The Voiceover Story, Part 2: Hakuna Matata

Warning: This post is another interminable installment of blather about my voicework. The story began in the previous post, so if you've got a lot of time on your hands you can read about the background to this post there.

So despite the hugely long post to be found below, I never really did get to the issue that inspired the whole deal in the first place. As mentioned there, I've been training on the engineering side of the sound booth for a few weeks, along with Deb and Mary, two delightful ladies who started at the school at the same time I did (we attended the same introductory seminar, actually, though we didn't formally meet and start hanging out until some months later), under the tutelage of Chuck, the man with the voice we all wish we had. We learned the basics of recording with the equipment at the studio and celebrated our one year anniversary of attending Voicetrax classes (our toast was that we'd actually have a few paying gigs by next year).

The training allows us to run the boards and open and close the studio for classes when Samantha is not in attendance--there are a great many guest instructors and not all of them are familiar with the equipment. Not only do you get experience on that end, but you get to sit in on classes for free. We've all been scheduled to engineer for a handful of classes through the end of the year.

I got an e-mail on Friday that Deb and Mary wouldn't be able to make the class they were signed up for this weekend and Chuck invited me to come run the boards. Joanna in her infinite kindness allowed me to go, and I'm quite glad I did. The instructor is the head of voice casting for Disney(!), so had all kinds of stories about what it was like casting for Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, The Emperor's New Groove, and just about every other major movie the Mouse has produced in the past several years; they also do the casting for Miyazaki's pictures and he had many a story about Howl's Moving Castle, which I have still to see. In addition, they cast for all the peripheral work, like video games, audio toys, and the like. They're working now on the casting for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which is excessively cool (here's your movie trivia for today: the producers were pushing really heavily for James Earl Jones to be the voice of Aslan, but the studio held out, claiming [quite rightly] that Jones was the voice of Mustafa from The Lion King and you just couldn't have the same voice for both. I know who they cast, but I'm not going to tell without some kind of bribe). He was also just a very nice guy.

In any case, I did pretty well at engineering and, as sometimes happens if you're lucky, there were a couple of moments when I got to get in the booth as though I were a real student. The class focused a good deal on voice-matching and synching sound with video, so they were doing lots of exercises putting student tracks up against Disney animation, which turned out hilariously (I got to provide about two lines for Kuzco from Emperor's New Groove; a bit strange to hear my voice come out rather than David Spade's). He also had them singing, using Disney karaoke CDs. A talented young fellow named Wes had gone in to sing "Hakuna Matata" (you knew that the title would have some explanation here at some point, didn't you?), and he was lacking a Pumbaa to his Timon.

Enter me.

We sang and we rocked. We were far and away the best of the class and we got a good deal of applause as we stepped out of the booth. The instructor was impressed, and that's no bad thing. That's another of the advantages of the Voicetrax classes and the amazing roster of instructors Samantha has gathered--even if you don't come away with excellent performances, you still meet some important folks in the business--having my name known in some capacity by the casting director at Disney, I figure, can't hurt. I've met a slew of producers and agents while at the school, too, so hopefully all these encounters will pay off one day.

All right--that's it for voicework stories for now. I've got a master class on audio books at the end of the month, so I may have to pester you about that then.