Birthday Month Excitement and Reflection
July is my favorite month because it’s my birthday month! It always feels like a restart of my year. It’s warm out, sunny, and people are off enjoying the brighter evenings. I’m looking forward to a week away soon to see my grandparents and best friends and some family. I share a birthday with my red-headed grandpa, so it’s very special and necessary to me to celebrate it with him! Here’s to sleeping in and eating tasty food and having lots of laughs!
June was rough to me, in all honesty. I went to the doctor to get my ears cleaned, which is a normal thing for me. About a month ago I had an ear infection that never fully healed, and when my doctor cleaned my ear, it stirred the infection up and made it worse! Then, the ear drum was sensitive and tore a little! It was the worst pain I have ever experienced. I took some time off and took it easy from workouts for a week, which was a big bummer for me as I’m very active. But now, 3 weeks later, I’m feeling close to 100% and I can hear out of my ear again! It really makes you stop and appreciate what you have, and hearing is so crucial for voice actors!
I still kept up where I could, doing auditions and sending out cold-emails to potential clients. Making reels and doing Women In VO challenges kept me happy and creative.
On June 24, I had a one hour class on “Accents of the Midlands and Northern England” with Dialect Coach and Linguistic Anthropologist Paula Vanlandingham through Actors Connection online. It was broken into 2 weeks. Paula did a great job of giving a backstory of how it’s different sounding than RP English accents, and how it’s actually very similar to American accents using some of the same sounds. We looked where to place certain sounds on parts of the word to give it the Birmingham accent aka like the TV show “Peaky Blinders” or a Manchester accent aka the TV show “Ted Lasso”. Then all 6 of us got to practice lines out loud and get feedback. It was cool to see everyone get a grasp of it! During the last week, I was walking around the house or driving in the car and practicing, it was quite fun! Then we finished the second class this past Friday and practiced Yorkshire accents, like in the TV show and films “Downton Abbey”. I got great feedback that mine was pretty spot on which is so cool! I posted some stories of myself practicing on my Instagram stories in the archive “Training” if you want to see!
The last Saturday in June, SkillsHub had its 1 year anniversary and birthday party! Their site is a great VO community and has on-demand training from a variety of coaches. It’s run by Jennifer Hale, who is an awesome video game voice actress. She led a Q&A session that was only suppose to be an hour, but extended it to an additional hour. She had some great insights about not only acting and business but mental mindset about approaching our craft and our outlook. She told me not to “give-away” my power and focus on what I can control. I loved following along with what others were asking and saying. Voice actors are such a wonderful community.
I had TWO new clients this month which was very exciting. I did 2 Explainer voiceovers for Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County for their “Smart Trips” program. One focused on signing up for the program and the other for using the calendar feature when scheduling trips.
The second was a client that I sent a cold email to back in January and they got back in touch with me. It was a pleasure to work with them and I’ll be able to share the project soon!
Last week I had my Character Demo prep session with Universal Talent Coach Garnet Williams! He custom wrote my scripts for all the voices I have created and it was SO much fun to act them out. Our demo prep session was scheduled for 45 minutes, but we flew through in 25 minutes! It’s taken about a year of figuring out my character voices through one-on-one coaching, classes, general practice and some research but I’m so excited for the demo to come together! Our demo recording day is slated for tomorrow, Wednesday July 6th. I’m expecting the production and editing to take a week or more, but I’m so excited to share the finished product and hard work with the world! I’ve got my friend Robyn, a tattoo artist in Salt Lake City, drawing me as an animation character to post alongside it for some fun. I love collaborating with other artists in this regard!
I hope you have a wonderful week and find moments to make you happy and challenges to elevate you! Don’t give your power away and push onwards and upwards!
