Site's Up!

A bit simpler than it will end up, but the initial version of the JimEdgarVoices website is up.

Which, curiously enough is called -

JimEdgarVoices.com

There are a couple of demo files, and a few other bits in there. More to come, but at least something reasonably cogent is now in place. Whew! I should be in bed...

LA Idol - First Round and Results

Last Saturday was the first round of the Voicetrax LA Idol Competition. As I mentioned in a previous post, these focus upon voice work, rather than singing. There are two editions of this - "LA Idol", in which the winner(s) end(s) up with a week of auditions at the major Los Angeles voiceover talent agency, and "SF Idol", where the winner gets representation with a San Francisco talent agency for 6 months.

As threatened, I did a lot of breathing beforehand. And scripts. And got together with fellow voice actors to work dialogues, which was pretty much the name of the game on Saturday.

We did know that going in, of course. What we didn't know was who would be paired with whom, and what scripts were to be used. Folks assembled and the buzzing of excitement could easily be felt. By the time Juliette posted the order and brought out the script for the first round, we'd already busted one another up a few times.

And that, it certainly seems in retrospect was what made the day so darned great. The camaraderie. The sudden realization that these other people with whom I'd shared classes and practices and horrible first takes and glorious successes with over the last couple years had become friends and peers.

To put it another way, everyone in the group was competent. But, our knowledge of one another made it possible for each to enhance the other and bring out the best in each. It's a moment of grace that only too seldom seems to occur in life. Between takes and scripts, we hung out and joked and laughed and kept one another pretty loose.

And loose, and I'm not sure I've observed before, is very good.

Of course, focused is also a desirable attribute as well. I'd brought some notes from various classes (a lot of them seemed to be from Tom Pinto classes...) and had a hand-written set of thoughts, points and reminders which had occurred to me over the previous few days. Probably things that wouldn't make sense to or even help other people, but those specific things that tended to trip me up or remain forgotten when things got hectic.

My wife also sent me a quick loop of the badgers, which for some odd reason of its simplicity and oddness, always cracks me up. It came through on my phone just as we broke into pairings for the first dialog.

The day felt good. Felt fun and loose.

And it seems to have paid off, because it would seem that as of Thursday, my name was among the qualifiers for the finals. Which had me doing the happy dance at my desk. I may have even busted into a badger dance for a few verses...

The 2009 LA Idol Finalists are:

• Chris Abell
• Jessica Blue
• Ralph Boethling
• Brian Davis
• Cinthia DeGregory
• Jim Edgar
• David Johansson
• Ken Krauss
• Kyle Morton
• Angie Noble
• Don Porto
• Nicki Rapp

Which now means that I need to pull together some thoughts, a strategy and some scripts for the finals. And of course, remember to keep breathing, have fun and stay focused.

And maybe bust out a badger dance move now and again...

Invitational Advanced Workshop with Thom Pinto - 08/09

It's pretty easy to run out of superlatives when talking about Mr. Pinto's classes. On the one hand, it seems not too long ago when I was taking the "Colors" class and feeling a bit, uhhh, challenged and awed to be taking a class from Tom. Now, no semester seems complete without some time under his tutelage. He has the capacity to cut right to the core issue that any student may be dealing with and I always appreciate the energy and focus he brings to a class, not to mention the breadth of knowledge of any and all voice actors who have ever recorded anything. He's a true student of the craft and expects as much from his students.

In broad strokes, this was a four week class focusing on specificities. As such, it's one I could take again and have a number of different things stressed, as my needs at that time would be different than now.

But, there were definitely overarching themes: the need to hit the right note from the first syllable of the first word, the need to understand every script both in terms of its meaning and format, the need to be capable of accurate assessment and self-direction. All that stuff that sounds so easy, yet is never simple in the execution.

One nice aspect to this class was that one week was "cyber" style - forcing the students to submit scripts from home, then respond to his feedback with a second version. Very "real" test of the home studio. I will not recount here the number of weird computer issues which cropped up for me on that night, only say that I had to go next door and apologize to the neighbor for my yelling at the last crash. And I'd much rather have that happen on a class than a job...

Countdown to Idol

It's countdown time - the first round of Voicetrax Idol: LA hits on Saturday, September 12th. Deep breathing and working practice scripts shall ensue for the next dozen days...

For those of you not intimately aware - the Voicetrax Idol events are patterned after some large vocal talent contest which they tell me appears now and again on television. In this case, we're dealing with voice work, rather than singing. There are two editions of this - "LA Idol", in which the winner(s) end(s) up with a week of auditions at the major Los Angeles voiceover talent agency, and "SF Idol", where the winner gets representation with a San Francisco talent agency for 6 months.

The format has a couple rounds of competition, and the goal for me this time around is to get past the first one. This will be my third time in the competition. I did the LA a year ago, and it was a great experience, but I felt more like "pack fodder*" and was a little overwhelmed by the level of the other competitors. Most of the folks who showed up I'd never seen before in my classes, they all seemed to know one another and most of them were represented and working. All good, as they say, and I'm pretty happy with what I did. It was just that the folks who moved on seemed to do just a little more.

The SF Idol this spring was a bad patch. I'd love to claim that aliens possessed my brain, or even that the dingos ate my baby, but the fact is I started out of balance and it went downhill from there. Got clipped at the first cutoff.

The question now is whether I learned from the most recent competition. And the classes. And the privates. And all the reads since then.

Which is why I'm counting down the days. And breathing. And relaxing. It's just that funny balance of pushing yourself a certain direction and then getting out of your own way. I love this kind of stuff the way I love bike racing - the anticipation, the feeling of excitement and dread, the focus that comes when you toe the line.

*bike geek term for folks who fill out the pack in a bike race.

In other news, Voicetrax decided that there was so much interest in the Idol series that they filled another SF Idol for the fall. The first round went off a week or so ago, and the first round winners were announced yesterday.

Here's a big congratulations to all the folks who are moving on:

• Patty Allen
• Vicki Baum
• Nigel Ball
• Annalisa Bastiani
• Alyson Casas
• Lynn Douglas
• Roni Gallimore
• Dan Greenblatt
• Maureen O’Donoghue
• Liz O’Keefe
• Rob Sandusky

I know a number of the first round winners quite well from classes, and it's hard to root for any one of the talented people listed above over anyone else.

Good luck to all in the next round! Bring it and have fun.

Back Up to Speed

Things got a little off track around here for a couple months. As I had some fine fellow open his truck door into me while riding home, I had an excuse for a little while (that actually happened back in the last week of June). Things just seem to have gotten a little hectic in the wake of that.

And I'll be honest with you, when I had the opportunity to go for a bike ride instead of studiously sit and pound out a blog entry...well, the bike ride won. Hey, it's summer!

On the voice front, a couple of nice events as of late - the biggest news is that I booked a nice job with the fine folks out at Antenna Audio - in fact, just wrapped up the second of two sessions this past Friday morning. I'd recorded a couple of "file" reads for them earlier this month. Later that week, got the call that the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan wanted me to narrate an audiotour for a temporary exhibit they were putting together. Fair amount of pronunciations to work through and a good bit of text as well. Very challenging and very, very enjoyable. Great folks to work with.

Also voiced a narration for an in-house video for Accenture on information security risks and solutions. That one came my way directly from a fellow voice actor - one of the really high quality folks I've come to know through classes at Voicetrax.

I got to sit behind the board a couple times this past month as well - once for Sirenetta Leoni, engineering for her Audition Angel class. That was really a fun course - patched in "special guest" directors from L.A. and got to work with a great booth director on the following day. Lots of "real-life" scenarios played out with realistic time and tension pressures. There were a few times when I was glad I was working the sliders rather than the mic.

The other class I just finished engineering for today was the "Gamerology" class - Jacquie Shriver from Sony brought a full class up to speed on the ins and outs of the current video game market. She kept folks busy with a good set of auditions, sides and tasks to work on. I'd taken a class from her before, and it's always good to see her energy and understanding the importance of getting things right, fast!

I even got to get some cheap road miles in as I rode to the gig. Busy, busy... but it's voice work, so it's busy, FUN!

Advanced Invitational Direct Thyself Characters - July/Aug 2009

A new offering, and kind of "under the radar." I think most everyone who was in this class had been in a couple of classes that were, well, definitely registering on the "tough love" scale. In those, and in the wake of SF Idol, we had identified a lack of character-specific courses that "dug deeper" into longer, trickier scripts. Mostly, it was focused on getting us to realize were we really were with our character work.

It was, in short, one of the best classes I've taken from Samantha Paris. There were a couple weeks when I really scared the heck out of myself with what happened in the booth. But, I'm getting a little ahead of myself.

The format of this six week course was pretty straight forward. Characters, characters, characters... scripts Sam chose for us all, duked out in "audition" format with full debriefing afterwards. We brought iin scripts that had troubled us and scripts we brought in that we felt we could nail. Samantha would then go through those scripts, issue it to another student and let us direct them on the script. She'd let us flail our way through it for a couple takes or so, then isolate the key areas which we weren't hearing. Curiously enough, the key thing we were generally missing was the same thing we generally missed in our own efforts.

She's used this "Director's Chair" exercise in some other classes, but for some reason, it seemed to click for a number of people in the class.

Over the final two weeks, we also got to write for our "secret voiceactor" - a name we'd chosen out of a cup. After listening to their work and learning something of their strengths, we wrote a monolog and a dialog for them, which we directed them in over the final two sessions of the class (monolog one week, dialog the next). There were, to drastically understate it, some incredible pieces of writing, which gave flight to some great character acting.

This class was the highlight of my week while it was going. I miss it a bit now that it's finished.

Audiotour Intensive - 7/09

This was a four week class, given by new instructor Peter Dunne of Antenna Audio. It is a new class for the Voicetrax catalog, geared at more advanced students. It's assumed that you have some background in narration techniques. There's probably no other voiceover discipline which is as immediate and intimate as audio tours found in museums, heritage sites and galleries. You literally are one-on-one with the listener and join them for an extended period of time.

This was a great class - a rare chance to work with one of the sound designers and directors for the Antenna Audio projects. As such, this class was more "session like" than anything else. Time in the booth came in longer chunks, and the feedback was both subtle and specific. Over the four weeks, Peter brought recent scripts from a variety of museum exhibits and tour sites - some basic, others with the complexities of foreign language pronunciations and finally a few that were less common - true character roles and very "challenging" art. He would usually supply these to us a few days before class, let us read through them and choose a few "stops", then suggest or supply others in class based on our vocal qualities.

It seemed as though everyone caught on to his directing and really raised their game through the class sessions. Peter was a pleasure to read for - the specificity of his feedback and interest in the subject matters came through with every student. I enjoy narration in general, but this was really a very challenging and interesting means of speaking. Great information.