VAM 209 | Interview with Zeke Alton, Part 2
Welcome to episode 209 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
Get ready for the second part of my interview with the hardest working actor I know, Mr. Zeke Alton! Zeke is a multi-talented performer who does voice acting, performance capture, and also works on-camera. He’s been in major AAA game titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Starfield, and the Callisto Protocol. He’s also worked on TV shows like S.W.A.T and movies such as My Dead Friend Zoe starring Morgan Freeman and Sonequa Martin-Green. Zeke is not only a member of the actor’s union, SAG-AFTRA, but also serves on many of their contract negotiation committees helping to secure artistic rights, fair wages, and safe working conditions for his fellow union members. In addition, Zeke is also a founding board member of NAVA, the National Association of Voice Actors, who work tirelessly to promote the interests and protect the rights of all voice actors regardless of union affiliation.
In the last episode, Zeke outlined for us the fascinating journey of how he transitioned from being a pilot in the Navy for 20 years, into becoming a working actor in Los Angeles. It’s a very inspiring story and if you haven’t heard it yet, I strongly encourage you to listen to the previous episode before continuing with this one. Even though he decided to purse an acting career later in his life, Zeke didn’t let that dissuade him from breaking in to the entertainment industry. In fact, knowing that he might be at a disadvantage, he made sure to be methodical and diligent in his approach. This focus and determination served him well. It not only allowed him to develop the necessary skills to be professionally competitive, but more importantly, it helped him hone a mindset that gave him the resilience and the resourcefulness to deal with the challenges he faced. One of the resources he found helpful at the time was this podcast! He started listening to my episodes back in 2015 and he thanked me for the helpful advice he found on my show. I’m so honored to have contributed to his success!
In this episode, I ask Zeke what inspired him to become a performer in the first place. For Zeke, the moments when he’s acting feel like absolute magic. He goes into what some describe as a “flow state” where the rest of the world falls away, and the only thing that matters is him performing as the character. He finds this state so compelling that he’s willing to manage and deal with all the more mundane aspects of an acting career in order to experience it. Zeke also shares with me his advice for the aspiring actor and how important he thinks it is for actors to understand that if they want to be commercially successful, they need to think of themselves as contributors to an entertainment business enterprise. We then talk about Artificial Intelligence, a subject I dearly wanted to discuss with Zeke because of his extensive knowledge about not only the technology of AI, but also the current business practices of the companies trying to use AI in their creative projects. There’s great advice in this episode, both about developing your performance abilities, and about protecting those hard won skills from being exploited by technology. I hope you find it as insightful and useful as I did!
VAM 208 | Interview with Zeke Alton, Part 1
Welcome to episode 208 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 pleased to present the first part of my interview with one of the most industrious men I know, Mr. Zeke Alton. Zeke works in many different areas of the entertainment industry including voice acting, performance capture, and also on-camera. You may know his voice acting work as Terrell Wolf and William Peck in Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, Quantum in Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, Mike Abadio and Lendel Green in Starfield, and his amazing performance as Elias Porter in The Callisto Protocol. Zeke also works on camera and has been in The TV series S.W.A.T. as well as the movie My Dead Friend Zoe starring Morgan Freeman and Sonequa Martin-Green. Zeke is a member of the actor’s union, SAG-AFTRA, and serves on many of their negotiation committees helping to secure artistic rights, fair wages, and safe working conditions for performers. As if that weren’t enough, Zeke is also a founding board member of NAVA, the National Association of Voice Actors, who work tirelessly to promote the interests and protect the rights of all voice actors regardless of union affiliation.
We begin our discussion with Zeke telling me how he broke into the world of show business. His journey is incredibly unique. His father was in the Air Force and stationed in various places in Europe. Zeke was born in Italy and raised in England where his mother’s family resided. Eventually his father moved his family back to the U.S., and after spending his early childhood overseas, Zeke ended up going to High School in America. While he did study acting in elementary and high school, he didn’t act in college, but instead got a scholarship through the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps, commonly known as ROTC, and focused on pursuing a military career.
After graduating college, Zeke joined the Navy as a pilot and subsequently achieved the esteemed status of test pilot, flying new and experimental aircraft. He ended up serving in the Navy for 20 years. He knew that after those 20 years were up he had some options available to him: he could choose to stay in the Navy which most likely would have led to a distinguished career being promoted up through the ranks, or he had the option to retire and enter civilian aviation as a commercial pilot which was another common career path for Navy fliers. Zeke did neither, however. Instead he chose to pursue a career as an actor. It was a momentous decision, and one that he did not take lightly. He knew that if he was going to pursue a career in entertainment, that he would need to approach it with the same focus, dedication, and commitment as he would give to any goal that he attempted in the military.
Zeke took years to study, plan, prepare, and train as an actor before he finally decided to make the move to Los Angeles. He arrived in LA in 2019 and has made great progress in his acting career ever since! The story of how he went from being a Navy test pilot to deciding he had to pursue a career as a performer is a fascinating study not only in what steps you can take in order to be successful as an actor, but also in how important it is to adopt an effective mindset so you can achieve your acting goals. Zeke attributes the bulk of his success to the professional attitude he adopted, which helped him approach his acting goals in a reliable and effective manner. I hope my listeners can take inspiration from his journey, as well as adopt his practical approach to pursuing an acting career. So without further ado, here’s Zeke!
VAM 206 | Interview with Lauren Mayfield, Part 2
Welcome to episode 206 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
This is the second part of my interview with an accomplished voice actress who just happens to be a former student of mine and one of my class assistants, Lauren Mayfield! Lauren has gone from studying with me in class, to helping me coach my students, to booking work as a professional voice actress, and even securing representation at one of the most prestigious agencies in Los Angeles, Sutton Barth and Venari also known as SBV. I was delighted when she told me that we were both working on the same video game together, providing voices for characters in Starfield by Bethesda. You may also know Lauren’s work in games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III where she plays Raptor, Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising where she plays Societte, and Tower of God: New World where she plays Po Bidau Blanc. It’s always so satisfying when I get to watch one of my students navigate the transition to becoming an accomplished colleague of mine in the voice acting world and I’m so proud of Lauren’s achievements!
In the previous episode, we talked about how Lauren got her start as a voice actor. She had loved acting and especially musicals when she was young. Then she’d had the opportunity to work at both Disney World and Disneyland, which she enjoyed thoroughly. However, it wasn’t until she was passed over for a position at Disneyland that she decided to focus more of her attention on voice acting. She took classes in Orange County, California where she was living, and she also took classes with me at Voice Acting Mastery. She was a dutiful actress who tried to do everything right and follow what seemed to be the conventional wisdom at the time about how one could break into voice acting. This included booking parts in anime dubs at first, and then moving on to other projects after that. This was certainly my experience when I started as a voice actor in the late 90’s. Lauren discovered, however, that her path was going to be different. After struggling to make much headway in anime, she finally found her niche in video games which is where her career really took off. Her success in games helped her secure agency representation, which has opened even more career opportunities for her!
In this episode, I ask Lauren what inspired her to become a performer in the first place. She revisits how she loved performing and especially musical theater from a young age, and shares how she had a passion for fantastical, larger than life storytelling. She was eager to explore how she could pursue a career as a performer. Over time, she began to realize that a musical theater career would not give her the kind of stability she desired, neither financially, nor in terms of lifestyle. She didn’t want to have to travel for work, and the life of a theater actor tends to be very nomadic. Voice acting became a way for her to pursue acting, apply her vocal and singing techniques, and still remain close to home. This subject leads quite naturally into a discussion about how important it is to be always checking in with yourself to make sure that you’re pursuing goals that are truly what you want and that you aren’t working towards some accomplishment that won’t give you satisfaction. Lauren and I also discuss how competitive voice acting has become in recent years due to the rising popularity of games, animation, and anime.
After that, I ask Lauren to share her advice for the aspiring voice actor. While she knows that teachers and coaches will often stress how much work it takes to be successful as a voice actor, and Lauren herself can personally attest to the amount of time, effort, and dedication she has put towards achieving her voice acting goals, she also says that it’s important to know when to relax and trust that you’re doing good work, so you can avoid trying to force things to happen. One way to achieve that balance between effort and relaxation is to make sure that you’re as well rounded a human being as possible, with activities and interests outside the field of acting. Another method is to take the pursuit of voice acting less personally and to decouple your own value as a human being from your professional accomplishments. Ironically, the less personally you take things in the voice over industry, the more relaxed you’ll become, and the more authentically you’ll be able to share your own artistry with others. These insights from Lauren are a lovely way to wrap up our discussion, and I’m so glad I get to share them with my listeners!
VAM 205 | Interview with Lauren Mayfield, Part 1
Welcome to episode 205 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 first part of my interview with an accomplished voice actress who just happens to be a former student of mine and one of my class assistants, Lauren Mayfield! One of the things that I love most as an acting teacher is when a student of mine is able to achieve a level of success in their career where the two of us can graduate from being teacher and student to being fellow colleagues in the voice over industry! Lauren has definitely achieved that! I first met her when she started taking some of my acting classes back in 2016! I admired her talent, her commitment to the craft of acting, and her generous spirit, so I eventually asked if she would be willing to assist me with my classes, and she graciously agreed.
Since then, Lauren has been a consistent source of encouragement, advice, and inspiration for many of my students, and I’m so grateful to have had her on the Voice Acting Mastery team for so long. Over the years, Lauren has also been diligently building her own voice acting career, and I was delighted to hear from her recently that she and I were both playing characters in the video game Starfield by Bethesda. You may also know Lauren’s work in games like Smite where she plays Deadly Dinner Discord, Smash Legends where she plays Brick, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III where she plays Raptor, and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom where she plays Yona. Lauren is signed with one of the most prestigious agencies in Los Angeles: Sutton, Barth and Venari, more commonly known by the initials, SBV, and I couldn’t be more proud of her accomplishments!
In this episode, I begin our discussion by asking Lauren how she got started as a voice actor. As she recounts how she became interested in performing at a young age and started pursuing not only acting, but musical theater, I was amazed to discover how many similarities that Lauren and I had in our childhood experiences! We both would reenact scenes from our favorite movies for our parents, we both had an appreciation for classic MGM musicals, and we both came to the realization that neither of us really had the temperament to pursue a full time theater career in New York City.
Lauren is a California native who grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and spent time both there and later in the Los Angeles area where she went to college. She also had a love for Disney theme parks and worked at Disney World in Florida right after she graduated, and then returned to California where she worked at Disneyland. While there, she applied for a special ambassador-style program in addition to her regular duties, but was passed over for the position, even though all of her co-workers in her department were chosen. Feeling disappointed, and having more time in her schedule, Lauren decided to pursue something that had always interested her: voice acting.
She started taking voice over classes at a school called Del Mar Media Arts based out of Orange County, California. She also started taking classes with me at Voice Acting Mastery, and at Bang Zoom Studios in their Adventures in Voice Acting program. She fell in love with voice acting and decided to commit to pursuing a professional career in voice over. During our discussion, Lauren shares with me not only the detailed action journey steps she took to try to further her voice acting goals, but also the adjustments she had to make to her mindset, and what preconceived notions she had to let go of in order to find her own way of breaking into the LA voice over market place. Even though we’ve known each other for many years, I learned so much from diving deep into Lauren’s voice over journey, and I hope you will as well!
VAM 197 | Interview with Josh Petersdorf, Part 2
Welcome to episode 197 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 second and final part of my interview with voice actor and theme park voice performer, Josh Petersdorf! You may know Josh from his work in games like League of Legends, Fire Emblem: Engage, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, and Overwatch. He’s worked on the English language dubs of anime shows like Aggretsuko and on live action shows like Project “Gemini”. He’s also the voices of both Megatron and Optimus Prime at the Universal Studios Theme Park during the live action show that takes place before the Transformers 3D ride.
That last time we spoke, Josh shared with me how he became a voice actor. He was inspired to pursue performing at a young age after watching his sisters perform in dance recitals. However, during high school, he focused more on athletics, and it wasn’t until after he was living on his own that he realized that he wanted to pursue voice acting as a career. He moved to LA, started taking classes, and was fortunate enough to be able to book work at the Universal Studios Theme Park and to also get agent representation. He started booking voice over work, but when he landed the role of Roadhog in Overwatch, it definitely took his career to a new level.
In this episode, I ask what inspired Josh to become a performer in the first place. He shares with me how much the artists from his childhood influenced him to try to create things himself, and how his love of pro wrestling and his nostalgia for 80’s cartoons still inform his artistry today! The characters from the entertainment he consumed often served as role models for him and helped shape not only his creative sensibilities but his personal development as well. He and I also talk about how the most successful voice actors are always looking to expand their capabilities and grow into different areas or niches of the industry. And finally, Josh gives me his advice for the aspiring voice actor, which at its core seems to contain a paradox: He suggests that actors both be ready to work hard and also be easy on themselves. He thinks they should both be demanding when it comes to their own skills, but forgiving as well. It’s a fascinating contradiction that I actually think you’ll find very insightful as we explore it in this episode.
VAM 196 | Interview with Josh Petersdorf, Part 1
Welcome to episode 196 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 excited to share with you the first part of my interview with voice actor and theme park voice performer, Josh Petersdorf! Josh works extensively in games where he uses his booming voice to embody characters such as Galio in League of Legends, Morion in Fire Emblem: Engage, Stonefist in World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, and most notably, Roadhog in Overwatch. He’s worked on the English language dubs of anime like Aggretsuko and live action shows like Project “Gemini”. He’s also worked for many years at the Universal Studios Theme Park portraying the voices of both Megatron and Optimus Prime during the live action show that takes place before the Transformers 3D ride. This process involves a stilt walker putting on a large Transformers costume and interacting with the people in line for the ride. Josh then provides the voice for the person in costume, speaking in real time to the park goers and improvising dialogue to keep them entertained. It’s an amazing collaborative performance that is fascinating to watch!
As we begin our interview, Josh explains to me how he got started as a voice actor. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, where he watched his younger sisters perform in plays and dance recitals, and he decided that he wanted to be a performer as well. He got into an advanced theater class at his school when he was in 7th grade, and participated in the debate team. However, when Josh went to high school, he got more involved in sports, specifically water polo, and had less time for acting. After high school, he attended college briefly, but decided to leave college to pursue his interests in music. He made friends with many creative musicians in the Bay area who also had access to all sorts of recording equipment. In addition to making music, he and his friends would have fun doing fan dubs of live action Japanese Power Ranger-style shows like Kamen Rider. Over time, Josh realized that he wanted to pursue acting more, so he eventually moved to Los Angeles with the goal of becoming a voice actor. He started taking classes to develop his skills, and was also working a restaurant job in order to support himself at the time. A friend at the restaurant told him about an opportunity to audition to be a voice for the live Transformers show at the Universal Studios Theme Park. So Josh auditioned and booked the job. As his confidence grew, he was also able to find agent representation, and one day, his agent sent him an audition for a character in a new game from Blizzard Entertainment which turned out to be Roadhog in Overwatch. Josh was then called back and eventually cast as Roadhog which helped his career blossom even more.
Listening to this overview of Josh’s journey towards becoming a professional voice actor, it might seem like his path was relatively straightforward and almost inevitable. What the summary leaves out, however, are all of the challenges, setbacks, and uncertainty that Josh endured on his way to discovering what he truly wanted to do and how to go about achieving his goals. He and I spend the majority of this episode talking in depth about all of these issues. Josh is very candid with me about what he went through and what it took for him to grow both as a person and as a performer. It’s always been my goal with this podcast to share the reality of what it takes to become a successful professional artist, and I’m so grateful for Josh’s willingness to give both me and my listeners these honest insights into his struggles and his triumphs. I think you’ll find his story very inspiring!