Aliso Creek Voice Over Blog

If you’re reading this blog post, chances are sometime in your adult life friends, family or coworkers have commented on how nice your voice sounds. Or maybe like us, you go around using animated and wacky voices to entertain friends and family. If this double life sounds familiar, you’ve already inadvertently taken the first step to becoming a professional voice actor. Continue reading →

The essence of a great voice actor is the ability to speak the written word as if it was spontaneous. This may seem challenging, but with the fun and exhilarating exercises of Improvisation, not only will you become a better voice actor, but you’ll have fun and meet exciting people like yourself.

Voice acting is a mix of both the critical script analyzing left brain and the fun spontaneous, intuitive and artistic right brain. The techniques learned in fundamentals classes such as analyzing script and knowing what keywords to put emphasis on, are necessary skills in voice over acting. However, you need that artistic, method acting approach of being in the moment to really make the script come alive-And this is where Improvisation plays a key role. Continue reading →

Congratulations to those who participated in the first Improvisation for Voice Actors work out class. The folks that acted as our improv guenea pigs were the most creative and fearless group I’ve worked with and were able to very quickly grasp the creativity and spontaneity of improvisation. And then the group turned around and immediately applied it to their voice acting.

We used all sorts of fun and interesting improv games to work on acting skills such as scene visualization, spontaneous character development and then jumped into the booth for commercial reads as well as animation and group reads. Continue reading →

Right Brain... meet Left Brain!

Standing in a booth and talking to a microphone all day long is fun but it can get lonesome. How do you break out of that rut?  With Improvisation!

Improvisation games are fun and active exercises that get you up on your feet and keep you on your toes.  This is how it works! The improvisation game format is established up front such as “we will conduct an interview with two people” and the class decides who their characters will be. Then the scene work that is created is ad-libbed on the spot by the actors. Continue reading →

Wav files longer than a minute should be delivered using

Well, it happened again. I got a small job for a video narration about a hotel. No big deal. Two and half pages. A few words that were tricky to pronounce but overall an easy job. Then I got the email from the client. “Please email me the finished files in WAV format.” These clients are out there, and you are going to run into them sooner or later. The ones that are familiar with the digital terms but don’t really know what they signify. I’ve always said, you don’t have to be Bill Gates to do this stuff but you DO need to know a bit more than the client. The bottom line: anything longer than about a minute in WAV format is going to be too large to email. Usually WAY to large.  So what is Plan B? Continue reading →