Still, he said his own experience as an actor has been a plus. “They don’t care abut your acting resume unless you’re a celebrity,” he said.
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“How else would you know how to approach a book that has 60 characters in it if you’re not used to analyzing scripts?”Ĭopeland, who pursued careers as a rapper and an actor before finding a niche as a voice actor in commercials, said an acting background isn’t as important to the people hiring talent for advertisements. “The person who has an acting background, that is going to give you a huge leg up” in the audiobook world, McCormick said. Perkins, for example, says she did summer stock theater and a few national touring productions before moving to Los Angeles and taking up voice work. Having some experience on stage or in front of a camera helps. “If you’re not the type of actor who likes to play around and have fun, it’s going to be torture for you. “You’ve got to have an imagination to do that,” Rudin said. And the actors have a lot of blanks to fill in, performing not just the lines on the page but also the grunts, groans and all the other sounds coming out of their characters’ mouths as they move around the screen. Typically, she said, each voice actor in a cast works individually, like a soloist before a conductor with no other members of the orchestra on stage. What to consider as you pivot to HollywoodĪctors who have chosen to pursue Hollywood later in life as a second career share their experiences and advice. That world felt a little more accessible to me, somehow.”Ĭompany Town It’s never too late to pursue acting. “Animation was the one place where the heroes in the story sometimes didn’t look like anybody I knew because they were out of somebody else’s imagination. “It wasn’t lost on me as a kid that the heroes of the stories often didn’t look like me,” she said. Beatriz said her interest in voice acting dates back to her days as a child of two working parents in suburban Houston, when she and her younger sister spent a lot of time watching cartoons and animated movies.
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Take Beatriz, a theater actress who came to Los Angeles about a decade ago eager to do voice work alongside films and TV shows. But one thing that seems common among voice actors in all these fields is a fertile and well-practiced imagination. Narrating an audiobook, providing the voiceover for a video game, performing lines as an animated character and making a commercial pitch are markedly different pursuits that demand different skills. Here are their pointers for how to break into and succeed in the business. The Times talked to Los Angeles-based voice actors Stephanie Beatriz, who works in film and TV Chanté McCormick, who records audiobooks Thomas Copeland Jr., who specializes in commercials Joe Zieja, who’s worked in animation, games, corporate video and commercials and Kathy Perkins (stage name Kathy Grable), who’s done a wide variety of voice gigs in addition to teaching the craft, as well as agent Jen Rudin, head of animation at ICM Partners in New York. As with anything in the entertainment industry, you’ll need skills and perseverance. Which is not to suggest that it’s easy to break into the field. And as the opportunities have expanded, so has the number of people finding careers doing voiceovers. Long a fixture of commercials, kids’ cartoons and overdubbed videos, voice actors are now finding outlets in audiobooks, podcasts, serialized dramas, online educational materials, video games and animation for grown-up audiences. The explosion of content being developed for screens of all sizes has led to a burgeoning demand for actors - including ones who perform for a microphone, not a camera.