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...
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
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:
Good luck to all in the next round! Bring it and have fun.
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
Good luck to all in the next round! Bring it and have fun.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
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!
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!
Friday, August 14, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Idol Decompression Session
This is a bit more of an actual "Voicetrax Class Report", something I'd begun posting over on the VTX ning.com page (a feed of which is currently visible on the left top of this page.) But, since they keep threatening to turn that into a Facebook Group, it sounded like it might be time to begin embedding them here (and maybe put a copy on the ning.com page - which looks like it may be a copy/paste task as ning.com doesn't appear to support an RSS feed. Of course, the FB Group pages don't support an inbound RSS feed either... but, I digress...)
Tonight was a low-key pizza & beverage get-together and "I love you guys, but..." beat down for those of us who went through the recent Voicetrax Idol SF competiton - modeled after - yep, you guessed it! - another contest which you may have noticed on television recently. Basically, it was a three round performance competition which ended with the winner getting representation with Stars, The Agency for six months.
The third and final round took place a week ago, and the winners were to be announced live (...after the break).
Before we got to that though, we got to share our experiences, failures and lessons learned with one another. Obviously, there was a "carrot" to chase and everyone wanted to win the prize, but this was above all a class - and as such a grand opportunity to learn how we react under different pressures and audition situations.
I don't have too much to share about the later parts of the competition as I got spat out the back with a dozen others in the first round. This actually led to some good lessons and realizations, but I don't really have the time or energy right now to delve into those. Let's just say that it was a good kick in the pants reminder to focus, execute and trust the teachings which have been shared with us. I took my frustration with not advancing and focused it into the prep for my demo.
It was interesting tonight to hear how many other people encountered a lot of the same difficulties. Nerves seemed to be universally shared thread, for example.
We also got to listen to everyone's Round 1 auditons. As Sam mentioned, no one was stellar and the folks who advanced seemed to be the ones who made the least errors.
She may have termed it a little more directly, now that I think about it.
The listening helped to remind us how easy it is to sound the same - hit the same notes and fall into the same types of traps. We did not listen into the second round auditions, but by then the first round jitters seemed to begin leaving those who had made the cut and Sam said that the quality of work definitely improved. By the last round, the reads from the six finalists created significant discussion among the judges at Stars and they gave strong accolades to all who made it that far.
I guess this would be the "after the break" part I mentioned earlier.
There was a final "Selection" to be made, of course, and none other than Mark Middleton nabbed the first place. I've had a lot of classes with Mark, and it's great to see his talents and energy pay off.
Ralph Boethling took second place. He also received word tonight that he had been signed by Stars for representation. Another frequent classmate who just always "brings it."
Louise Theron took third place. I've only bumped into her rather recently in classes, but she has done very nice work.
Congratulations to everyone!
Tonight was a low-key pizza & beverage get-together and "I love you guys, but..." beat down for those of us who went through the recent Voicetrax Idol SF competiton - modeled after - yep, you guessed it! - another contest which you may have noticed on television recently. Basically, it was a three round performance competition which ended with the winner getting representation with Stars, The Agency for six months.
The third and final round took place a week ago, and the winners were to be announced live (...after the break).
Before we got to that though, we got to share our experiences, failures and lessons learned with one another. Obviously, there was a "carrot" to chase and everyone wanted to win the prize, but this was above all a class - and as such a grand opportunity to learn how we react under different pressures and audition situations.
I don't have too much to share about the later parts of the competition as I got spat out the back with a dozen others in the first round. This actually led to some good lessons and realizations, but I don't really have the time or energy right now to delve into those. Let's just say that it was a good kick in the pants reminder to focus, execute and trust the teachings which have been shared with us. I took my frustration with not advancing and focused it into the prep for my demo.
It was interesting tonight to hear how many other people encountered a lot of the same difficulties. Nerves seemed to be universally shared thread, for example.
We also got to listen to everyone's Round 1 auditons. As Sam mentioned, no one was stellar and the folks who advanced seemed to be the ones who made the least errors.
She may have termed it a little more directly, now that I think about it.
The listening helped to remind us how easy it is to sound the same - hit the same notes and fall into the same types of traps. We did not listen into the second round auditions, but by then the first round jitters seemed to begin leaving those who had made the cut and Sam said that the quality of work definitely improved. By the last round, the reads from the six finalists created significant discussion among the judges at Stars and they gave strong accolades to all who made it that far.
I guess this would be the "after the break" part I mentioned earlier.
There was a final "Selection" to be made, of course, and none other than Mark Middleton nabbed the first place. I've had a lot of classes with Mark, and it's great to see his talents and energy pay off.
Ralph Boethling took second place. He also received word tonight that he had been signed by Stars for representation. Another frequent classmate who just always "brings it."
Louise Theron took third place. I've only bumped into her rather recently in classes, but she has done very nice work.
Congratulations to everyone!
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Demo Day
Monday was the first actual, really-truly "Red Letter" day on my calendar. Back in early April, I'd had a private session with Samantha, and she felt that it was time to set a date to record my Commercial Demo. When I wrote down the scheduled session on the calendar, I actually rummaged around and found a nice bold red Sharpie, boxed the day in right and proper and put "DEMO SESSION" in big, block letters. (I even did the same on the month of May, as it fell on Monday, June 1st. Like I was going to forget it or something... I am such a geek.)
It deserved something, and a little graphic energy around the day did seem appropriate. But, thinking about that now, I can't recall ever doing that before.
Of course, the actual session was important, but there was a bit of work beforehand. She had me submit a significant number of scripts a couple weeks before the recording. This meant that I had to go through my files, and received some excellent scripts from fellow voice-actors and teachers, then analyze those things which seemed to best demonstrate my range in commercial copy and decide how each script fit into the scheme of things. As I mentioned earlier, it was a highly iterative process.
But, that work paid off, and we came up with a good number of diverse scripts. All I had to do was be brilliant...
Well... yes and no.
I mean, yes, I had to do them as well as I could.
On the other hand, it wasn't going to take some miraculous act of divine intervention for me to get them right. That sounds abruptly pompous, so let me explain slightly.
In most classes I've taken, scripts get chosen for various reasons. Sometimes, that reason is specifically to cause us to fail. When you have a dozen people at roughly the experience level, and all of them miss the same thing in the copy, I have to assume that we were supposed to miss it, so it could be pointed out clearly, so we would learn and recognize it in the future. Learning by failure.
The Demo Session on the other hand was nothing like that. I had my dozen scripts. We'd pulled out the parts we wanted to use. We had definite attitudes and situations which I was to portray. This was not a time in which anything was going to be a surprise or be designed to trip me up. It was time to show what I've learned.
I'd scheduled a Private Session with N. the Thursday before, where I read through three of the scripts we'd chosen for the Demo. He knew I had the recording session coming up, but hadn't been part of the script selection process. We were working on a couple of other things first. Then, I read through the scripts-for-demo set. After I read the first one, he said, "I know you have a demo session coming up, but if you haven't thought about using that script, you really ought to consider it." Talk about a confidence-builder...
I was also trying not to go through them too many times, as it was important to keep my reads fresh. I spent some time refining what my approach would be - all the good acting choices about what had just happened, who I was talking to, etc. But, I only read through them once or twice more before the session. Enough to know where I was going with them, but not enough to "overwork" anything.
Brought a bunch of other scripts along and warmed up on them beforehand. Right on time, Sam fetched me and we headed over to the main studio. Chuck ran the board and we dove right in.
And it was fun. I lost all sense of time - would've believed it if someone said it took 20 minutes or 5 hours. Even though I had to head into work for the afternoon, I was buzzing and happy all day. Even had trouble falling asleep that night.
Good, good stuff. Which, hopefully, I should be sharing with you soon...
It deserved something, and a little graphic energy around the day did seem appropriate. But, thinking about that now, I can't recall ever doing that before.
Of course, the actual session was important, but there was a bit of work beforehand. She had me submit a significant number of scripts a couple weeks before the recording. This meant that I had to go through my files, and received some excellent scripts from fellow voice-actors and teachers, then analyze those things which seemed to best demonstrate my range in commercial copy and decide how each script fit into the scheme of things. As I mentioned earlier, it was a highly iterative process.
But, that work paid off, and we came up with a good number of diverse scripts. All I had to do was be brilliant...
Well... yes and no.
I mean, yes, I had to do them as well as I could.
On the other hand, it wasn't going to take some miraculous act of divine intervention for me to get them right. That sounds abruptly pompous, so let me explain slightly.
In most classes I've taken, scripts get chosen for various reasons. Sometimes, that reason is specifically to cause us to fail. When you have a dozen people at roughly the experience level, and all of them miss the same thing in the copy, I have to assume that we were supposed to miss it, so it could be pointed out clearly, so we would learn and recognize it in the future. Learning by failure.
The Demo Session on the other hand was nothing like that. I had my dozen scripts. We'd pulled out the parts we wanted to use. We had definite attitudes and situations which I was to portray. This was not a time in which anything was going to be a surprise or be designed to trip me up. It was time to show what I've learned.
I'd scheduled a Private Session with N. the Thursday before, where I read through three of the scripts we'd chosen for the Demo. He knew I had the recording session coming up, but hadn't been part of the script selection process. We were working on a couple of other things first. Then, I read through the scripts-for-demo set. After I read the first one, he said, "I know you have a demo session coming up, but if you haven't thought about using that script, you really ought to consider it." Talk about a confidence-builder...
I was also trying not to go through them too many times, as it was important to keep my reads fresh. I spent some time refining what my approach would be - all the good acting choices about what had just happened, who I was talking to, etc. But, I only read through them once or twice more before the session. Enough to know where I was going with them, but not enough to "overwork" anything.
Brought a bunch of other scripts along and warmed up on them beforehand. Right on time, Sam fetched me and we headed over to the main studio. Chuck ran the board and we dove right in.
And it was fun. I lost all sense of time - would've believed it if someone said it took 20 minutes or 5 hours. Even though I had to head into work for the afternoon, I was buzzing and happy all day. Even had trouble falling asleep that night.
Good, good stuff. Which, hopefully, I should be sharing with you soon...
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