Chapter 5 - Elvish has left the building.

So a little while later, I got a chance to audition for doing the voices of an assortment of elves.

I didn't have to worry about squinching up on my vocal cords to do the voices, I was just told to go a little nuts and put out a variety of voices for the elf roles.

I think I was so eager to please, and so over prepared with what I thought,... no, what I knew they were surely looking for,... that I pushed some of my accents and vocalizations beyond parody into some non family friendly tinged performances. Not by measure of crude words or anything like that, but by getting a bit too loose on the ad-libbing and my speed in delivery was all over the place on a few takes. This I am sure made the pitch up far harder to do on my voice work as I didn't account for it, and the clearer your enunciation the better any sort of effects applied to your voice will sound.

I think my range in accents and everyone else's patience was what saved me from a complete crash and burn. I learned a lesson that day to keep my energy in reserve for when needed, to measure out my words, let clear diction and purpose of the acting come out. That along with understanding your client. My employer is Hallmark. Not anything on Adult Swim, not Family Guy, not Adventure Time... and each voice over project has an a feel that the people involved want you to deliver. Few people in this industry can work using a unique singular voice (Patrick Warburton is an example of this), and truthfully the more flexibility and variety you can bring along with you, the more work you'll get.

And it's not about just reading the lines, it's about understanding who the character is, what do they do, what do they look like? In this particular case, there was no pre-existing artwork that I knew of to help me out on this, but there was a good descriptive run for each of the characters that perhaps I should have paid more attention to.

Like so many things I endeavor to do, I always want to be at the top of my game as immediate as I possibly can be. That's not the case here, and only time, practice, observation, and learning every trick and tip to build upon my fledgling techniques, would be key to any hope of success.

About this time I believe is when I stumbled upon the very excellent YouTube series VO Buzz Weekly and it's become a staple to watch for me every Sunday, and not a moment too soon, as I've come to learn over the years in other things like art, you cannot create in a vacuum.

Next up, hello Charlie!