VAM 223 | Want To Book More Work? Learn To Think Like A Producer.
Welcome to episode 223 of the Voice Acting Mastery podcast with yours truly, Crispin Freeman!
As always, you can listen to the podcast using the player above, or download the mp3 using the link at the bottom of this blog post. The podcast is also available via the iTunes Store online. Just follow this link to view the podcast in iTunes:
http://www.voiceactingmastery.com/podcast
One of the most common questions I get asked by voice actors, especially when they’re early in their career, is how they can book more work. Once an aspiring voice actor starts to develop their skills to the level where they can be competitive when auditioning for projects, they quickly realize that they will audition for many more characters than they will ever be hired for. The goal is to increase one’s booking ratio, which is calculated by figuring out how many auditions you tend to submit before you finally book a part. SAG-AFTRA statistics have shown that working actors, who are professionally competitive, tend to audition for 30 parts before they book a single job. Competition in the entertainment industry is fierce and voice actors early in their careers may feel like they audition for hundreds of parts before booking anything.
Every voice actor wants to increase their booking ratio. After all, it’s always more enjoyable to be cast as more characters rather than fewer. If an actor is industrious, they’ll focus on sensible things to improve their booking ratio, such as improving their acting skills, expanding the kinds of characters they can play, updating their marketing materials like demos and websites, and networking with industry professionals to make sure they are kept in mind when someone is thinking of actors to call for their next project.
And yet, I have noticed that many aspiring voice actors don’t pursue these activities with a practical mindset. Rather than focusing on improving their objective skills and marketability, they tend to approach the audition process like a test of personal approval. They may use language like, “How can I get casting directors to notice me?”, or “Who do I contact so I can get a job?”, or even, “If only someone would give me a chance, I’m sure I would be successful.” At the core of all of these statements is a common mindset: the actor is looking for approval from an authority figure. This mindset is often bolstered by TV shows that capitalize on this kind of wish fulfillment. Shows like American Idol, The Voice, America’s Got Talent, and others, can set an expectation in people who are unfamiliar with the entertainment industry, that the secret to becoming a success is to get the right people to approve of you.
In this episode, I want to suggest that a better way to improve your chances of getting cast, is not to look for approval from a producer, but rather, to start thinking like a producer. What is a producer looking for? What do they need to make their project successful? What sort of collaborators are they eager to find? If you start thinking like a producer, it will begin to shift your mindset. You’ll be less likely to pursue getting approval, and you’ll be more likely to start thinking in terms of what you have to offer a project and why they should hire you over everyone else auditioning for the same part.
As you start to think more like a producer, you’ll realize what sorts of actors you’d like to hire to bring your project to life if you were producing one. As you begin to imagine those ideal acting collaborators, you can start to model your own behavior as an actor to try and satisfy what producers are looking for. You’ll realize how important it is to be able to accurately evaluate your skills as an actor, and also to know which types of characters you can believably and competitively play. You’ll start to appreciate that if you can anticipate a producer’s needs, you can make their life easier. And if you make their life easier, they’ll be far more inclined to hire you for their project. They’ll do this both because you’re perfect for the role they’re looking to cast, and because you’re a reliable actor who’s easy to work with.
Thinking like a producer is a great way to reverse engineer the casting process so as to demystify it for you. No longer will you be wondering what the producers are looking for and if they approve of you. Instead, you’ll have walked in the producer’s proverbial shoes, if only in your imagination, which will help you approach the industry in a much more practical and effective way. So let’s spend this episode learning how to think like a producer!
VAM 217 | Interview with Mara Junot, Part 2
Welcome to episode 217 of the Voice Acting Mastery podcast with yours truly, Crispin Freeman!
As always, you can listen to the podcast using the player above, or download the mp3 using the link at the bottom of this blog post. The podcast is also available via the iTunes Store online. Just follow this link to view the podcast in iTunes:
http://www.voiceactingmastery.com/podcast
This is the second and final part of my interview with the vocal shape-shifter, Mara Junot! As I mentioned in the previous episode, Mara identifies as non-binary, but accepts both “she” and “they” pronouns. For the purposes of this podcast, I will be using “she/her” when referring to Mara so as to avoid pluralization confusion during these episodes. You may know Mara’s voice acting work in animation on shows like Curious George, Boss Baby: Back in the Crib, Blaze and the Monster Machines, and Arcane. In Video Games she’s been in Destiny 2, League of Legends, Mortal Kombat and Marvel Rivals. In Anime she’s worked on Ishura, Tezuka’s anime, Pluto, and Mara and I are both cast in Pokemon Horizons.
In the previous episode, Mara explained how she got started as a voice actress. She originally started in voice over as a radio DJ, and thought that was going to be her dream job. However, because of management changes at the station, and her own desire to grow artistically, she decided to leave radio and pursue voice acting full time. After spending 16 hours a day on average researching and studying voice over, she began to build a career for herself working remotely, first in Louisiana, then later in Colorado. After booking a role in the hit animated series Arcane, she realized she needed to move to Los Angeles to take her career to the next level.
In this episode, I ask Mara what inspired her to become a performer in the first place. She shares with me a vision that her mother had of Mara standing on a stage, speaking to a large audience who was enraptured. This idea of Mara using her voice to uplift others became a guiding principle in her life. She and I then talk about how important it is to have a good work/life balance as a performer. Mara has found it too easy at times to overcommit and burn herself out! She’s a big believer in naps, which I endorse heartily as well!
We then go back in time to when Mara first performed in the theater as a child, and how an experience she had on stage which could’ve been very embarrassing, actually helped her feel more empowered as a person and as an artist. It’s a formative story from her youth, and discussing it on the podcast helps Mara realize just how much it has influenced her artistic journey ever since! She then shares with me her advice for the aspiring voice actor, and how important it is to be patient with yourself as you pursue an acting career. Mara is a big believer in finding your authentic self and sharing that in your performances. Finding and revealing your true self can take a lot of introspection, self-honesty, training, and courage. The world is full of actors who seem to have become overnight successes, but if you ask them about it, you’ll find out that they’ve actually been practicing their craft for years! Mara encourages you to be good to yourself as you grow as an actor. She is courageous not only in the pursuit of her career, but also in how willing she is to share her own trials and tribulations as an artist. So without further ado, here’s Mara!
VAM 216 | Interview with Mara Junot, Part 1
Welcome to episode 216 of the Voice Acting Mastery podcast with yours truly, Crispin Freeman!
As always, you can listen to the podcast using the player above, or download the mp3 using the link at the bottom of this blog post. The podcast is also available via the iTunes Store online. Just follow this link to view the podcast in iTunes:
http://www.voiceactingmastery.com/podcast
Welcome to the first part of my interview with the vocal shape-shifter, Mara Junot! Before we begin, I want to acknowledge here that Mara identifies as non-binary, but accepts both “she” and “they” pronouns. For the purposes of this podcast, I will be using “she/her” when referring to Mara so as to avoid pluralization confusion during these episodes. Now, you may be familiar with Mara’s work in animation where she’s played Marlene in Curious George, R&D Baby Simmons in Boss Baby: Back in the Crib, Superhero Narrator, Tiger Statue, and Betty Blueprint from Blaze and the Monster Machines, and Shoola in the hit show, Arcane. In Video Games she’s played Ikora Rey in Destiny 2, Evelyn in League of Legends, Sindel in Mortal Kombat and Storm in Marvel Rivals. In Anime she’s played Elea the Red Tag in Ishura, Helena in Tezuka’s anime, Pluto, and Mara and I have the great pleasure of working together on Pokemon Horizons where she plays Orla, the chief engineer of our airship the Brave Olivine.
In this episode, Mara and I begin our discussion with the question I ask all of my guests: how did she get started as a voice actor? Mara’s path to voice acting is a bit unique because she actually began her career on the microphone as a Radio DJ! She was living in a town called Houma in Louisiana, about an hour southwest of New Orleans, working a corporate job that she hated. She then found an opportunity to audition for her local radio station. She reached out to a friend of hers who had some experience in radio, and he helped her put together a recording demonstrating her DJ skills. The station liked what they heard, and she was fortunate enough to get hired to host one of the shows on their county music station. She eventually expanded into DJing at two other stations owned by the same company: a classic rock station, and a soft rock station. Working as a radio DJ was a dream come true for Mara and she thought she was on top of the world!
Unfortunately, after about 7 or 8 years, Mara began to feel like she had stopped growing. She was working all the time, but didn’t feel like there was any more career advancement for her in radio. There was also a change of management at the company which resulted in some personality conflicts amongst the employees, and Mara realized she needed to switch careers.
She had always enjoyed acting as kid in school, but had never felt comfortable embracing what she thought was the acting lifestyle. Mara is an introvert who values her privacy. She didn’t know how to pursue acting without having to become a public figure. That’s when she realized that voice acting might be a way for her to pursue her acting ambitions, retain a sense of anonymity, and still work from her current location in Louisiana. It wasn’t going to be easy, but she was determined to figure out a way to make it work.
Mara began by finding out everything she could about pursuing a voice over career. She scoured websites for information, she started signing up for pay-to-play sites like Voice123.com where you can pay a membership fee to get access to auditions for certain types of voice over work. She even listened to this podcast to help her find out more about the industry! Early on, Mara knew that she wanted to become a household name in voice over. She wanted to have similar name recognition to someone like Morgan Freeman. She also understood that such an ambitious goal would require a lot of commitment. She would spend all day studying voice over, sometimes 16 to 18 hours a day, doing everything she could to expand her knowledge and her skills.
All of that hard work started paying off. She began getting work, building up a list of repeat clients, and discovering that she could in fact have a career in voice over outside of her experiences in radio. However, in order to become as recognizable as Morgan Freeman, there were some major hurdles she had to overcome. Initially, she had to learn to overcome her reluctance to meet with industry people in person, especially at big voice over conferences. Once she overcame that hurdle, she then realized that in order to get her voice acting career to the next level, and work on the types of projects she had always dreamed of, she was going to need to move to Los Angeles. After moving to LA, she still had more work to do: looking inward to come to grips with who she really was as an artist, and how best to share her authentic self in her performances. It’s a compelling and heartfelt journey, and I’m grateful to Mara for being willing to share such very personal details with us. Let’s get started!
VAM 210 | Interview with Amanda Wyatt, Part 1
Welcome to episode 210 of the Voice Acting Mastery podcast with yours truly, Crispin Freeman!
As always, you can listen to the podcast using the player above, or download the mp3 using the link at the bottom of this blog post. The podcast is also available via the iTunes Store online. Just follow this link to view the podcast in iTunes:
http://www.voiceactingmastery.com/podcast
I’m very excited to share with you my interview with a voice director who’s worked on some of the most popular and influential games in the world, the amazingly talented, Amanda Wyatt! The list of games she’s voice directed is truly impressive including Death Stranding, Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War, Ghost of Tsushima, Outer Worlds, Assassin’s Creed 2, Batman Arkham Knight and Skylanders to name just a few! Amanda and I have worked on a number of games together including Halo Wars, Outer Worlds, The Batman Arkham Games, and Horizon Zero Dawn. I’ve always appreciated her insight, her guidance, and her attention to detail, and I’m grateful she was able to find the time to talk with me on the podcast!
In this episode, I begin our conversation by asking Amanda how she got started as a voice director. After working as a theme park performer at Disneyland in her youth, she eventually got a job as a production coordinator at a company called Soundeluxe which focused primarily on sound design and music scoring for films. This was in 1999, and video game developers were hiring Soundeluxe to help produce the sound for their projects. It was also around this time that developers started incorporating more voice acting into their games as well. Since the developers themselves rarely had connections with Hollywood actors, they would reach out to Soundeluxe to see if they could hire and record voice actors to perform in their games. This means that Amanda was there to help coordinate the production of some of the earliest games in LA that utilized voice actors.
Amanda contacted voice directors she knew in order to help Soundeluxe cast and record, including such well-known talents from the animation world as Kris Zimmerman and Gordon Hunt. After working for many years at Soundeluxe and achieving the position of producer, Amanda decided to take a break so she could give birth to two wonderful twin daughters. After the arrival of her daughters, she realized that she would not be able to work full time as a producer and also take care of her newborns. She needed to pursue a career path that had more schedule flexibility, so she decided to reach out to Kris Zimmerman and ask if she could become Kris’s apprentice as a voice director. Amanda wasn’t sure how Kris would respond, but fortunately, Kris agreed to mentor Amanda. Amanda shadowed both Kris and Gordon Hunt to learn their approach to directing voice actors. Eventually, they decided that Amanda was ready to work on her own without their guidance or support and she has gone on to have a hugely successful career ever since.
As a voice actor, your primary collaborator on any project is the voice director. They are the one you work with most closely and they’re also the person you depend on to help inform you about your character, and guide you to providing the most believable performance. Often, voice directors are also helping to cast the project they’re working on. Therefore, it’s vitally important to understand what they are looking for in the auditions they get from actors. In this segment, Amanda shares with us what kind of auditions she finds most compelling and which ones she finds lackluster. Listen closely to the advice she shares since it will help you as an actor to be more appealing to the directors you audition for. As an added bonus, if you can understand the pressures and responsibilities of being a voice director, you’ll empathize with what they’re dealing with in the studio, and you’ll be that much better a collaborator whenever you’re working with them. So pay close attention! Amanda has wonderful advice to impart to all of us!
VAM 209 | Interview with Zeke Alton, Part 2
Welcome to episode 209 of the Voice Acting Mastery podcast with yours truly, Crispin Freeman!
As always, you can listen to the podcast using the player above, or download the mp3 using the link at the bottom of this blog post. The podcast is also available via the iTunes Store online. Just follow this link to view the podcast in iTunes:
http://www.voiceactingmastery.com/podcast
Get ready for the second part of my interview with the hardest working actor I know, Mr. Zeke Alton! Zeke is a multi-talented performer who does voice acting, performance capture, and also works on-camera. He’s been in major AAA game titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Starfield, and the Callisto Protocol. He’s also worked on TV shows like S.W.A.T and movies such as My Dead Friend Zoe starring Morgan Freeman and Sonequa Martin-Green. Zeke is not only a member of the actor’s union, SAG-AFTRA, but also serves on many of their contract negotiation committees helping to secure artistic rights, fair wages, and safe working conditions for his fellow union members. In addition, Zeke is also a founding board member of NAVA, the National Association of Voice Actors, who work tirelessly to promote the interests and protect the rights of all voice actors regardless of union affiliation.
In the last episode, Zeke outlined for us the fascinating journey of how he transitioned from being a pilot in the Navy for 20 years, into becoming a working actor in Los Angeles. It’s a very inspiring story and if you haven’t heard it yet, I strongly encourage you to listen to the previous episode before continuing with this one. Even though he decided to purse an acting career later in his life, Zeke didn’t let that dissuade him from breaking in to the entertainment industry. In fact, knowing that he might be at a disadvantage, he made sure to be methodical and diligent in his approach. This focus and determination served him well. It not only allowed him to develop the necessary skills to be professionally competitive, but more importantly, it helped him hone a mindset that gave him the resilience and the resourcefulness to deal with the challenges he faced. One of the resources he found helpful at the time was this podcast! He started listening to my episodes back in 2015 and he thanked me for the helpful advice he found on my show. I’m so honored to have contributed to his success!
In this episode, I ask Zeke what inspired him to become a performer in the first place. For Zeke, the moments when he’s acting feel like absolute magic. He goes into what some describe as a “flow state” where the rest of the world falls away, and the only thing that matters is him performing as the character. He finds this state so compelling that he’s willing to manage and deal with all the more mundane aspects of an acting career in order to experience it. Zeke also shares with me his advice for the aspiring actor and how important he thinks it is for actors to understand that if they want to be commercially successful, they need to think of themselves as contributors to an entertainment business enterprise. We then talk about Artificial Intelligence, a subject I dearly wanted to discuss with Zeke because of his extensive knowledge about not only the technology of AI, but also the current business practices of the companies trying to use AI in their creative projects. There’s great advice in this episode, both about developing your performance abilities, and about protecting those hard won skills from being exploited by technology. I hope you find it as insightful and useful as I did!
VAM 208 | Interview with Zeke Alton, Part 1
Welcome to episode 208 of the Voice Acting Mastery podcast with yours truly, Crispin Freeman!
As always, you can listen to the podcast using the player above, or download the mp3 using the link at the bottom of this blog post. The podcast is also available via the iTunes Store online. Just follow this link to view the podcast in iTunes:
http://www.voiceactingmastery.com/podcast
I’m very pleased to present the first part of my interview with one of the most industrious men I know, Mr. Zeke Alton. Zeke works in many different areas of the entertainment industry including voice acting, performance capture, and also on-camera. You may know his voice acting work as Terrell Wolf and William Peck in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Quantum in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Mike Abadio and Lendel Green in Starfield, and his amazing performance as Elias Porter in The Callisto Protocol. Zeke also works on camera and has been in The TV series S.W.A.T. as well as the movie My Dead Friend Zoe starring Morgan Freeman and Sonequa Martin-Green. Zeke is a member of the actor’s union, SAG-AFTRA, and serves on many of their negotiation committees helping to secure artistic rights, fair wages, and safe working conditions for performers. As if that weren’t enough, Zeke is also a founding board member of NAVA, the National Association of Voice Actors, who work tirelessly to promote the interests and protect the rights of all voice actors regardless of union affiliation.
We begin our discussion with Zeke telling me how he broke into the world of show business. His journey is incredibly unique. His father was in the Air Force and stationed in various places in Europe. Zeke was born in Italy and raised in England where his mother’s family resided. Eventually his father moved his family back to the U.S., and after spending his early childhood overseas, Zeke ended up going to High School in America. While he did study acting in elementary and high school, he didn’t act in college, but instead got a scholarship through the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps, commonly known as ROTC, and focused on pursuing a military career.
After graduating college, Zeke joined the Navy as a pilot and subsequently achieved the esteemed status of test pilot, flying new and experimental aircraft. He ended up serving in the Navy for 20 years. He knew that after those 20 years were up he had some options available to him: he could choose to stay in the Navy which most likely would have led to a distinguished career being promoted up through the ranks, or he had the option to retire and enter civilian aviation as a commercial pilot which was another common career path for Navy fliers. Zeke did neither, however. Instead he chose to pursue a career as an actor. It was a momentous decision, and one that he did not take lightly. He knew that if he was going to pursue a career in entertainment, that he would need to approach it with the same focus, dedication, and commitment as he would give to any goal that he attempted in the military.
Zeke took years to study, plan, prepare, and train as an actor before he finally decided to make the move to Los Angeles. He arrived in LA in 2019 and has made great progress in his acting career ever since! The story of how he went from being a Navy test pilot to deciding he had to pursue a career as a performer is a fascinating study not only in what steps you can take in order to be successful as an actor, but also in how important it is to adopt an effective mindset so you can achieve your acting goals. Zeke attributes the bulk of his success to the professional attitude he adopted, which helped him approach his acting goals in a reliable and effective manner. I hope my listeners can take inspiration from his journey, as well as adopt his practical approach to pursuing an acting career. So without further ado, here’s Zeke!