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.”