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 207 | Acting Is Inherently Uncomfortable, That’s Why Great Acting Takes Courage
Welcome to episode 207 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
While the majority of my podcast episodes in recent years have been interviews, I wanted to take this episode to talk about a problematic misunderstanding that I see too often lately amongst people who are thinking about getting into voice acting. It’s a misunderstanding that I’m finding more and more common in my students as well, so I thought it would be a good idea to address it head on. I get the impression both from reading online comments on social media sites, and from my interactions with my students in my classes, that too many people out there think that voice acting is the easiest form of acting, that it requires less of you than other forms of acting like film or theater acting, and that acting as an activity should be comfortable and easy to do. This mindset often boils down to a belief that goes something like this: “How hard could it be to talk into a microphone, get attention, and get paid?”
There’s many reasons for this flawed belief. Some of these reasons have been around for a while, and some have been exacerbated by social media and the increased mental and emotional health challenges reported by more recent generations. Never in my teaching career have I had so many students citing “anxiety” as their number one stumbling block when it comes to acting, and never have I seen such a mismatch of expectations vs. reality when it comes to what people think is required of them to become professionally competitive as a voice actor.
While historically, people have often assumed that acting was the least demanding of the performing arts, online marketers have taken this misconception and turned it into a selling point, using the leverage of the internet and social media platforms to advertise just how easy it is to work and make money as a voice over artist. I can’t tell you the number of ads I’ve seen from “voice acting experts” who say things like, “If you give me 10 minutes of your time, and watch this video to the end, I’ll share with you the secrets that the voice over industry doesn’t want you to know!” Or, “Let me show you this one weird trick that will allow you to make money on demand by recording yourself at home in your pajamas!” Or, “There’s so much work out there that there’s no competition. People want to pay you to just talk into a microphone, with no artistic development, personal improvement, or familiarity with the industry required!”
Okay, that last one was a stretch, but not a big stretch, and unfortunately this kind of messaging is all too common online today. It offers quick solutions, cheat codes, or easy income with minimal effort, when building a voice acting career really takes artistic dedication, diligent practice, and a lot of self-actualization. This predatory grift really upsets me. It not only promotes greed and laziness, but it also targets the anxiety issues that I mentioned earlier. Anxious people want to hear that voice acting is easy and that they can make money by hiding in their closets and talking into a microphone.
And perhaps they can, for a while. The democratization of affordable recording equipment and the ability to work remotely have indeed fostered an environment where it seems like anyone can make money in voice over. But the specter of AI is looming over the horizon, and soon the market for that so-called “easier” voice work will start to erode. As AI voices proliferate and are used more often for entry level or lower budget projects, an aspiring voice actor will need to become much better than AI in order to compete in the marketplace. Soon there will be nowhere to hide from the reality that professional acting requires one to overcome their limitations, not capitulate to them or look for hacks to avoid facing them.
I’d like to explain to my listeners exactly why acting is such a tricky art form to master, why becoming a professionally competitive voice actor is so challenging, and to hopefully bring some honesty and clarity to what it really takes to embody characters in such a way that you captivate and delight an audience. This advice is not meant to discourage any aspiring voice actors, but rather to inspire them to meet the challenge of pursuing a voice acting career head on, with a clear understanding of the true skills and mindset they need to become successful.
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 204 | Go Hunting for the Best Acting and Storytelling
Welcome to episode 204 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
Since episode 128, this podcast has focused primarily on doing in-depth interviews with industry professionals that I feel have unique insights that will be useful to my listeners. For this episode, I’m going to go back to my earlier format of speaking at length on a single topic. Since this episode is coming out in January of 2024, I thought it might be good idea to start out the New Year with some valuable advice that I’d like to share with my listeners.
I want to talk about how important it is in today’s media environment to go hunting for the best acting and storytelling you can find. This means not only studying performances, movies, tv shows and games that are highly acclaimed or intensely popular, but also researching and understanding the art and creators who influenced and inspired those projects.
The reason I’m suggesting this is because recently I have found that more and more of my students not only lack exposure to some of the best acting performances in media, but they also lack an understanding of how earlier art continues to influence some of the most popular media franchises today. Without this knowledge and context, those students who are less familiar with these things are less professionally competitive than my students who have researched and studied some of the best acting and storytelling that exists.
So what I’d like to do in this episode is share with you not only some of the most important touchstones for voice actors, but also to impress upon my listeners how valuable it can be to understand the artistic lineage of where current popular culture comes from. I also want to stress just how vital it is to actively hunt for these things in a world that is increasingly overloaded with insistent demands on your attention.
VAM 203 | Interview with Crispin Freeman, Part 4
Welcome to episode 203 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 fourth and final part of an interview of me, hosted by my good friend and fellow voice actor, Julie Nathanson! As I mentioned in episode 200, Julie had offered years ago to turn the tables on me and interview me on my own podcast! I thought it was a great idea and I’m so grateful that she agreed to take over as interviewer for this 4 episode series!
In the previous episode, Julie and I talked about how I began my voice acting career working on anime dubs in New York city in the late 1990s. We talked briefly about my demos before we dove into a longer discussion about AI and whether I think artificial intelligence and machine learning can create meaningful storytelling. She then shared more questions from our voice acting colleagues, including one from Steve Blum about whether or not my deep analytical knowledge about storytelling ever gets in the way of my spontaneity as an actor. This gave me the opportunity to articulate my personal acting process with more specificity and nuance than I’ve ever done before. It was a very satisfying conversation and if you haven’t already, I would suggest that you listen to the 3 previous episodes of this interview before continuing with this final segment.
We begin this episode with some more questions from my voice acting colleagues. The first is from JP Karliak who says that even though voice actors may be facing some new and daunting challenges recently, he’d like to know if there’s anything about the voice acting industry that makes me optimistic and excited for the future. The next comment is from Stephanie Sheh who talks about how my willingness to admit my shortcomings as a director allowed her to be more honest and trusting with me as an actor. The final contributor is Jennifer Hale, who wants to know if there’s any question that I’ve never been asked, but that I’ve always wanted someone to ask me.
Jennifer’s query prompts me to share with Julie three stories or wisdom fables about the artistic process. While I’ve occasionally told one of these stories in previous interviews, I’ve never told all three of them at the same time. The stories were originally told to me by Rinde Eckert, a virtuosic theater artist and composer, and they are educational metaphors that are densely packed with wisdom. Furthermore, they encapsulate some of the core pieces of advice that I would want to impart to any aspiring voice actor. These stories also segue quite elegantly into my definition of the word “mastery” and how it applies to the artistic process. It’s a wonderful way to bring my time together with Julie to a satisfying conclusion and I’m so glad for the opportunity to share these insights with my listeners!