VAM 131 | Interview with Eliza Jane Schneider, Part 1
Welcome to episode 131 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 first part of my interview with voice actor and dialect expert, Eliza Jane Schneider! You may remember in my previous interview with Zach Hanks how he mentioned how much he appreciated Eliza’s comprehensive dialect classes. Based on Zach’s comments, I thought it would be apropos to have Eliza on the podcast to speak with us! Eliza has an amazingly long and diverse acting career. She started very young as an actress in both school and community theaters. She parlayed her theatrical experience into on-camera acting jobs in college and eventually into voice acting. She’s probably most famous for portraying almost all of the female characters on the animated series South Park in the years between 1999 and 2003. More recently she’s the voice of Agent Rama in the Agents of Mayhem video game, she’s played numerous characters in the animated series Sanjay and Craig, and she’s also in the animated series Breadwinners playing the Tooth Fairy. In addition, Eliza and I have also been in a number of projects together including Diablo III where I played the Male Wizard and she played the Female Necromancer, and also the Pirates of the Caribbean video games where I voice match Orlando Bloom to play Will Turner while she voice matches Keira Knightly to play Elizabeth Swann.
In addition to her many acting accomplishments, Eliza is incredibly dedicated to the study and mastery of English language dialects. While she was still in college, she bought an ambulance and travelled around the country recording people speaking in their native accents. She’s turned many of these interviews into one-woman theater performances where she reenacts her interview subjects on stage. She also studied with Robert Easton, a master of dialects who was once dubbed the Henry Higgins of Hollywood for his ability to train actors. Eliza has taken everything she’s learned from Robert and created her own unique approach to dialects and accents. I’m very happy to have her on the podcast to share her insight and expertise with all my listeners!
In this first episode, we explore how Eliza broke into the entertainment industry. We discuss her desire to be an actress from a very young age and how her experiences in the theater helped shape her approach to acting. It’s amazing how resourceful and ambitious she was in her efforts to tell stories and perform. I think my listeners can learn a lot about tenacity from hearing Eliza’s story!
If you would like to learn more about Eliza’s dialect training, please visit her website at:
Download Voice Acting Mastery Episode #131 Here (MP3)
Thanks for this fascinating look at Eliza Jane Schneider’s life and career (so far). She’s fun to listen to and I’m looking forward to the next podcast where she will explain about accents in more detail.
I hope you had a lovely Thanksgiving.
Hi there Mr. Freeman. I was wondering if you could take some time out of your day to address rather an important matter at hand. There has been a rough debate going on in the Online Voice Acting Community on doing VA services for free would ruin the Industry. If you could fill out these questions below, it would mean a lot as this debate needs to end for it is getting out of hand.
1. Should Official Voice Actors/Actresses, or just voice actors in general, offer their services for free, or do free VA work in general, should the Voice Actor Chooses to?
2. Would this ruin the Voice Acting Industry as a whole?
If not.
3. What would ruin the Voice Acting Industry?
Hello Mr. Freeman,
I was curious if you, or anyone you know that has, auditioned for a character has ever been denied that role however were asked to perform as a different character in that same project instead?
Thank you,
Katarina Mahan
Hello! I noticed this episode doesn’t seem to show up in the archive but part 2 and 3 do. I just thought I’d let you know.
Hi there Nathaniel. What archive are you referring to? It seems to show up in the November 2017 archive on the right column of the VAM website.
This one’s missing the “Podcast Episodes” category, so it doesn’t show up in this list: http://www.voiceactingmastery.com/category/podcast-episodes/page/2