Voice Over Blog Monkey

For anyone who grew up watching this series, this is good news – whether you play video games online or not:

Leonard Nimoy Reprises Legendary Role of ‘Spock’ in Star Trek Online

Looks like the ‘ole Spock will be adding his voice to the new Massive Multiplayer Geekfest Online Role Playing Game (MMGORPG) based on the Star Trek universe.  With the success of the recent “reboot” movie, this might actually have a chance!

This gets me thinking about what a great gig this would be for your average trench-digging voice over actor.  Unlike a one-off video game, an online gaming world would require constant updates, right?  If your character is part of the main storyline, they would be constantly releasing upgrades or “advancing the story,” all of which might require more voicing from the lucky VO.  Sounds good to me!  It’s kind of like getting a TV series instead of a one-off TV movie.

Now, if everyone could just agree on fair rates for video game VO, we’d be all set

As I do more and more audio books, I run across more and more pronunciation resources – or have them suggested to me.

Recently I completed a book of essays on the intersection of faith and science, and let me tell you, it was a challenge.  Each author gave a short history of their particular field, and seemed to delight in using large, arcane words.  From ancient Latin and Persian to modern scientific processes and techno-babble, this book had it all.

As it turns out…one of my best sources was of the flesh-and-blood type.  My Italian friend Stefano helped with the Italian names, my French-speaking friend Abby helped in her area of expertise, and my big fat Greek Pastor Bill helped with the ancient and modern Greek (ok, he’s neither big, nor fat…but he is Greek, and a pastor).  …and no, I won’t give out their phone numbers

In place of that, however, here’s a few more internet resources I’ve been availing myself of:

Tufts University Latin Site – for all your Latin needs

Japanese – for your next character from the land of the rising sun

Asian names – a general searchable database for Asian names

French Audio Dictionary – ’nuff said

Bible words – Methuse-wha?

Maybe I’m just not that familiar with the voice of Zach Braff, but this Slate.com article really rips him a new one:

Brow Beat: Zach Braff

Do you want this man selling you products?

The author references this Cottonelle commercial as the epitome of badness:

Source: Gizmodo

This just in: a new drool-worthy piece of tech that I want yesterday.  In short, it’s a two-sided tablet type computer that has multi-touch capability.  The down-side, it’s from Microsoft….but maybe they have some new employees on the usability side.

Here’s where it might come in for voice talent: some voice over artists like to read their copy off of a monitor, whether to save paper or for easy scrolling.  This can be tricky, however, since it will involve running cables into your booth; a monitor cable, and probably a mouse/keyboard cable as well.  With this device, I would imagine loading up a PDF or Word doc and flipping through the pages would be a dream…very quite page turns, and you’re saving the environment.  Plus it looks like there would be very easy highlighting/note-taking functionality with the stylus.

The downside is that this would be purely a “reader.”  With a cabled in monitor you could also edit in-studio, like this example.

Check out the nifty video example in the full article over at Gizmodo:

Microsoft’s secret tablet

Yet more digital ink spilled on the whole celebrities-are-taking-over-the-industry issue.  I agree, it’s annoying, and it’s interesting that a non VO-specific publication picked up on this: Examiner.com  Check out the article and let me know what you think:

Call of the Wild

This hasn’t really been an issue for me, but then again, I’m not in LA competing directly against some of these celebrities.  Chicago has our own local celebrities and voiceover rockstars that command a lion’s share of the VO market.