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When I was a very little girl, I wanted to be an actress. Watching Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz and Shirley Temple movies made me realize exactly what I wanted. Despite being very involved with high school theatre and getting my bachelor's in Theatre, I didn't get a lot of stage time. Nobody ever really knows what to do with me.
It was still what I wanted even when I joined the Navy and I managed to get to perform with an English language theatre group when I was stationed in Lisbon, Portugal. (I will forever swear I would have met less English people if I had actually gone to England.)
I've never stopped wanting to act, but a lack of confidence in my ability held me back. Well, I knew I was good at it, I just didn't think anyone else would ever see it. Over the last 10? 20? years, I've started thinking about voice acting. It's basically just reading to a large degree and I excel at reading. So, I signed up with a voice-over training company out of New York, paid them far too much money - but it got me moving in the right direction, so I'm okay with that, got a demo out of it that resulted in a response of "yeah, that's a demo, can't do anything with it, but it's a demo."
There is a wonderful voice coach here in Houston and I finished a beginner's workshop with him last month and will schedule a follow-up session to discuss where I go from here after the New Year. It was a wonderful experience and I'm looking forward to the discussion. He's main philosophy of voice acting is that you have to know yourself very well because that's what you're sharing with your listeners. I've come a long way in that regard since Spring 2017 and some new ground has been dug up the last few months, some because of the class and some because it's time and I'm ready.
The prison ministry I'm involved with starts the weekend retreat off with a talk about the Prodigal Daughter - it's a ministry for women whose lives have been impacted by incarceration hence the gender-bend. I have always identified with the good daughter who stayed at home and did what she was supposed to. If someone needs something done and doesn't want to worry about if it will get done competently, I'm the one they ask. I've pretty much always thought of myself as Ethel to someone else's Lucy. I'm the sidekick. The best friend. But the coach and the guys in the class have made me wonder if maybe I can't be Lucy. Everybody in the class was really good and discussing one of the recordings, the coach said I was designed for this. One of the guys called me flamboyant and charismatic, which I know wouldn't be in the top 50 words I would choose to describe myself and probably not in the top 1000.
Anyway, all this is leading up to me announcing I've joined LibriVox which is a site that does audiobooks from public domain books, plays, short stories, poems. A lot of the stories come from Project Gutenberg. They ask that you do a test to check out recording quality before volunteering for a project. If anyone wants to listen and let me know what they think, I'd love to hear about it.
It was still what I wanted even when I joined the Navy and I managed to get to perform with an English language theatre group when I was stationed in Lisbon, Portugal. (I will forever swear I would have met less English people if I had actually gone to England.)
I've never stopped wanting to act, but a lack of confidence in my ability held me back. Well, I knew I was good at it, I just didn't think anyone else would ever see it. Over the last 10? 20? years, I've started thinking about voice acting. It's basically just reading to a large degree and I excel at reading. So, I signed up with a voice-over training company out of New York, paid them far too much money - but it got me moving in the right direction, so I'm okay with that, got a demo out of it that resulted in a response of "yeah, that's a demo, can't do anything with it, but it's a demo."
There is a wonderful voice coach here in Houston and I finished a beginner's workshop with him last month and will schedule a follow-up session to discuss where I go from here after the New Year. It was a wonderful experience and I'm looking forward to the discussion. He's main philosophy of voice acting is that you have to know yourself very well because that's what you're sharing with your listeners. I've come a long way in that regard since Spring 2017 and some new ground has been dug up the last few months, some because of the class and some because it's time and I'm ready.
The prison ministry I'm involved with starts the weekend retreat off with a talk about the Prodigal Daughter - it's a ministry for women whose lives have been impacted by incarceration hence the gender-bend. I have always identified with the good daughter who stayed at home and did what she was supposed to. If someone needs something done and doesn't want to worry about if it will get done competently, I'm the one they ask. I've pretty much always thought of myself as Ethel to someone else's Lucy. I'm the sidekick. The best friend. But the coach and the guys in the class have made me wonder if maybe I can't be Lucy. Everybody in the class was really good and discussing one of the recordings, the coach said I was designed for this. One of the guys called me flamboyant and charismatic, which I know wouldn't be in the top 50 words I would choose to describe myself and probably not in the top 1000.
Anyway, all this is leading up to me announcing I've joined LibriVox which is a site that does audiobooks from public domain books, plays, short stories, poems. A lot of the stories come from Project Gutenberg. They ask that you do a test to check out recording quality before volunteering for a project. If anyone wants to listen and let me know what they think, I'd love to hear about it.
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(And yes. I did, indeed, although it's been much less fraught since my SIL died for various reasons.)
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