So recently I was interviewed for an article in Craine’s Chicago – a business publication online. I fear the article makes it sound as if I’m way more successful than I truly am – but I’m still thankful!
Archive for category Voice Over
Interview in Craines!
Jan 12
The Voice of Nimoy
Dec 31
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 
Pronounce What??
Nov 25
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:
Do you want this man selling you products?
The author references this Cottonelle commercial as the epitome of badness:
A Narrator’s Dream Machine?
Sep 23
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:
OverDrive for the iPod
Sep 18
iPods get new tasty DRM-free audiobooks!
I’m seeing a lot of chatter about this lately: Overdrive is dropping the DRM on some of their audiobook titles, which will make them compatible with the iPod and iPhone platforms. If I’m understanding this correctly, it means that users will be able to download DRM free audiobooks to their ipod. I guess the desktop client version of Overdrive is what you need to do this….
There’s an article here.
Some good blog coverage with comments by a libraian here.
And here’s a blog specifically on audiobooks on iPods
While this is great for end-users, I wonder if the publishers are worried about pirating. Strike that – I know they’re worried about pirating. One of the audiobooks that I’ve narrated pops up as a torrent when you Google my name…so I know people are doing it. And this particular title has a smaller audience, I can’t imagine how quickly a Dan Brown book would be up on the Pirate Bay. We’ll see how this shakes out, I’m interested in keeping an eye on it.
Photo credits:
More Celebrity VO Attention
Aug 27
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:
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.
As I mentioned in my previous post, sometimes I have a hard time finding the correct pronunciations of words in narration scripts or audio books. Especially if it is a foreign word or proper name it can be hard to track down. Here’s a few more resources that were suggested to me:
Merk Manuel: lots of medical terms
Voice of America Pronounciation Guide
Lots of good sources for names! In addition, I had a project recently with a lot of foreign words, specifically Arabic, and this site: HowJSay, seemed to include a lot of them.
Celebrity Voice Overs
Aug 6
Here’s an interesting list on an annoying trend: Celebrity Voice Overs.
Via the Ethiopian Review.
The Pronounciation Conundrum
Jul 29
We’ve all been there, you’re reading along in your voice-over copy, whether that’s for an audio book, e-learning narration, or commercial, and you come to that word that despite your overwhelming large knowledge of vocabulary, you have no idea how to pronounce. Seriously, it’s okay, you can admit it, it happens to best of us.
Glabrous
Sedulous
Shibboleth
Now how do you pronounce these guys? Usually I use a combination of two sources: Dictionary.com and the OED. Between the two of these you can usually find out how to pronounce just about any word. The OED is great for archaic words, or if you just like to geek out over the linguistic history of words. As far as I know you can only check it online for free through something like a library. My account with the Chicago Public Library gives me access. (you can buy the full version, a micro-text version, or coming soon, the OED Thesaurus!)
Now that’s all fine and dandy…but what if the word you’re having trouble pronouncing is a proper name? If it’s the name of a person, or especially a foreign person, you might have a hard time knowing how to pronounce it. I ran across this recently while recording a non-fiction audio book. The author quotes numerous outside sources, many of them foreign writers or personages. As an example, one of my first challenges was:
Dag Hammarskjöld
Phew – there’s a mouthful! First off I just did a Google search and was able to easily find out who he was: Swedish diplomat and author, and former Secretary-General of the United Nations. News to me.
Photo: UN/DPI
His Wikipedia page conveniently has an audio file of how his name is pronounced – wonderful! However, there were many other names I ran across that Wikipedia did not help with. Enter a new site, or at least new to me: Forvo.com This site tags itself as “All the words in the world. Pronounced.” A hefty mission, to say the least. I looked up Dag’s page, and there is another pronunciation from a native speaker, similar to Wikipedia’s. They also give you a handy little map that shows the nation of origin. I don’t feel too bad for not knowing of Forvo already since it’s only been online since January of 2008.
You can become a member and contribute to the cause! Forvo now has a reserved spot in my bookmarks and will be a tool in my box for future projects. If you have any tips and tricks for finding pronounciations of words, or helpful websites, leave them in the comments section!