Welcome to episode 130 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

Welcome to the third and final part of my interview with voice actor, director and teacher, Zach Hanks! You may be familiar with his performances as Garnac in the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Morgan and Custis Pendleton in the video game Dishonored and Lars Halford in the game Brutal Legend.

Not only is Zach a voice actor, but he’s also worked as both a voice director and casting director on multiple video game projects. In addition, Zach has taught voice acting as a professor at the Stephen F. Austin State University in Eastern Texas. He currently resides in Atlanta where he is continuing to pursue his own voice over career in addition to founding the Voice Over Career Launch Pad, a service that helps voice over artists learn the skills they need to become business-savvy professionals in the industry.

In the previous episode, we explored major turning points in Zach’s varied career and the very practical lessons he learned from each of them. As we conclude our time together, Zach and I discuss his experience as a college professor and the most common mistakes that students tended to make in his acting classes. The time Zach spent working with those students helped him shape his current education program, the Voice Over Career Launch Pad. Zach observed that around the country there were many fine voice performance classes taught by very reputable teachers. Where he saw a lack of education was for voice actors who wanted to develop the technical and business skills that they needed to be competent and reliable in the voice over marketplace. Zach’s experiences as an actor, director, and professor give him a unique understanding of what it takes to help people get their voice over careers up and running as quickly as possible. But I’ll let Zach tell you more about all of those topics himself.

Zach’s Facebook Group: Voice Over Career Launch Pad
Zach’s Auto-Scheduler: Schedule an Online Meeting with Zach Hanks

Download Voice Acting Mastery Episode #130 Here (MP3)

VAMFR 025 | Maintaining Good Psychological Health as a Voice Actor, Part 2

Welcome to episode 25 of the Voice Acting Mastery: Field Report podcast!

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.vamfieldreport.com/podcast

Welcome to the second part of a special report on maintaining good psychological health as a voice actor by our special correspondent, Maureen Price!

For those of you who have already checked out part one, you’ll remember that Maureen explored how to deal with rejection in healthy and productive ways. Her guests shared their approaches for grappling with one of the most inevitable and universal experiences of being a voice actor and she’s so grateful to each of them for their honesty and vulnerability in addressing that subject.

In this episode, Maureen will be discussing how to overcome self-doubt and build more confidence. One useful strategy for achieving this goal is to develop healthy tactics for dealing with one’s internal critic: that nagging voice in our head that wants to belittle our accomplishments and dismiss our feelings. Managing one’s internal critic is a challenge that we all face as actors. If you’ve ever experienced that little gremlin of self-doubt creeping onto you shoulder while you’re working and felt yourself spiraling out of control into anxiety and fear then this episode is for you. Or if you’ve simply felt like you weren’t “enough” or that you don’t deserve to be where you are, well, we’ll explore that too. While self-doubt and issues with confidence are universal experiences, Maureen feels that they can be especially pernicious for voice actors as we frequently find ourselves alone in a recording booth with plenty of time and space to get stuck in our heads. Being in a booth means that we’re separated from the director, producer, and/or clients by a huge pane of glass. Through that glass we can see them talking about us and our work, even if we can’t hear them. If they neglect to turn on their talkback microphone, we have to stand there in the booth waiting in silence, unsure of what they are saying. Such a situation can be nerve-wracking, especially if we’re feeling less than stellar about ourselves or our performance.

Maureen is very fortunate to have her four wonderful guests from the previous episode back to dive into these tricky topics with her. They’ll be sharing personal anecdotes from the booth as well as their approaches to dealing with self-doubt and that nagging internal critic. First up, she sat down with Keith Silverstein, an industry veteran whose work includes Torbjörn in Overwatch, Hisoka in HunterxHunter, and Hawk Moth in Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir amongst many, many more. She then spoke with Laura Post, voice actor and now voice director for the anime series Little Witch Academia. Laura’s voice acting work includes Big Barda in Justice League Action, Ragyō in Kill la Kill, Ahri in League of Legends, and Nozomi Tojo in Love Live! School Idol Project. Maureen also spoke with Ray Chase. Ray voices Prince Noctis in Final Fantasy XV, Master of Masters in Kingdom Hearts 2.8 and Puri-puri Prisoner in One Punch Man. Finally, she sat down with Valerie Arem. Valerie is a voice actor, voice director, and educator. Her directing work includes Persona 4 and Persona 5. She voices Francine in The Walking Dead video game, Naoto Shirogane in Persona 4, and Kyra Mosley in Call of Duty: Ghosts. Valerie and her husband Keith Arem run PCB Productions, a studio in Los Angeles specializing in video game recording. They also teach workshops that focus on voice acting for a variety of video game genres. Maureen was especially interested to talk to Valerie given her wealth of experience as an actor, director, casting director, and educator.

The VAM Field Report will be released on the 1st Wednesday of every month so stay on the look out for it!

Download VAM Field Report Episode #25 Here (MP3)