Week 6: Woes and Successes
Life keeps throwing wrenches this month. What happened this time, Sam, you may ask? If you don’t want to hear about dental gripes, I suggest skipping the first section. My music and voice over journeys continue even among the chaos!
Life Woes
I had my bi-yearly dentist appointment. A standard checkup. Turns out I managed to crack a molar without noticing. My lovely dentist was doing the cleaning and asked, “you aren’t in any pain?” Me, confused because why would I be in pain in a basic cleaning, responded, “…no?”. Turns out I managed to crack my rear-most molar at some point since my last cleaning. It was obvious when she showed me the photo of the spot. Thankfully, since I keep up with my oral hygiene bacteria hadn’t managed to penetrate too far into the tooth, so I only needed a crown instead of a full crown + root canal. Any dental hygienist might be asking why they would do the more expensive crown procedure instead of just filling it? That tooth already had a filling, and this is, in fact, the second time I’ve managed to crack it. At this point a more permanent solution was needed.
Unexpected expenses aside, the expected expense of minor repairs in my home are adding up and my to-do list ever growing in preparation for selling my condo. Unfortunately, there are some drywall repairs I need done due to having had a section of wall torn out a few years back to replace the old HVAC. I say unfortunate because, while an easy task for a contractor, that means I need to find the right shade of paint to match the wall to the rest of the home. I do have an old paint can from the previous owner, but that paint is over 6 years old and I believe is just the primer they used, not the color. With my luck I’ll end up having to re-paint the whole place. Considering I’m already up to two and a half walls and several repaired spots to paint over throughout the unit from cracks and other standard wear, that may end up being the correct choice in the long run.
Voice Over Learnings
In the last post I covered the steps I’ve learned for preparing a character audition. This week I didn’t have a coaching session as I am working through a few practice items before setting up the next one, but I did attend two more group sessions: improv in voice over and marketing.
Improv
Improvisation is a key skill for any form of acting – or art in general. I had previously experienced a few improv exercises when I did theatre in school as a child but haven’t gone over the subject in many years. We’re talking 18 years. Real quick, what is improv? It is working unscripted or unplanned. This form requires quick thinking and a strong imagination.
Being able to improvise on the spot helps an actor give different takes on a scene. Playing around with one sentence and quickly coming up with alternative lead-ins or settings is one way to work on the quick thinking needed for improv when practicing solo. For example, the line, “Oh, that’s my good boy” could be said to a dog or a particularly flirtatious lover. Which interpretation is chosen makes drastic changes to the tone of the line. Maybe you choose to say it to a toddler instead? How does that change the tone of the line?
There is one major difference in improv for voice acting and improv for stage acting. When voice acting on a mic, you can just run a new take. When on stage in front of a live audience what you did is committed. You must work off it with no takebacks (unless you’re doing that fun exercise where someone offstage tells you to change it up until they are satisfied). That brings me to the next point. Commit to your choice. Don’t stay in your head – fully go for it! Staying in your head makes it feel fake. As actors, we want it to feel real.
Marketing
We all know that any successful business out there has a marketing plan. If you didn’t, you know now (*winky face*). It is the way they announce themselves to potential customers/clients. The image they create for themselves. For me, this website, blog, and various social media platforms (TikTok, YouTube, Instagram) are all part of my marketing plan. Sure, people don’t normally bluntly say, “I’m writing this blog in part because it is a marketing opportunity,” but I view transparency as part of my personal brand so here I am saying the blunt thing. Of course, that isn’t the only reason I write these blog posts. I like documenting my journey and sharing learnings with others so we may learn from one another; after all, humans are a communal species.
There are many forms of marketing, and I am only just learning about how to best accomplish them: email funnels, the before mentioned social media and websites, casting platforms, conferences…the list goes on. I am not ready to do the majority of these marketing forms. Without proper demos in place, I would be spinning my wheels and hurting myself in the long run. Right now, the openness of social media is my best tool. Perhaps after I have that character demo complete I’ll be able to sign up for one of the casting sites for that type of work. I’ll need to evaluate which one of the dozens I want to start with because, as I’ve heard from many experienced professionals, not all sites are equal, and we need to submit auditions quickly if we want to have them actually heard. I consider those sites a stepping stone on the journey to a fully sustainable career as ultimately I’d like to find an agent who would help locate auditions for higher paying roles not available through those sites.
The one casting platform I have set up is ACX. This is the audiobook narrator casting platform behind Audible. While I don’t anticipate me doing much audiobook work given the texture and tone of my voice, I find learning to navigate the platform and practice both vocal technique and editing with the few audition scripts available that I would be a fit for beneficial. If I were to get any form of audiobook narration job, it is likely to be in the youth or self-help genres. I highly doubt anyone would want to listen to a bright-toned voice narrating something like a romance.
Music: New Single
If you haven’t heard it yet, check out the lead single for my upcoming EP ‘It’s a Lie’! To make it easy, here is the Spotify link and YouTube lyric video. For a first song release, I feel promotions are going well. I have gotten some…interesting…comments. Such as one person saying TikTok thinks a video of mine is AI? And another with a bunch of middle finger emojis. That one made me laugh because what did I ever do you sir stranger? It looks like I’m going to have to create a few videos showing my creation process because there is no way I want my art being labeled AI when I spent a very long time learning the craft and creating.
I am looking forward to the full EP on Tuesday (9/22 8pm for Spotify). Hopefully it is as decently received as the single. I’ll be pushing a second song for that via the same marketing campaign company as the first.
That is everything going on in my world! Hope you all enjoyed this lovely mid-September weekend as the weather cools (or warms if you’re in the southern hemisphere).
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