Welcome to episode 146 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’ve got a very special treat for you in this episode! I’m honored to bring you the first part of my interview with the stupendously talented Dee Bradley Baker! As of the release of this episode, Dee has over 500 credits to his name on the Internet Movie Database! He’s worked on hundreds of animated movies and shows including Cow and Chicken, The Angry Beavers, Dexter’s Lab, Ben 10, The Box Trolls, The Fairly Odd Parents, Phineas and Ferb, American Dad, Avatar the Last Airbender, The Legend of Korra, Star Wars: the Clone Wars, and the list goes on and on! Dee has great comedic instincts and has played numerous characters over the years, but he also has a special affinity for creature voices. He is often called in to voice characters that don’t speak a human language, but communicate through non-verbal sounds. It’s a highly specialized skill and Dee excels at it. He can do small animal and bird sounds, large scary monsters, and every kind of swamp creature in between all without the use of pitch shifting or electronic alteration. He just gets in front of a microphone and is brilliant!

I was really excited to get Dee on the podcast because I wanted to talk to him about his acting process. While the vocal pyrotechnics he can produce are impressive, Dee doesn’t just get hired because he can make crazy sounds with his throat. His special skill is to convey emotions through creature noises, in other words, acting. He combines his amazing technical prowess with his road-tested acting abilities in order to make his creature sounds so expressive and believable.

In this first segment of our interview, I ask Dee how he got started as an actor. While he did get involved in theater at a very young age, his journey to becoming a professional voice actor was anything but typical. He didn’t take many acting classes in school and he never planned on having a career as a performer. Instead, he simply did what sounded fun to him in the moment and gave himself permission to try any interesting opportunity that came his way. This meant that his journey has been filled with serendipity and synchronicity. He never had a concrete plan for his career, but rather followed his fascination and did his best to capitalize on where his skills overlapped with his interests. His story is as inspiring as it is unconventional.

Download Voice Acting Mastery Episode #146 Here (MP3)