VAM 202 | Interview with Crispin Freeman, Part 3
Welcome to episode 202 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 part 3 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 asked me to tell the story of how I got started as a voice actor. While I’ve recounted this story in earlier episodes of the podcast, this time around, Julie wanted to talk more in depth about how my emotional responses to my personal experiences shaped my acting journey. This included how my childhood experiences in Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia helped me relate to the Romanian director of my graduate acting school. Julie and I also talked about how influential J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy literature had been on my psyche and the lessons I took from the values he expressed in his stories about Middle Earth.
In this segment, Julie asks me to describe the next steps that I took to further my voice acting career, and I discuss how I got started working on anime dubs in New York city in the late 1990s. Julie asks about my demos, when I made them, and how they helped me make progress towards my voice acting goals. She then asks me to share my opinions about AI and whether I think artificial intelligence and machine learning can create meaningful storytelling. After that, she continues with more questions from my voice acting colleagues, including one from Steve Blum about whether or not my analytical skills, which have helped me develop a deep knowledge of storytelling, ever get in the way of my spontaneity as an actor. In order to respond to that question, I end up articulating my personal acting process with a level of specificity and nuance that I don’t think I’ve ever done before. Julie has to reframe my explanation twice just to make sure that both she and my audience can understand my thought process as clearly as possible.
Julie is very good at asking me questions that I had not considered in the past, which gives me the opportunity to figure out my responses to these conundrums in real time. I find it very satisfying to tease out my opinions on these topics with her as my sounding board, and I think my listeners will both enjoy and benefit from gaining a deeper understanding of how I approach both acting and storytelling.
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