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!