of how she was hired to cast a film because of her relationship with her then-boyfriend, now husband, for whom the screenwriter had written a role in the film. After reading the script, Bonnie and her boyfriend agreed that he was not the best actor for that role! Examples like this are abundant in show business. It is even possible to get cast and end up not playing the role. Last weekend Bob Bergen told us the story of how Lily Tomlin was cast in the role of Edna Mode, the diminutive costume designer in The Incredibles. Brad Bird had a certain attitude in mind for that role and after attempting to get the read from Tomlin that he envisioned, Tomlin told Bird that he really should read the part himself, because he was perfect for it. And we all know how that turned out.

I’m waiting to hear the outcome of a number of recent auditions and submissions. Except that I’m not “waiting”. I’m working on the jobs I have right now, and continuing to work on my skills so that I’m prepared for whatever opportunities present themselves next. Not knowing what might come along is one of the most exciting things about my job as a voice actor. As Bonnie said in her column this week: “Staying prepared, focused, and available is all you really control.”

I’ve been Bob Bergened.

A tornado hit my world last weekend and I hope that world will never be the same. After a weekend with Bob Bergen at his voice-over animation workshop, I feel like I want to live my life IN CAPITAL LETTERS!!! The energy and generosity of this gifted teacher are beyond words.

I was sorry to miss Bob’s earlier appearance in Boston last month, especially because several of my good friends were in the class. One of the good things about the Hartford experience, however, was that I had never met any of the participants so I now have a whole new circle of very talented voice-over friends, and several of them live close enough that we can have periodic workout groups to keep the energy going from this extraordinary weekend.

The thought of going back to business as usual Monday morning was not appealing. I have to say, the dry narration scripts that were waiting for me when I switched on the computer just didn’t know what hit them! I had to tone it down a little so my clients wouldn’t say, “Whoa!! What are you ON?” but I was glad to find that indeed, life is not the same! My profound thanks to Anthony Piselli for bringing it all together, to Planet of Sound for their hospitality, and to Bob Bergen, for being his amazing self. Bob, you rock.

Mike Hand with Bob Bergen at Planet of Sound, May 2008

Dialects for Voice Actors.

Yesterday I received an entertaining email from one of my favorite clients, Richard, for whom I’ve done several large jobs requiring accents. His company produces educational software and he hired me to provide an Australian voice for “Miss Melberry” in a maps and graphs project, and a Georgia accent for a lizard (“Miss Lizzy”) in a reading skills module. I’ve also done Teacher’s Voices on several occasions.

Richard’s email included an exchange he’d had with a 4th grade teacher in Lowell, Massachusetts who has just started using the maps and graphs software with Miss Melberry. She wrote that the kids “really enjoyed it” but that one of the children said of Miss Melberry, “She’s not from around here, is she?”

Richard’s response included the following:

“Actually, Miss Melberry is from western Massachusetts; or, at least, her voice is. If you'd like to learn more about the excellent voiceover artist who voiced Miss Melberry (and loves to do accents), check out http://www.mcmvoices.com/. She is very good.”

Well, you can see why Richard is one of my favorite clients.

Australian accents are not easy. One of the sounds that is exceptionally difficult for non-natives to produce is the long “o”. When I was working on this accent intensively I studied that “o” a lot, and took a couple of snippets from Gillian Lane-Plescia’s Australian and New Zealand Accents for Actors CD and listened to them over and over again. The first one, which you can listen to here, is the phrase “in a moment”. I pulled that off the CD and multiplied it so that it is 25 seconds of just that. The sound is almost like mye-oo-munt. Hard to transcribe, hard to say.

Building on that we come to the second snippet, which is, “I know that bloke’s going to roll over in his boat in a moment”. You can listen to that one here. Lots of long o’s to practise!! If you want to try it, break it up into shorter bits and practise each bit until it sounds good. Practise them all separately and then start to piece them together. If you can master that incredibly difficult phrase, you’ll be ready to take on Australia!

I recommend the Lane-Plescia CDs above all others I've used as the ultimate dialect resource for actors. The sound quality varies because many field interviews with native speakers are included. And of course, it’s those field interviews, as well as Ms. Lane-Plescia’s discussion of the sounds that make these dialects what they are, that are so valuable. You can order them directly from The Dialect Resource or, if you live in or are visiting certain major cities you can buy them in the stores listed.

Other dialect resources:

International Dialects of English Archives

The Speech Accent Archive

American Dialect Links

Say it Like a Texan

More on dialects in future posts. Feel free to add to the list above, which is rudimentary!

Time Management for Voice Talent.

and everybody else!

Life has been awfully busy for me lately. Busy is good. But managing one’s time during the busy days requires care. I don’t have the answers but am always looking. I got some ideas from one of my heroes, Randy Pausch, who gives a mean time management lecture. If you have 86 minutes to spare, take a look (10 minutes of it is introduction by others). Of course not all techniques will work for everyone, due to our different brain chemistries and personalities, but there is good stuff here.




Randy Pausch is an expert on the subject, and his words are all the more compelling since he may not have much time left (I’m praying for a miracle there). One of the first points he makes is that we need to be very mindful of what our time is worth, and learn to equate time and money in order to get out of the habit of wasting time.

This got me thinking (again) about all the ways that I waste time. Almost all my time-wasting is done on the internet, dealing with email and reading stuff, some of which is unnecessary. I took a look at my RSS feeds and at the large numbers of unread posts in the many blogs to which I subscribe. Those large numbers told me that maybe I’m not as interested in those topics as I was when I first subscribed or that perhaps I just don’t need them right now. So I unsubscribed from a lot of them (the blogs of my fellow voice talent stayed on the subscription list but a lot of marketing and freelancer blogs were cut. I need to spend more time marketing and less time reading about it). That was incredibly liberating and I don’t miss them at all and figure I have gained at least 30 minutes per day that I can use for useful work, for all the stuff on my To Do list.

A few of Randy’s other points:

The To Do list - Randy asks, what would happen if I didn’t do this thing on my to-do list? What if I just cross it off? What do I need to get done today, this week, this semester? You can be flexible, and cross things off your list without doing them, but you need to have a plan. Break things down into small steps. An item that used to be on Randy’s list as a new faculty member at Carnegie Mellon, “get tenure” is too big. You need manageable chunks of effort on your list. He advocates the quadrant approach of Covey (of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People): Important, Not Important, Due Soon, Not Due Soon. Do the Important, Due Soons first. Then, resist the impulse to do the Not Important, Due Soons, and go right to the Important, Not Due Soon items. Do them before they become Due Soon items!!! As for the Not Important stuff, well, those are candidates for crossing off your list without doing them at all.

Keep Your Desk Clear. Touch each piece of paper only once, and that goes for email as well. Randy says, your email inbox is not your To Do list – you should read the mail and then file it or delete it (actually he doesn’t delete any of it, he files it all) and add an entry to your To Do list if necessary. While listening to/watching Randy’s lecture I have managed to get my inbox down to 8 emails, and disposed of some that had been just squatting there for months to remind me to do things that I have now done, or decided were not that important after all. For me, handling each piece of paper only once is really important. I may not manage it completely, but close to it. Without it I would be awash in paper, which is one of my biggest stresses in life. Most of my paper mail goes straight to the recycling bin, the other pieces get filed immediately (bills get entered on my Time & Chaos calendar so I can pay them shortly before they're due and thus earn maximum interest on my money before I have to give it away).

Telephone Calls – have an agenda, and stand up during calls. Don’t put your feet up! If you have to call someone, call at 11:50 a.m. because “no matter how interesting you are, you are not more interesting than lunch” (Randy also advocates the Miss Manners approach to telemarketers – hang up in the middle of your own sentence). Some of his recommendations are based on the academic’s life – where you focus your time on your research and teaching and minimise your vulnerability to interruption. As voice talent you need to be a bit more receptive if you are on the phone with a client!

Make time to write thank-you notes – not just for gifts but for things people have done for you or things you appreciate. When Randy got tenure, he took his whole research team to Disney World. Of course, writing (or showing) thank-yous applies to us voice talent every day since it is a gift to be successful and we should not forget it.

Keep a time journal, which like a food journal for a dieter, will probably surprise you and after a few days you will get more careful about how you spend/waste/organise your time! Learn what you’re doing and what you could delegate or stop doing, what you are doing to waste other people’s time, and ask yourself how you can be more efficient.

The more you have to do, the more you can get done. Randy says that when he got married and had kids, he got more done, because he got more efficient. This is so true! Now that I have finished my semester and no longer have Spanish and German classes to attend 3 days a week and homework to do, I'm adding voice-over related projects to my to-do list to make sure I don't waste the time that has just opened up.

Get help. Delegate, don’t micromanage. Give authority and responsibility (don’t require that your helpers check with you on everything). Delegate, but do the dirtiest job yourself. Treat your people with dignity and respect.

Have an agenda for all meetings. Randy says “if there is no agenda, I won’t be there”.

Only use technology if it makes you more efficient or allows you to do things in a new way.

You must always make time for sleep and exercise.

He summed up his talk with a few recommendations:

Make a Day Timer (a To Do list) and sort by priority (as a self-proclaimed geek, his has to be on a PDA).

Keep a time journal – he says if you do nothing else, count the number of hours you watch television (he doesn’t know that as voice actors we have to watch TV – and he would be appalled to know we have to watch the commercials too).

Check in 30 days and ask yourself, what have I changed? If you have changed something, then you probably have more time to spend with the ones you love. “And that’s important. Time is all we have. And you may find one day, you have less than you think.”

Bob Bergen Workshop in Hartford, CT

Bob Bergen will be bringing his renowned voice-over workshop to Hartford next month and I will be attending. Bob has provided voices for hundreds of cartoons, games and commercials, but is best known as the voice of Porky Pig and Tweety, having inherited these roles from the legendary Mel Blanc. Of course, it wasn't a simple bequest - Bob had been in training for the job since he was 5 years old and it was well earned.

I've taken 4 different character voices workshops in the last 3 years: two at Edge Studio, one with Pat Fraley, Hillary Huber and Candi Milo, and one with Pat Fraley hosted by DB Cooper. I'm allowing myself this one more and then I am not allowed to take any more until I make a character voices demo - a real one!

If you're a voice actor in the New England area and are looking for an extraordinary educational opportunity, you can join Bob Bergen 17-18 May 2008 by contacting Anthony Piselli.

Peter O'Connell responds.

Voice talent Peter O'Connell took time from his busy schedule of bagel noshing to respond to my breakfast story with a wonderful & hilarious post about networking and marketing. Peter is a very funny guy, but his post is not purely comedy - it is full of excellent ideas for voice actors (and all business people).

And, I'm very relieved to report, Peter has excused me for the time being from the requirement to leave my grape-nuts, Kefir and berries behind and go out into the world for bagels with potential colleagues. It isn't the time, the venue, or the meal that matters, of course - it's networking early and often. Take karate for example - one of my few long-term rituals. A few weeks ago I read about a medical communications company I had not heard of (it's huge, so I must have been networking with ostriches before this). I entered a few key words into Google to learn more about it and try to find someone whom I might contact about medical narration. To my astonishment, Google Desktop turned up an email in one of my very own folders from a karate colleague in New York. She is the Creative Director at this company! And she put me in touch with the head of the video department there - who as it turns out attended the same small private school I attended in Manhattan years ago.

I assure you that no bagels changed hands in all of this. And no grape-nuts. No food at all. As in karate, I realised (again) that you must always keep your eyes open and be aware of your surroundings.

Which is what Peter O'Connell has been saying all along. So take a marketing and networking lesson from Peter. He knows his stuff. And if you ever have him over to breakfast, give him a cinnamon raisin bagel, not toasted, with butter. Hold the Pepsi. Now, stop reading this post and go read his!!

Why I Don’t Conduct Voice-over Business Over Breakfast Like Peter O’Connell Does.

My friend Peter O’Connell is a voice talent, producer and marketing expert, and he is one of my heroes. He’s full of ideas and of energy that he invests in his business and in his family, friends, and colleagues and he’s always coming up with something new. So, when Peter says that over the years he has conducted a lot of lucrative business at the breakfast place he visits every single morning of the work week, I feel I should be listening, but the fact is I cannot bring myself to do what he does. Why is that?

In science one often speaks in terms of proximate and ultimate explanations. The latter are the “real” ones, the former are the superficial ones that sort of masquerade as explanations. Let me first talk about the proximate explanation for why I breakfast at home. This is best represented by the photograph I took of my breakfast this morning: Grape-nuts and Kefir with flax seed meal, topped with fresh and frozen berries, with a side of Celestial Seasonings Honey Lemon Ginseng green tea.

OMG. So yummy. The only place I know that serves this nutritious repast bursting with beneficial phytochemicals is my own place here by the river with the newly arrived Eastern Phoebes (the first insectivorous migratory birds of the season in this region) buzzing their euphonious song from the leafless branches. So there’s that. Then the fact that I seem to spend my first waking hours in service to the other members of my family – getting the kids to school since invariably they miss their ride these days because they are young teenagers and the school system’s start times are designed to give the most sleep to the kids who need it the least (the elementary schoolers) while those who need it most have to be out the door at an inhumane hour (or maybe it’s because they have a lousy mother who lets them stay up too late). And to save on gas my husband takes public transportation to work, but I drive him to the bus. Three days out of five, I then park the car at the college and spend the morning in my Spanish and German classes (you really don't need to point out that we should be riding our bikes. We already know it and are actually going to do it today). The other two days I get to spend the whole day in the studio and am glad not to have to go anywhere.

So the truth is, fitting a business breakfast into my daily routine is not something I have felt strongly motivated to do – the quarterly Chamber of Commerce breakfasts are a different story entirely – I look forward to those tremendously, as well as the monthly Arrive@5’s and the Chamber’s Tourism Committee meetings. But I often think of Peter’s daily ritual and wonder what I am missing out there. I wonder, does it have to be breakfast? Perhaps this fixation on breakfast is a matter of convenience and economy – breakfast is early and cheap. But what about a mid-morning coffee or tea – we could bring back “elevenses”! And, would it have to be every day? I don’t do well with ritual that requires effort. And finally, where would be the best place in my area for this to occur?

I have thoughts of experimenting with breakfast and elevenses and visiting a different local establishment each week to try to determine where the most interesting people are hanging out, and if it is a regular occurrence for them. But I suspect it’s an experiment that’s doomed to fail. This is because you can’t go out a few times and expect something to happen RIGHT NOW. Business relationships are cultivated over the long term - and many of them, as with Peter's breakfast, probably start out as a social thing, not as an overtly business venture. You meet people and get to know them and trust them and vice versa, and maybe some day one of you can do something for the other in business. And I just know that I don’t have the personality for a daily or even weekly ritual that requires what would be required for me to have what Peter O’Connell has developed over many years. I think you have to LIKE doing it in order for it to work. The closest I have come to ritual is going to karate class several times a week, which I’ve been doing for 7 years – but that is a ritual with infrastructure that makes it easier for me to go (I have friends there, my husband also goes, there are health benefits and a sense of accomplishment as well as spiritual peace). As for voice-over and marketing rituals, though, if it’s daily and it requires going somewhere, it just isn’t going to happen, which is a much simpler explanation and among the penultimate reasons why I don't do it (for clues to the ultimate reason, see yesterday's post on brain chemistry).

But I would love to enjoy these rituals vicariously – and I hope Peter will now oblige me by writing a blog post about the famous Fire-Up-the-Toaster-‘Cause-O’Connell-Just Pulled-Up Daily Breakfast Routine. How about it?

If you have a social/marketing ritual, I’d love to hear about it.

Voice actors and the Edge Effect.

Last week during a vigorous house-cleaning event I unearthed a book I had read so long ago I didn’t even recognise it. Or at least, so much has happened since then that it seemed like a long time ago. The book is The Edge Effect by Eric Braverman, and it is about the influence of brain chemistry on personality, memory, attention and overall health.

Braverman asserts that there are four basic natures among humans, each one dominated by a different neurotransmitter (dopamine, acetylcholine, serotonin or GABA). The extensive Nature Assessment questionnaire in the book allows you to determine your nature, and with this information you can learn how to restore your system to balance (since we all seem to be out of whack in this mentally and physically stressful world).

There are many books on the market that claim to hold the key to restoring us to health, and after a while one becomes rather numb to these claims. But I have long felt that brain chemistry is the “final frontier” of medicine, that it truly does hold the key to so much of what can ail the body as well as the mind. I was interested to review my scores on the Nature Assessment and to remember that according to those scores I have an acetylcholine nature, which includes 17% of the population. This is what Dr. Braverman has to say about me and my kind:

A balanced acetylcholine nature is intuitive and innovative. You take pleasure in anything involving words, ideas, and communication, and are able to share your enthusiasm with others. This nature makes for ideal counselors, mediators, think tank members, yoga and meditation instructors, religious leaders, and members of public service organizations. Brain speed impacts the creative function, so artists, writers, advertising professionals and actors are all likely to be acetylcholine dominant. An educator with an acetylcholine nature would gravitate toward teaching art or literature; an accountant would gravitate toward specializing in forecasting and projects, and a plumber might find himself teaching in a trade school.

Well, I didn’t teach art or literature, I taught biology, although I always had the feeling I should have been in the humanities. That may be what made me good at teaching biology though – it was hard for me to understand it, so after I had finally wrestled the subject to the ground, I was able to explain it in a way that a non-scientist could comprehend.

We are in the very early stages of understanding the brain, and I imagine that the information in Braverman's book is going to seem simplistic in a few years, but I find it very intriguing. Fellow voice talent, if you happen upon a copy of Braverman’s book and take the time to answer the questions on the Nature Assessment test, stop back and let me know how it turned out. I’m curious to know if we’re all in that 17% together!

Richard Thomas in voice-over session at Tapeworks.

Erin Paul of Tapeworks in nearby Hartford, CT was kind enough to send me the following press release (thank-you Erin! I'm always pleased to hear news of local studios):


Richard Thomas, renowned TV and stage actor, visited Hartford’s Tapeworks recording studios Tuesday to record voiceover tracks for Mercedes-Benz latest radio and TV spots.


The session was recorded using ISDN technology, which allowed Thomas to voice the spots in Hartford while being recorded by a production team in NYC. An in-studio monitor screen provided a video reference for the TV spots, giving Thomas the feel and attitude needed for his delivery.


Television and movie actors are often chosen to voice commercials even though their voices aren’t always recognized by the average viewer when their face isn't shown on-screen.

Mercedes-Benz chose Thomas as the voice of their new campaign, much of which promotes the Certified Pre-Owned sector of their dealerships. Thomas warm and soothing voice credibly amplifies Mercedes’ pride in their cars and engineering skills while affirmatively answering the old chestnut; Would you buy a used car from this man?


Thomas is in Hartford this week performing 12 Angry Men at the Bushnell. The show went on tour in February, and opened Tuesday night in Hartford and will run through Sunday March 30th.


Tapeworks is celebrating its 33rd year as a Hartford mainstay. The studio is regularly the temporary home of TV and movie celebrities when their voices are needed elsewhere.

Richard Thomas (left) wraps Mercedes session with the help of Tapeworks staffer Erin Paul (right)

Success in Voice-over: What are you afraid of?

This week my friend and colleague Liz Solar and I each drove to the center of the state to meet for lunch (she from eastern Massachusetts and I from the west). I met Liz two years ago at the amazing Women in Animation workshop run by Pat Fraley and Hillary Huber, with guest Candi Milo, and we’ve kept in touch ever since.

Liz and I talked over our lunch about everything under the sun, but heavy on the voice-over of course. She mentioned she had read an article in that day’s Boston Globe about Scott Chapin, who voices promos from his New Mexico studio 10 hours a day. We talked about what kinds of sacrifices a voice talent might have to make in order to sustain that kind of schedule, and it made me wonder, how many of us in this business are ready for that level of success?

Many of us believe we would like to be so successful as voice talent that the jobs are coming in all day, every day. Or that we would like to have a regular role on an animated series, or land roles in feature films. Are you one of those people? If you aren’t there yet, are you actively engaged in bringing your dreams to reality? If not, what is holding you back? Children at home? Caring for a relative? Civic duties? Are you waiting until you “get organised”? Or until you get a killer character demo made or until you save up enough to build a better studio? If you achieve this success, what impact will it have on life as you know it?

Do you know where you want to be? Have you sat down to think seriously about how to get from where you are now, to that place? What will it take?

Creating Your Own Voice-over Career

Among the things I love about a career in voice-over: the endless opportunities to create. But I think life offers opportunities to create no matter what you do. In my previous career as a biologist, I wrote a lot of papers based on rather dry data. When I wasn’t generating dry data and writing about them, I wrote papers that weren’t based on data at all. In a paper on homology and the ontological relationship of parts, I compared historical pathways in evolutionary biology to the transformation of the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz from an all-flesh person to an all-tin person, or to the complete turnover of members in a baseball team that nevertheless does not change “the Yankees” into some other, separate historical entity. A paper on phylogenetic constraint was my favorite project ever, because it released me from the bonds of data and let me play with ideas to my heart’s content. Later, as a program director at the National Science Foundation, it was more challenging to find ways to have fun and create, but when I needed to give a presentation to discuss the history of funding in my program and the distribution of dollars across taxonomic groups, I made a huge “tree of life” that filled the conference room, with “apples” on the tree to represent grants awarded (it was quite effective, by the way, and paved the way for a major funding initiative at the foundation).

Tree of Life project, National Science Foundation

And whenever a poster or flyer was needed, I volunteered. So the panelists we invited to help us make the final decisions about funding grant proposals found their way to the conference room with this:

or this:

The point is, you can create your own opportunities for both work and fullfilment no matter what else is going on in your life. Whether your voice-over career is keeping you hopping, or whether you sometimes find yourself with down time, you can be creating something.

Casting director Bonnie Gillespie wrote yet another excellent article this week for The Actor's Voice called Back to Basics, covering the latest thinking on headshots, resumés, and the other tools of the actor’s trade. In it is a section entitled Put Yourself Out There – a call to action if you’re looking for ways to get yourself on the map. How do you get on the map? You put yourself there!! She writes about a talented actor-writer comedy team who produced their own short film, Girl's Night Out, to showcase their skills, which became a featured video on Youtube (thanks to additional legwork on the part of the creators – you don’t have to wait for that to happen either) and has led to some great opportunities for them. Bonnie is so right about the importance of creating your own work.

Ideas and opportunities come when you least expect them. A lot of the auditions and scripts I get are interesting, a lot are, well…. not. Last fall I got an audition script for Ariat boots that I really loved, and although I didn’t expect anything to come of this audition, I wanted to do something with it. I got my friend, voice-over talent & production wizard Ben Wilson to work on it with me and we came up with a piece we’re both very proud of. No, we didn’t get the gig (yes of course they were nuts not to hire us – thanks for mentioning it!) but we got a wonderful showpiece that we thoroughly enjoyed creating, and it has brought us other work. Sometimes I get nutty ideas for commercials. I know nobody is going to produce them, so I do it myself. Or I just stick stuff into projects I’ve been hired to do, just because. A long-standing client wrote me yesterday that he has left AuctionPal, the company he founded three years ago and for which he hired me to create the young and energetic, British-accented Piper as their spokesperson. AuctionPal is doing great, and he's still closely associated with them, but he needs new outlets for his own energy and creativity so he’s starting a new internet marketing company, Double Vision. He’s interested in hiring me to do the telephone answering system and wanted me to try out some voices, so this is what I sent him.

The next time you find work slowing down (not that you would ever admit to anybody that that happens – cuz that would be putting negative energy out there and it gets in your way and trips you), don’t wring your hands over it – do something about it! Send out more postcards, make more calls, write more emails, do more networking – but also, create something. Don’t know how to make Flash animations? Find a friend who does or take a class. Lack production skillz? Collaborate. Get busy. If people aren’t hiring, hire yourself to create a showpiece. It will keep you in tip-top creative shape, you’ll have a blast, and you never know where it might take you.

100 + Industry Resources for Voice Over Talent

Stephanie Ciccarelli at Voices.com maintains a very active blog with tons (tonnes) of useful information for voice talent. Her recent post on industry resources lists voice-over discussion boards, books, VO coaches, podcasts, marketing and rate information, and blogs about voice-over, including blogs by many of my colleagues & friends. And of course, no list of voice-over blogs would be complete without the MCM Voices Voiceover Blog (pssst, in case you've forgotten- that's where you are now)! Thank-you Stephanie, for the link and for your untiring efforts on behalf of the voice-over industry. Your work is truly appreciated.

German Voice-over at MCM Voices!

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I love languages and that I’ve been taking Spanish for a while with the goal of being able to offer voice-over in Spanish. The language I’ve studied the longest besides English, however, is actually German. I started taking it in 7th or 8th grade, continued through high school and college, and the last German course I took was when I was a university faculty member back in the not-even-gonna say when-ties! I audited a course at that time, since I was considering spending some time at the University of Vienna working with a colleague in developmental evolutionary biology and wanted to brush up (I ended up working at the National Science Foundation instead). Because I started relatively young, my accent is close to perfect. I could get along just fine if you dropped me off in a Spanish-speaking country, but my German still sounds better than my Spanish right now. Still, I expected to be offering Spanish voice-over in the near future, not German. Last month, a German narration job dropped into my lap.

Okay, I actually moved my lap so that the job would fall in the right place. My friend Liz de Nesnera, who does voice-over in English and French, has a client who was looking for native German voice talent. I told her that if her client was desperate she could let him know that my German was very good. Apparently, he was, because he hired me. Not only that, he made the same mistake a few weeks later, and it looks like I’ll be working with him on a regular basis. I am really quite thrilled. It was a little scary at first, but I’m here to tell you, it is very good for us to stretch our wings and get out of the place where we’re comfortable.

So, it is back to school again for me. I took a one-week course in medical Spanish during interterm at the local college, and now am in Contemporary Culture (in Spanish) AND “high intermediate” German. I’ve survived the first week unscathed and am in linguistic heaven.

A link to a snippet of that first German narration job is here.

Another vote for getting out of the house - Dialect Paradise!.

I wrote last week, and not for the first time, about the importance of getting out and doing things. Like going to a climbing wall (and by the way, yes I did go again, and yes I did try the more challenging route again and this time was successful!). But sometimes it’s far more routine things that turn out to be immensely rewarding.

We’ve gone to my brother’s family home for Easter dinner the last couple of years. This year they got an invitation from friends and those friends were kind enough to extend the invitation to us as well. We were touched and accepted gratefully. But as the day approached, we found ourselves wishing we could spend the day at home rather than make the 2+ hour drive each way. There was no question about not going, of course, and we made the journey. Thank goodness, because a fantastic surprise awaited us.

The other people at the gathering, besides my brother’s family, were terrifically interesting and funny. But that wasn’t the surprise. The astonishing thing was that four of them grew up in the Limerick region of Ireland, 3 were from south London and one was from Yorkshire!! A dialect student’s dream! This was my first opportunity since taking up an academic approach to the study of dialects for voice-over to hear some of this speech “live” rather than listening to recordings on the internet such as at IDEA or The Speech Accent Archive or NPR or films or the enormously valuable series of CDs produced by Gillian Lane-Plescia at The Dialect Resource. I was able to listen for and observe some of the patterns I had noticed in my academic work, along with the facial expressions and body language and all the rest that no mere voice recording can convey. I made no secret of my interest in their speech – I couldn’t if I had tried, and they in turn were fascinated by my voice work. In short, it was a wonderful day and we all parted great friends, with all sorts of plans and schemes for the future. Imagine if we had decided, “oh bother, let’s just laze the day away at home?”

Shudder.