David Ciccarelli on the Future of Voices.com using AI voices

A series of recent events sent the VO industry into a spin last week, culminating in voices.com revealing that it would be aggressively expanding into the area of AI voice, TTS or speech synthesis.

Many reports circulated that voices.com, due to a change in terms of service, were now able to train any voice model using demos, auditions and jobs uploaded to the platform.

I put the concerns of the VO community to the CEO of voices.com, David Ciccarelli - and these are his direct responses. This content is provided for information only, and for the purposes of fact-checking so that interested parties can make up their own minds.

Here is a transcript of the interview:

Toby Ricketts

This is VO life hosted by me Toby Ricketts. It's a podcast, which goes over all the things happening in the voice over world. We meet the people behind the voices, and the people behind the companies that employ the voices. And today we have a very special guest, David Ciccarelli from voices.com. Recently, we've had some controversial news that's come out about voices.com, which is in the area of AI. So welcome, David. Thanks for coming on the program and answering some questions today. Of

David Ciccarelli

course. Great to be here, Toby, you and I go way back. So happy to to chime in.

Toby Ricketts

Absolutely cool. I thought Firstly, I want to do a bit of a recap bit of a timeline about the history of AI voices. And I don't like calling them AI voices. And I've heard people say it's not AI voice it's nothing AI about it. All it is is text to speech or speech synthesis. But we will probably mention AI voices from time to time. So anyway, back in 1960s, IBM developed speech synthesis, you know, you got the Stephen Hawking voice, you can hear what it's saying, but it doesn't really sound like a human. Then in the 2010s we've got machine learning Alexa, Siri, Google come on the scene in 2014 11 and 16, respectively, they offer like dynamic speech so that you know the computer can generate some text and read what's on screen or read you know, commands etc. Then in 2020s, the voice models improve Google's taka Tron two comes out in 2017. And lots of sites launch using this as kind of a face plate and basically just using the API to generate speech and then selling it to the public. And this is the first idea that as voices as professional voices, there's some you know, there's this stuff doing a very bad job of what we're doing. But in the last two years, there's been huge investment into like, you know, in data purchase and mining for speech data on the internet, machine learning generative AI comes along, of course, Chet be GPT is the most recent edition of this in terms of like generating text and just getting hyper realistic passing the Turing test and really smashing through all those barriers that we thought would 10 years away. Then there's stuff in the in the visual field like Dali, mid journey, stable diffusion comes along, starts, you know, copying famous works of art, extending famous works of art as the most amazing thing where they can basically paint what the the original artists didn't. And, and now it's kind of crept this photo realism is kind of starting to creep into the world of professional voice. We've got things like 11 Labs back, we've even got people being replaced, like with AI, radio, and DJs. You know, effectively fake these, as you can't tell, are not human. Then suddenly, last week, all of this stuff happened. We had a new song released from one of your fellow countrymen, Drake, one of the famous most famous rappers in the world, except it wasn't Drake and the weekend, it was a song that was completely contrived using AI. X next. And a very interesting sort of sudden court battle ensued, which we'll get into a little bit in the interview, but it proved that there were holes in the copyright law when it came to copying people's voices with AI. There was a Wall Street Journal article that came out at the beginning of last week, which outlines how lots of voice of artists and a lot of the people I know and work with, how they're being stolen from, you know, old samples that have been hoovered up from around the internet, or previous jobs that they've done for clients, where the terms of service were changed, or something happened around that. A good friend of mine and host of The Pro Audio suite, Andrew Peters announced on his podcast the other week that he's been replaced by AI for one of his biggest gigs, which has been the voice of a network. I got interviewed late last week about about how my voice had been stolen. And I was suddenly like, has it and I looked into Yes, it had I've been I've been copied on the internet. And then right into the middle of this whole fray like all this is going on. And then the voices.com announces the purchase of voices.ai. And and you updated your terms of service. And this is where everyone the internet went crazy for a second, lots of fires were started, pitchforks were grabbed and charged with and there was lots of lots of robust debate, shall we say around the internet about what it meant? What does this mean for me as voiceover, there's lots of existential crises going on with with with people's voice and their careers because like, you know, many people rely on this for their, for their bread that brings them to their house. So it mostly centers and this is my first question and mostly centered around the terms of service of voices.com. And we've covered this before in other discussions, because I remember when it changed, and it was like, you know, we own the voice for whatever we want all around the world in every jurisdiction. And that was correct me if I'm wrong, but that was basically so you can transfer the ownership from the voice to you to the client, so you can therefore Chase pregnant. That's it in a nutshell, right?

David Ciccarelli

Yep. So if the client doesn't pay for any reason that we have some recourse to go after the client to say listen, you don't own it. We own it as a temporary kind of holding pattern. On behalf of the talent until you pay Yes. And then we dispersed the payment to the talent. So that was that was the background on that project.

Toby Ricketts

That's advice. I assume you've had lawyers have got involved, and also only these rights otherwise, we can't do our jobs. So but what people are saying is that that effectively does like it puts in writing that you can use it for all these purposes. And while VoiceOver is not in, like explicitly mentioned, it's not explicitly excluded, I guess. So my biggest question is, like, you've made statements basically saying, We will not use your voice for AI, we won't use demos, we won't use auditions and we won't use and the end clients are not allowed to use Final jobs. And this specifically stated that it's an AI job. Why can't you? You've said that in statements like blog posts, and you've said it, you know, on interviews, etc. But couldn't you incorporate that into the terms of service? Because that would put a lot of mine people's mind at ease?

David Ciccarelli

I you know, and the short answer is, yeah, we're going to, and I think that's what we've realized that it was maybe an omission, through, you know, realizing that the technology has kind of developed that quickly, that this is needed. And it's why we co create with the talent community. And so we have some terminology with the lawyers right now, I was hoping that I could get it, you know, if you will, approved prior to prior to our podcast, but I'm happy to kind of read it out, because I think it's the section here, that would be most helpful that it does, quote, does not permit voices to make or trained derivative works. And then might be asking, well, what's the derivative work, such as synthetic voices, or more commonly known as AI voices of any user generated content without the express consent of said user, ie the talent? And so that's, that's what we have, I think it was just, it's really just the call out because derivative works. You know, it could be a cut down or an edit or something. That's how I think initially, we're thinking of derivative works not to create a whole synthetic voice. So that's what's that's what's kind of in queue right now. Yeah, there's, I mean, we've never created an AI voice. From, you know, from a from a demo, from an audition and the finished product, it's owned by the client, if the clients paid for it, that's their ownership at that point. And nor do we have any plans to so this wasn't, this wasn't a difficult decision to make. It was, as I say, perhaps, an oversight and omission, mostly because we didn't recognize the speed of the in the development of the technology. And if there's concern that we're doing this, I'd rather dispel the concern and put it put it in writing. And I appreciate that I can, I can make pledges and statements, but it's, it's really the legally binding agreement, which the community wants and happy to oblige.

Toby Ricketts

Okay, cool. Does that also cover the fact that if I, you know, say, I do a, you know, a three page elearning, for for Microsoft, that then they own those files, once they've, once they've paid for it, and they have this files in their position, it's very easy for them to train something like a living labs on that on just, you know, three minutes or 10 minutes of audio, and to sound like my voice does anything in the terms of service prevent clients currently from using it for a different purpose than was hired for?

David Ciccarelli

It does similarly, how, and I'd have to kind of dig up the exact kind of section number, if you will. But certainly the intent is just like if you're going to have it for an audiobook, and that's presumably hours long, it's for an audiobook. It's not meant to train another system. And maybe in a more kind of practical use, you said, it's for a radio commercial, you don't get to transpose that and put it into an online audio ad and upload it to Spotify, and get, you know, a million listens that way. So this really does come down to the honor system of the client saying this is how I'm going to use it. Our responsibility is to ask the right questions, and capture what they're saying, in terms of usage, and ensuring that we communicate that through this system to the talent and let the talent decide. Yep, that's acceptable in terms of the use and the price. That's what I'm agreeing to. And yet, I think we can go a step further. And so next week, you know, there's there's a lot of these licenses that have been established. I've granted permission for my voice to be used for this medium for the next time period, 13 weeks or a year. And yet there isn't, you know, a log, if you will, a system and we move asked talent, how do you keep track of all that usage? And there's a phrase in the industry that the real money is made on the back end, it's not actually the initial particularly in broadcast work. It's not necessarily the initial creation. It's the ongoing usage of that for real successful campaigns that might go on for multiple years. And so we wanted to build a in what we're launching next week is a license management system, where the client To be able to see all the licenses that they've purchased. When it comes up for renewal, we'd ask them, I think it's like 30 days in advance. Are you still using this? Do you plan on using it? If so, would you like to renew your license? And then there's a request for quote, and so that they can ask the talent, hey, what would it cost to renew this license for, you know, and they can extend the time period. Or they can extend again, modified, perhaps the jurisdiction of the media, if you will. So it is a request for quote, but it's, it doesn't require an audition, and it doesn't require the delivery of another file. But that at least creates the system for that kind of ongoing usage, to be, you know, managed and monitor over

Toby Ricketts

time license extension. Exactly. It'd be lovely to see some kind of collaboration with eyespot. TV or one of the media monitoring platforms as well, so that it can actually, you know, because I know many people who found work that are still playing that should absolutely, so that's, that's exciting progress. I'm just going back to the Terms of Service, again, in terms of what because many people were, they were like, it happened on the same day announcing the AI voices and then changing the terms of service. And of course, someone who's, who's a bit worried about the career anyway, will leap to the conclusion that you change Terms of Service, so that you can enable you to train voice models for whatever, whatever, you've gone on the record saying that that obviously didn't happen. It was a kind of a minor change. I think they happen on the 24th do want to just outline people who, who didn't see the explanation for that.

David Ciccarelli

Sure. No, thanks. Thanks, Toby. The change on to the Terms of Service last week actually related to we've removed something from the terms of service, which related to language around the categories that we, you know, moved into, you know, we've always we've been doing for voiceover for more than 15 years, a couple years ago, we thought, Oh, well, you know, audio production is a natural extension, maybe music composition, or kind of custom music. And then translation, often scripts need to translate from English to French and Spanish and so forth. And so why don't we enable these additional creative services on voices.com, then we had lots of, you know, service providers, other talent in those other creative categories. But really getting the clients to think to go to voices.com. First for translation was a real struggle, even though they had, you know, maybe done some work with us in the past. So that was

Toby Ricketts

an experiment that you launched them didn't really work,

David Ciccarelli

exactly, we looked at, and I think we're a niche player and, and really excel at that. And I think that's something that we're recognizing, and so we should, you know, in all likelihood, embrace the strength of being a leader in voice. And you're right, it candidly didn't work as, as anticipated. So we thought, why maintain these because every, every new feature and iteration, we talked about whether it's licensing, or, you know, searching the search engine, we always have to ask, Well, how do we do that for translation? How do we do it for music, and it just slowed us down? Okay, so we decided to wind it down, remove the language, you're right. Coincidentally, had these are two completely unrelated items. Now, when we make a change to the Terms of Service, there's, there's three levels, okay. One is this fundamentally changes the nature of the agreement, the spirit of the agreement, if you will, between voices, and the clients or the talent, in which case, and that could be around pricing change, you know, cancellation clause refund policy, these kind of big pieces. And in that case, you've probably experienced on some sites, you'll land and it requires you to click or accept the agreement before you even continue. So one, this was far from that this was kind of saying this didn't work, we've removed this language, one level below that would say, Okay, we're going to inform you that something changed. And we'll describe kind of what it is. But in this situation, you know, and that's kind of like an email goes out, and people are informed. But you don't need to click to accept it just kind of breeze breeze through the lowest level would be it could be everything from a typo, to, you know, removing something innocuous that we're just not doing anymore, or a change of address or something that just needs to be a, you know, an update. Still, we go through that goes through kind of a, you know, a past with the lawyers internally and externally. And then we publish the new terms of service and archive, I think, which is above the standard of care archive, the previous version. So that's, that was really the level of change. In this in this Terms of Service, the sections that have been mentioned, they've actually been in there for over two years. So it's not like we added this new section. At that time. It's been there for two years.

Toby Ricketts

We did an interview on it at the time, actually, which I'll link in this video to prove that that's the case. Yeah, it's been a while the other kind of couple of legal questions while we're on the legal side. Which does hear where this exists is like, When will this new wording be added to the Terms of Service? People want to know that? Yeah, I

David Ciccarelli

listen if I could have it happened today? I certainly would. I mean, it went to them on Thursday, which was the April 28 or so. It's usually a week turnaround. It sounds you know, innocuous, just to add a couple words of like, trying to be more specific. But, you know, you know, the fact that we're even having this conversation shows that every word matters. And so just want to make sure that we've, we've gone through the process there. But because this is the commitment in saying, we're not going to do something this would, you know, be at that level of, of sending out an email, informing the community and describing in that email, Hey, here's, here's what changed. And here's, here's what's new and different as of this date.

Toby Ricketts

Okay, cool. And on the low question as well, someone brought up on one of the forums that, that you're based in Canada, and it's Canadian law, which governs your your terms of service, and which, which doesn't have any statutory performance rights provisions like in the US, and produces utilize work for hire doctrine there. And apparently isn't much so that we can do about it. This is this is the problem that's being seen around the world in various jurisdictions where, like, for example, that the Drake video where they found that they there wasn't actually any law to be able to prosecute this person, because then they've done anything wrong, according to the law. So is there is it something you've thought about in terms of like, is it always going to be governed by Canadian law where there's not as strong a copyright provisions in California law, for example? Like, how does that implement your your terms of service and your business model? Do you think we can sort of get what power clients have in this new AI world?

David Ciccarelli

I don't think it weakens it. I mean, we, as a Canadian entity, we do, you know, abide by Canadian law. The the new site, which again, we're really just standing up, is not another legal entity. voices.ai is really just a website at this point. It's not it's not a distinct legal entity. So it certainly would fall within Canadian law. And, you know, in the in the United States, the actual jurisdiction where most of the corporate work where a company maintains its corporate headquarters or entity is actually in Delaware, because there's so much precedent for case law in Delaware. So each state might operate differently. But if it's, you know, it Delaware has like the history and there's something unique about that space, it's not a very populous state at all,

Toby Ricketts

I had a podcast about that the other day about how it is like, it's all of the corporate laws are written by corporate lawyers. And literally, it's like, entirely closed off process. So it's basically like, you can do whatever you want in Delaware.

David Ciccarelli

That's, and that's where you if you were to incorporate a new business, it almost defaults to being in Delaware. Yeah, that's where you're Incorporated. You can operate really anywhere with with your office. But we're Canadian company. We've not viewed this as a hindrance in the past, and certainly hope not in the future, either.

Toby Ricketts

Okay, cool. That's so good. I guess just to round off that decision about because still people will have an issue with, you know, the terms of service that have been enforced for two years saying, you know, we can we can use, we can use this for whatever we want. There's Do you see there is any other way around that in terms of like being able to be the intermediary between voices and clients, you will always need that permission, if just expressly for the purposes of completing a commercial transaction? Is that your your official view? And there's there's sort of no other way? Because that does put a lot of people off, even though it's probably on other sites to be honest.

David Ciccarelli

Yeah, I mean, we've, I guess, in the absence of that, we it really doesn't give us any teeth to go after the clients, like how are we engaging the clients? I mean, I think the key difference is that we run a transactional platform, the money and the files are delivered through voices.com. Most from the best of my knowledge, most other voice kind of casting sites, really act is purely the matchmaker and say, Okay, go off to PayPal to figure out payment and send files by Dropbox or upload them to Google Drive. They're not handling the end to end. And so because we are, which is actually our patent that we hold in the US and Canada, which you know, we pervert, I guess properly referred to as sharpei. But there's a patent that's held on that. It really does require us to have that kind of end to end kind of coverage. And why which is why the language is a lot stronger there because we're facility transaction from the get go right through file from payment and file delivery as well.

Toby Ricketts

Interesting. It'll be interesting. If was 123 has changed, because they had been now, you know, trying to get as many talent through their platform on their, you know, them organizing the payment sites or their terms of service have changed. But I get back to our main topic. So voices.ai, you bought voices.ai? Was Was this? Was it just a name? Because, you know, I went to the site expecting demos like on speech alone there. I mean, there are 1001 ai voice sites now, because everyone wants to be the new, you know, center of artificial voice. But I was kind of disappointed in terms of it had lots of lots of statements like all the others and pictures, but you couldn't press play anywhere and hear the results, you could sign up for updates. Was it basically just a park domain that you bought? Or did you buy any technology along with that? Or any kind of data sets or anything like that?

David Ciccarelli

Yeah, no, I'm glad you brought that up. Because it was it was, it was really just a domain. Originally, it was just purely to be a defensive move. I mean, I wanted to acquire the domain, so that it didn't get into the wrong hands, ie a competitor, or maybe a new startup causes all kinds of confusion of, you know, hey, is this the site kind of looks and feels like you, there's actually even some quite some sites nowadays that are that are just voices, and then some something else, and people think that it's us. And so that I kind of saw that playing out. And I was like, well, maybe we should, you know, acquire this name, as the kind of ideal, I did what most people do, you just type it into the browser at the time, it was just simply a parked domain, which, which for those who are unfamiliar with this term of park domain, it means a website that is just hosted by the registrar, it's kind of a placeholder page, and it says, you know, website coming soon, something like that, and some contact information for the registrar, there was no, there was no site on it, there was no company or technology. In so after speaking with clients, though, you know, being someone I try to connect the dots on this type of thing, we've actually identified a new type of customer, which is that of the software developer, you know, on voices.com, mostly, it's creative producers, it's video producers, it's brand managers, marketing agencies, and, of course, small business owners as well, too. But this new persona, if you will, is that of the software developer, and these are people who were wanting to incorporate, you know, a synthetic voice into their product. And maybe it's for, you know, content that changes all the time. And therefore, you know, it's kind of a two way conversational assistant, or a chatbot. And so realizing and kind of identifying this new, you know, this new use case, if you will, and this new persona. At the same time, we were scheduled to attend an upcoming conference, on this very topic. I just felt, hey, why don't we soft launched this website, with this vision of actually creating a voice development platform. So a development platform is, you know, it's not really for the creative producer. It's somewhere where you get code snippets and documentation, and yes, through through code, you can access these type of AI generated voices. So if you go to, you know, Amazon Pali would be something for people to Google. It's the same type of voice development platform by Microsoft as yours manifest the same sort of thing. Exactly. Yeah. And so IP is basically it's really a tool set developers to create applications and seeing that, you know, chat right now, and is very popular, but it's really just tax base, that next evolution is going to be conversational, two way. And it's going to be voice based. And so I, you know, really just spotting an opportunity. So that's what this this site is there's you're right, there's no samples that you can play. It's really a join a waitlist, but we've been actually reaching out to those that have signed up and just said, Hey, what brought you to the site? Thanks for joining the waitlist, what is it that you're looking to build, because maybe we can help you sooner than later or when we co create with you, let's make sure that we're building the right thing. So there's 100 software developers on the list, and in certainly growing by a few every day, and you know, the future we're going to build with them as well, too.

Toby Ricketts

So you don't want to miss out on that. Because it's, it's clear that this is the direction that the world currently is heading in in terms of like heading voices. And you know, no one wants to miss that that piece of the pie, because we can see that it is going to be a big part. And I mean, we've been seeing it as voice artists for years, but didn't expect it to get this good this quickly. I mean, you'll be dragged into all of the debate that's raging at the moment, which is like it's large in the voice of Stockholm. It's mainly about copyright law. The Drake thing that I talked about earlier with the rapper, who you know released the song that he didn't actually sing at all, like they just sampled his voice, wrote a song and then wrapped it and then had their voice put over the top of it. And it highlighted all these these really interesting issues around copyright and the fact that like, No Copyright Act currently covers synthetic performances, just distributing copies of recordings. And so since AI voice recording is not a performance, given by the person who holds the copyright, it's a new, it's a new work independent. And so like lots of people are saying, well, this is, you know, the service. This basically allows people once they've got your voice likeness, as long as you're not performing it, and it's an AI performing it, then it's, it's, you know, the copyright belongs to the person who created the file so that in what ways I mean, this has been outside of the I don't know maybe what you've prepared for, but like, Have you identified ways to be a part of that debate? It's important now that we try and find a way that's equitable for voices to go forward and try and make some kind of living off off the synthetic voices they create. And you're going to be a big part of that, that discussion, given that you've got probably the one of the world's largest voice data sets, although you said you won't use it for for AI training? What are your thoughts around around? What's going to happen with copyrights? And how voices can keep control of their their voice?

David Ciccarelli

Yeah, well, to the best of my understanding, you really can't use someone's image or likeness, in for commercial purposes. Now that might be the difference is that that musical piece was done as almost like fan, a fan piece, it wasn't meant to generate revenue. Just like you can't take a picture of a celebrity, and then use it in an advertisement, right, without their permission, because you're using their image or likeness. Now, this is why we're gonna say quite sensitive about this, when a client would ask for a sound alike, like, are you doing an impression of someone? Or are you trying to impersonate them, because if you're impersonating you are really trying to be that image and likeness of that talent. Classic example is James Earl Jones. People would say like, I want you to sound like James Earl Jones. So are you putting it off as being them? That's who you hired? Or is it an impression, where it's more satirical, if you will, in its in its performance? It's so I think there is a fine line. However, you know, the law clearly needs to be updated to handle this, but probably that distinction is if it's for commercial commercial purposes, on voices in particular. You know, how can we maybe prevent I think, is it might be where, what you're alluding to, like, prevent the misuse of, perhaps someone's cloned voice. You know, a couple things right now, we don't allow clients to, you know, download the auditions, or sorry, the demos, you know, it's really hard to extract, you know, you can't just go in and like, go to Google Images and get every image that's available. Or some of these sites where you can like download on mass. We, if we see kind of like, bought like activity, we're going to put, you know, we have firewalls, we're putting up blocks, it's quickly. So these are kind of preventative.

Toby Ricketts

Just just just just to expand that theory, there was a debate a long time ago, and it still kind of goes on a bit about watermarking. Because you know, and I was shied away from watermarking, because, you know, you'd only read, you know, most of the scripts or whatever, not include the brand name or something. And that would be that would prevent them from using it effectively. But now that we're talking about the actual likeness of a voice, is I mean, if everywhere, if every demo had a slight watermark in it, it would be quite useful because then someone couldn't just go and like write a script that would go and harvest every sample of a page. For example,

David Ciccarelli

I've heard that on. Audio Jungle has this little whisper audio chuckles from whisper in the background, a lot of sites do that. If you recall, I actually think it was voice 123 A couple years ago did that and clients were just, you know, talent, were like, you're, you're deteriorating or degrading my voice, I want this demo. And clients in the audition were like, this is kind of useless, you know, like they might want to play with at a team meeting or a collaborative session when they're making those decisions. So you know, I've witnessed this a few times. We've contemplated that for, like for auditions, it's just becomes incredibly distracting. I think most clients have good intention of they're going to use this audition so they can make a decision and ultimately hire a talent about it. So I'm not sure and when it comes to an AI generated voice, this is something else really important, I think for the community to know and understand. The highest fidelity that this can be done right now is 22 kilohertz, which is kind of half the quote unquote broadcast quality. So I am having a hard time believing that big brand out there who's going to spend millions of dollars on airtime and media buy is going to use a degraded low fidelity. I mean, it would be like, you know, audio file it'd be like seeing a billboard with it's all pixelated or like a watermark on on it.

Toby Ricketts

So I think the content is more than that. It'll be used for the long tail audio like, like like audiobooks, you know, elearning industrials, basically industrials is where is where it's at, in terms of this new voice technology, because that doesn't really require the acting and the quality level, most of its watched on YouTube on phones. So really, like the quality is not as much of a barrier as I thought, I feel like commercial, and commercials will be safe for some time yet.

David Ciccarelli

I would agree with that

Toby Ricketts

it's the train, it's kind of the training grounds of voice over the, the stuff that you do, when you're you first start out that is, seems to be mostly in jeopardy. And for that quality doesn't matter as much. Because that used to be my argument was just like, you know, the speech synthesis models, they only sample at, you know, 2205 hertz. So, it's, it sounds to me as an audio engineer, like, it's not very good quality, but I think people watching on their phones and on YouTube videos just don't don't even perceive that. Right, quality is really amazed at how quality is dropped. For even for things like commercials, sometimes when people are recording stuff on their phones, or through the Blue Yeti mic or, you know, and and it's kind of deemed acceptable. Now, we're absolutely wouldn't have been five years ago. Yeah, so that is a bit of a problem, you know, in terms of people that the bar to, to acceptable audio is much lower than it was I think, even with with regard to the performance, because you do hear some YouTube videos that are clearly AI voice generated quite badly. And yet, it says hundreds and 1000s of them. So

David Ciccarelli

yeah, I mean, the genres, if you will, that I would almost describe as like, the applications or the uses, where, you know, voiceover might be impacted, or kind of is like might tend towards an AI voice. And I know, we're using that term kind of interchangeably with synthetic voice as well, too. But I would look at the spectrum of like informational versus emotional. And if it's just pure information, like turn by turn directions, the elevator, the parking garage, the airport announcements, I mean, it's very, basically public service announcements. Or, it's, as you describe this kind of corporate training material, where the person in the curriculum departments, you know, and human within human resources, and they're the curriculum designer, I mean, their mandate is to make the content accessible to the most people possible in that organization. So that there's a new compliance or safety video that's being produced, then they need to make it available in five different languages. And the whole thing does needs to be, you know, so that people of all walks of life, whether you have a and perhaps even disabilities can access that content in a lot of ways. It's purely an accessibility play that is being done here. And they don't unfortunately, have a lot of budget for it. And so the tendency can be that it's 100,000 words, and we're just going to have the generated text to speech voice, do this, rather than it gets in sometimes it's not even economically feasible for the talent who's going to who's going to do 100,000 words, for a few 100 bucks, no one is going to bother. So they're in a bit of a conundrum themselves to abide by accessibility, whether it's a law or a mandate within their organization, but then aren't given the appropriate budget. So how do they make those to fit? But basically, it's informational content. That can often be very high word count. Or on the other end of the spectrum, very low word count. Still informational. But it's, it's five or six words, it's almost, and I hope this comes out the right way. But it's such a short shelf life that the content has, you know, it's a one time social media video that, you know, once you've seen it in the feed, you don't want to see that again. I've seen and heard that video before. vapor? Well, exactly. And a lot of a lot of clients are like, producing 10 different variations of that video to see which one sticks, right, different calls to action, different script even. And how do we do this at scale? There's one advertiser that actually produced 2000 They hired a talent to do this 2000 variations of an ad. And it could it was different price points. 495 496-490-7595, five different calls to action Sign up today get started today. And then language depending on the device and the location that was used. It was all this, this whole matrix of all these different combinations,

Toby Ricketts

dynamic ads, I think they call those now is probably the way there is I think as well like they had so they kind of construct them on the fly, which is a very you know, it's an Interesting new form of media. And that kind of combines, like, kind of it's gotten outside the realms of advertising. It's more market research now isn't that amazing? So

David Ciccarelli

you just and marketing, the phrase of her recently is marketing is math, you know, people are going to create all of these assets, they're going to figure out through the numbers, which one works the best with the most about people, and then run with that. It's not just, it's not merely a creative decision, we're going to create variations, and then pick the winner, so to speak.

Toby Ricketts

Cool. Again, like with this new, you know, building voice models, so you've kind of gone out and said, You're going to be creating voice models, this is with individuals on on the voices.com platform. So you're not talking about kind of creating faceless models that are generated sort of out of thin air or out of out of large data sets, you're talking about specific voice models that people will own, still on your platform, and then you'll be the licensing agent for that, is that correct? Almost like a reseller,

David Ciccarelli

right, it's still your voice, but we are reselling that voice on your behalf. So I think this is how we're going to do this differently than maybe as you describe kind of the dozens of other startups that are that are out there. They're trying to aggregate data to create an anonymous, I refer to them as the mash up voices, it's like five different voices all at the same time, you can't really tell who it is, there's no attribution back to the talent. So if you really wanted to work with them for the big national campaign, you couldn't, because you don't know who it is. So how we can do this differently is that inviting to start 10 men and 10 women to have their voices cloned on voices.com. And it's done by professional voice actors. That way, the client can always hire, you know, the natural professional voice actor. But if they have some of these situations, what we're hearing of like, scratch tracks, it's a spec read, or just trying to get a sense of the video timing, these type of situations, or it's a test campaign, and before we go invest in the bigger national or deploy the big media spend, let's just see if we can get some quick feedback from the market, if you will, kind of that market research idea. So I don't So in those situations, you you hire the clone. Now the ideal state is you start with the clone and kind of it's it's almost like an upsell to the professional. But some maybe it maybe they're just realized up that ad campaign didn't work. No, I would rather have that client, start that journey@voices.com and be able to kind of reuse the term upgrade to working with with the Pro, rather than going to two or three different sites and trying to, you know, figure all that out. So I think there's a number of between the kind of like that, that spec test work. And then this dynamic nature of content, I think those are two real promising kind of new forms of media that previously are the types of jobs that weren't coming to voices.

Toby Ricketts

So just for clarity, because at the beginning that you said 10 Men 10 Women are going to have their voices sampled, it sounded like you were gonna put all those together to make a clone, but you're talking about 10 separate clones, male and female, and they would read and people will want to know this, that the people whose voices are sampled are free at any time to stop using that, and you won't own that they still have ownership of their Yeah,

David Ciccarelli

that's correct. I mean, there's, I mean, again, there's what's in it for us to say, No, you must stay on the website, we're gonna continue to use this, I just think it breaks, you know, trust in violation of everything that we're trying to achieve, which is if you want to participate, here's a new and different opportunity. If for some reason it doesn't work out, pricing or timing, or for whatever reason is, like, Great, we'll just, let's call it, you know, turn off that service and availability on your profile. So, you know, easy, you know, no harm, no foul, easy way to, to take the exit on that one.

Toby Ricketts

So just wrapping up, because I know we've taken a lot of your time today and thank you for for answering the questions. Like, like, Why do you think I'm, I'm always surprises that you guys sort of make a change. And then suddenly, everyone just like goes crazy, is what is it about voices.com that people just seem to get so mad about I know that sort of there's there's a bit of history where things didn't go right in the past, you've addressed it and I feel like you know, you've you've you've fairly addressed that. Is it just that people won't like, like, once the trust is broken, they'll never trust you again, or what's your sort of strategy for trying to make people feel better about the platform?

David Ciccarelli

You know, this this, it's really challenging because we often do things first. And when you do things First, there's unknowns because there's no precedent, right? There's not someone who's done this, you know, five times or you know, and in which case, those who are gonna say, the best I can do is communicate, be here on podcasts and interviews and videos, maintain a blog, let people know what we're up to. But there's actually a few venues that maybe others are unaware of, you know, I certainly don't operate in isolation. First and foremost, we have a great board of directors, who all of these type of decisions are run by that include a couple of independent board members, as well as our investors in so they're, you know, our intentions and incentives are aligned to make sure we're doing right by the business as well as the customers in which we serve. I also, you know, consult, if you will, with a CEO advisory group. So these are 20 voice actors, that from time to time, I'll preview ideas to say, hey, directionally, this is where we're gonna go. Or this is a decision we haven't made yet, but I wanted to bounce it off you. And those are one on one sessions that are held. And in addition to that, I've been hosting a number of what I call voices local, which are really just private events, you know, if I'm in a city or traveling to meet with clients, or again, at a board meeting, you know, gather people around for dinner, and we can go deep, these often go for three, four or five hours at a time. And, you know, there's, there's, there's nothing, you know, nothing off limits. It's a you know, and there's also no agenda for the evening. So anything goes often it's, it's definitely talking shot the whole night, and I try to answer questions, and maybe provide some clarity where possible. And that's really been, I feel, Toby, it's actually been quite helpful in the last couple of years, since putting in a real effort to be seen, and hopefully be heard. So, you know, yet another commitment is to continue up with those practices, because I do think they're making a difference.

Toby Ricketts

Cool. But David says early toward coming to a city near you. One final question, will there always be a place for human voices who own their own voices on your platforms, and you won't, you know, exploit them as it were, like,

David Ciccarelli

Oh, my goodness, I think this I think, the futures people because people buy and, and like to engage with other people, that we dragged some research around, like, well, what are the most popular voices, and it ended up being that people like to, you know, in terms of advertisements, like to buy from people who sound like them, which makes perfect sense, right? It's whether it's demographically or geographically in so that he's just going to need, you know, the human elements. There's things that are very difficult to replicate, if you will, like, and I know, we just say emotion is a bit of a catch all. But there's a lot that's, that can be unpacked there. Things like timing or comedic timing, or pause, what's the right amount of pause that it sounds natural, or even just a breath? You know, I think we tend to edit a lot of breath. So sometimes you need the breath or the sigh. And so I think there's absolutely a place for human voices on voices.com, it's likely going to be probably 99% of the activity for for quite a while because clients say yet well, I've looked at it, I've tried it, I can see some situations here and there. And maybe they get started with it. But I think there's continues to be a bright future for talent for years to come.

Toby Ricketts

Fantastic. Well, thank you very much for representing today and talking about the controversy. And I think we we got, you know, we've got through a good chunk of stuff there anything else that that you feel like people should know about your your current moves?

David Ciccarelli

No. Well, I think if anything, know that this, you know, we have good intent, we are here in in collaboration with the community. It might be cliche, but I've said this many times, our business truly is based upon shared success with the talent. When you thrive, that's when we do which is why we create the content, which is why we bring in the clients. So we were enthused, and we want to continue to work collaboratively with the community.

Toby Ricketts

And if people disagree with that, and think that those aren't your intentions, is there a way for them to get in touch? Like, what's the best way to actually

David Ciccarelli

I would love nothing more than people to send me an email, my personal emails, david@voices.com, it's pretty easy one to remember. And no matter how you feel, or what you're thinking, or you see something or hear something that doesn't sound quite right, I would welcome that, because that actually opens up the dialogue. What is what is heartbreaking is the assumptions that kind of lead to you know, and that are that are not really based upon fact, or reality, or assume kind of the worst, that becomes very challenging to navigate. And there's nothing more that I'd love than just to open a dialogue and let me hear the other side. And maybe it's an opportunity for us to improve or minimally course correct. So I would encourage that if you don't, if you don't feel that way, simply send me an email. Let's have a conversation.

Toby Ricketts

And I mean, it's true. I've sent you a number of jobs. where I've been like, Oh, this looks really dodgy. This is not a good look and you've looked into it and you've either stopped it or you've explained the situation and it has it is a good dialogue and like there was a there was a job about this AI stuff that we didn't get into on this time. But you know, it's yeah, if you have any concerns, then then email David and you must get a lot of email though. That email address

David Ciccarelli

I do. It's it's a little it's a little scary, but I chip away at it. I spend a lot of time just chipping away at but so please extend some patience and some grace but I'll get you an answer.

Toby Ricketts

Dave. It's it's really CEO of voices.com Thank you for fronting today and appearing here on vo life we will be sure to be in touch. If there's any other questions that the community wants answered.

David Ciccarelli

You got it thanks, Toby.

The Queen of Character Voices - Lani Minella

Ever since I saw Lani Minella's Character Monologue on her YouTube channel I was amazed at how one mouth could become so many different people! Lani Runs AudioGodz - a voice production company specialising in casting and directing character voices. Lani herself has brought to life many thousands of characters in animations and videos games in a voice artist career spanning nearly 3 decades!

Join Toby Ricketts in a wide ranging interview with Lani covering many topics including: Casting vs Directing vs Voicing
Where your voices come from
Where did she get her start
Gaining confidence and knowing the trade
losing yourself in the character
Playing 'The Clickers' from The Last Of Us 2
How to come up with different character voices
How she uses accents in her characters
Managing the ethics of accents in 2021
The most underrated accent
How she comes up with alien noises
The challenges of creating accents and characters in voice sessions
Using real kids vs female voice artists
Serendipity in getting voice jobs
The story of the voice of Spongebob Squarepants
How to approach emotes and exertion scripts
How to make sounds authentic
Making death noises
Talking in pain
Vocal health and wellbeing

Contains clips of: The Last of Us 2 - Clickers Tiamat boss scene from Darksiders Avatar at Disney World promo from Disney Find more about Lani Minella from www.laniminella.com or www.audiogodz.com

Transcript:

welcome to the vo life and gravy for the brain Oceania podcast, it is my spectacular privilege to introduce my next guest on VO life today. I've followed this lady for many years, I run a voice Academy and I always make a point to show this particular video to my students, which is her going through like a monologue or kind of a routine of all her different character voices. And I've always wanted to be in touch and ask her about the craft. And finally, it's my opportunity. So it's my great pleasure to introduce Lani, Manila to the BLF podcast highlighting. Hi, how are you? Good to see you. I never knew that. That's the first time I've heard that. So thank you. So tell us just a little bit about your voice career. How long have you been in this business? Oh, since the dinosaurs, I've been probably I started in the game industry in 92. But I went through I mean, I'm ancient. So I did all that in kind of a radio business years before that. And so I started doing invitations on radio people heard that started saying, We need you to do ferngully movie voices and to pitch the LaserDisc way back then. And then they had someone downstairs doing CD ROMs I didn't even know what a CD Mama. And they said, Go downstairs and talk to our children's departmental. Okay. And I asked them who else does this? And that was the beginning. You know, so that's how it all got started with basically radio. And that was decades ago. Gosh, that's amazing. Um, you'd sent through like your, your kind of resume and I was looking at the front page and thinking, Wow, that's pretty impressive. And then I realized with 13 more pages of video, like literally scrolling, as you know, like, more quantity than quality. I tried to print as much as I can because IMDb doesn't? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it struggles with the video game section, doesn't it? So you you are like primarily a voice talent. But you also do casting in your direction and session? Is that right? Right? Definitely. what's your favorite? Is your favorite to do the voiceover stuff? Or do you enjoy all three? I enjoy all three. And the main thing is I I still would say that coming up, if I'm doing voices, the most exciting thing is to come up and construct new things, new alien languages, new things that I know expect. For example, when I was called to do the monster voices for it, chapter two, I had no idea what I was up there for showing up on the Warner Brothers live. It's intimidating enough trying to know where you're going and get passes and doing all that stuff. And then to be shown, okay, here's what we're doing. And we want you to watch the little line going across and go. Okay, that I think is really nice. And that's the fun part is when you get a challenge like that and can make up things on your own. But directing is fine, too. I really enjoy working with people and casting, I think you've had other people that you've interviewed before, is a it's an interesting thing. But when I do casting, I tend to not make people audition. I don't generally go through agents, because it's always last minute. Here's the stuff we need it in two days from now. So I just kind of I don't typecast people, but I will kind of assign and that's what makes it a challenge to a lot of boys challenge because we have to come up with with this on the fly in the session and be able to, you know, act. Absolutely. So when was the first time that you were that you discovered that you had this sort of knack for being able to just come up with you know, voices that were not your own? Probably ever since I was a little kid and had no friends. I would make fun of teachers in school and imitate them and get in trouble and be the class clown to make people laugh. So that would be my approval. You know what I mean? So the N telling jokes and things of that nature. So probably from the time I was a little kid, I just was imitating things that I would see on TV. And luckily I'd be by myself so I wouldn't embarrass myself enough. And it's one thing to be the sort of the person at the party with with all the voice tricks. But I mean, I've discovered as a coach, like you get a lot of people that sort of come on courses and say, I'm great at doing voices but then you put them Find a mic or in a situation where it's like, No, I don't want that. But I want something slightly different and they kind of they can't deal with it. So it's a it's an entirely different skill set to be able to make that work for you commercially. When was the sort of When did you sort of When was the first time you're paid to be behind the mic doing this? guy she sent me remember that, Barbara? I think it would probably be. Hmm, I'm trying to remember. But it wouldn't have been games, it might have been in radio, you know, because I was at radio stations as well thing production and things of that nature. But you're absolutely right. Being on mic, people can freeze up. And even if you see some of the YouTube videos of the celebrities that are in Pixar or something doing their stuff, they're standing there with like a pencil. And we all know that in order to get action, you should move your whole body and do gestures and be big. And when you're taught to do on camera, what they say don't do that too much, Jim Carrey exaggeration, you're going to look really exaggerated, but it's just the opposite. So being on mic, like I said, Sometimes I've worked. I've auditioned for agents, and I would ask them, okay, where do I plug the mic? headphones? And they say, Oh, we were getting feedback earlier. And I'd say Why? Because mary matalin was in the studio, and she couldn't hear. Okay, door flies open. And they say it's a customer. This, I want mainly agency, not to put the headphones on the talent because sometimes it scares them to hear their voice in their ear. I'm not. Okay, you know, so this is a whole other field where I think people don't realize they all think it'll be fun. You've heard that before, I think it'd be fun to do voiceovers, I can do really like, do them all. Well, I can do this and that. And it is better than digging ditches, it's a lot more interesting. And it does bring out a lot more creativity. But you have to be in voice control. And that's the thing, you're controlling your voice enables you then when someone says like you said, Can you make a little older? Can you make it a little less accent? Can you pull it back, you know, you have to be able to adjust on the fly. And if you don't have the voice control, and we all never know what's going to exactly come out when somebody says can you do you know, just make up something, do it. And you don't know if they want to, let's say, Rosie Perez, you've never done Rosie Perez before. And you have to say, I don't know that she sound kind of like this, you know, I mean, whatever you have to be able to kind of not be embarrassed. And the trick to is that the more you move, the more people who are actually watching, you are impressed. That person knows what they're doing, instead of Santa looking all nervous in the fig leaf position or your hands in your pockets or, you know, things of that nature. So yeah, I think that being on the mic can intimidate some people. But that's part of being on voiceover. So not only do you have to be an engineer nowadays, because you have to record at home. But you also have to be able to bend with the wind. And oftentimes, if you have a bad director, the trick is if they say I'll know it, when I hear it, you just ask them the question, would you like it in a texture older boys? Then they still say they know and there? You just heard it. And so yeah, there's there's little fix, but to know the trade and know the terminology. You know, like you're saying, p pops, you got to know what that means. So I think it's all a matter of you have to be more than just a person that reads as you will know, and I'm sure you train people to is that when people say I've heard the coaching philosophy of just be yourself. When you have to be different characters in a game. I would say you should adjust as that self is that character. Not necessarily that you're being Lonnie doing an orc given me. If I want to do an AUC. I'm not acting like mice who acts like that, you know what I mean? myself. So I'm thinking that you can do that you can kind of add yourself but that whole philosophy of fine your motivation, your subtext and all that kind of stuff kind of can be modified a bit to say that you have to bring acting as though you're watching yourself on a screen on your forehead, and you're playing that role being that role, but being your quote unquote, self does not confuse you a little bit. Yeah, absolutely. Like I often see people who come in my courses that it's like, they they know the character they want to do. And inside they've committed maybe 50% because they're like, I don't want to go too far, because I'll look silly. And it's like, the that's the point of this game is to is to go beyond what anyone else will. Like that's when you get real successes. Like it's not by doing a voice but by becoming that voice that literally feeling like right inside that skin, which I'm sure you'd agree. Yeah, well, and plus in games, they don't write enough lines to give you just one part. You have to play multiple roles because they could bring back some repeat character from six years ago with two lines so they get banned up Getting all the little Bitsy parts that are leftover that might be new, you know, so you do have to be able to sound different. And still not. We don't expect a man to be Mickey Mouse and falsetto. You know, most women do teenage boy voices. But most games don't have a lot of kids unless you're doing it. Kids game, you know, that kind of deal. So when you're talking about role play games, and massive multiplayer, online role play games, those would be the more adult things. And for women especially, you don't really ever have parts that are written for like the Encino check can act like oh my god. It's usually heavy duty warriors, you know, so women are going to be a little bit masculine sometimes, or if they're going to be a fighter, you don't want someone thinking they're going to be destroyed on the first swipe. So your voice has to indicate a toughness. That's very true, isn't it? Yeah. And then games do tend towards like, I guess a kind of a more violent, or at least a very kind of gritty kind of nature like that, then it's not often it was towards darkness rather than light, right. And even the angels may not sound you know, like they're that angelic. Yeah, because everyone is always in a fight. You're always trying to beat somebody. And when you're having an boss, like in a blizzard game or something, I suppose you have a million people all on your screen, little icons, all throwing their spells and doing whatever it is at this monster. It's difficult to make out the speech is usually just a cacophony of things going out there. So when you have emotes where you're dying, and you're attacking or being attacked, what have you, it all becomes a big mess. It's not usually that distinguishable between that. And I think I love being an bosses, I think that's really a joy, especially though, you have to realize that, again, I when I was called to be the clicker, or Last of Us to and I was impacted on the first game and the clicker, they just said, Oh, by communicate by clicking go. And you were watching an avatar on screen of Oh, this monster running down, smacking against walls, doing all kinds of weird things going in agony and doing all this stuff? Well, there's two ways of clicking, you can let it out like a screen door. Or, like do this. Then when you're breathing in, you know, you can do that kind of a thing. But you never know what's gonna come out of your mouth. So just the whole ability of trying. And showing that you're willing to look like an idiot is, I think, very much appreciated in the industry. You know what I mean? And people who have a good attitude and don't say, Don't tell me how to say it. Don't give me a line read. That's kind of you were bringing up before, things that we directors don't really like to hear. I mean, it's fine. I just sometimes they're in such a hurry that I can't think of an analogy, like, okay, you're out in outer space and a birthday cake folks by and your line is what is that? And because I don't know why we're saying half the time. What is that? So I'll say Give it to me two ways, like, what is that? or What is that? Okay, next, you know, on with that, it would be really nice if we knew more about the games. But I, for one have never heard anything, I was asked once per gauntlet, they said you're going to be part of the whole process that never happened. So what I mean is that so we're looking cool. How important is it to sort of to know the genre and know games? Like, are you a video gamer? Do you play video games? Or do you rely on the directors to kind of show you what the context is? Ah, neither. I have to ask sometimes the people who are working with you that say on a Skype call or whatever, they don't even know. You ask them? Is this over battle noise? Is this in stealth mode? Do it both ways. So you have to make sure that you keep the loud stuff last, so you don't wreck somebody's voice. But oftentimes, the things that people that are getting a test, maybe the audio guys, not the producers, you know what I mean? So we're we're working with somebody that doesn't really know the game, maybe they know a little bit, but we're just working pretty much cold. And again, I have to give script writers the credit, because a terrible script is hard to make sound good no matter how good of a voice actor that you are. So I really am applauding of people that write good scripts. I remember when I was doing blood too. Long time ago. One of my favorite lines of this. I don't know what she was thinking she's kind of Jamaican huge warrior, and she says, I've got chunks of people like you in my stool. And I thought that was just hilarious. You know? It's been tested. Yeah, yeah, I know. But the point is when you get some fun stuff like that you have fun. And teamwork is really essential. So if everybody's on it, hey, let's do this, we're gonna have fun doing this, and, and we respect our talent. And, you know, nobody's trying to put anybody down and make anybody feel bad. I think it all turns out to be better. And if the teamwork is, is where people know what they're doing, it helps. But oftentimes, we're working cold. That's very true, isn't it? And I think it's important to have that playtime. Like where you're maybe not in a session, do you set aside a time to or I mean, I guess if we don't these days, but did you just start with? You lock yourself in a room and be like, I'm going to come up with 10 different voices or something like that. See yourself challenges? No, I have to say no. Because again, it's usually a surprise, when we get our auditions in the inbox, we never know what's going to be. And if it is for games, more likely, I'm called lately. I mean, I say now in my career, I'm called up, let's say, by Blizzard, I don't know for what I'll show up, and they'll Hand me the script. Okay, we've got three different characters, sometimes you don't even see a picture. They're nice enough to pull a picture up when you're when you're in front of the mic. And you go, Oh, okay. Okay. You know, and so it's kind of a very spontaneous thing, which was why maybe as a good training, theater helps. Because you can project you can be bigger, you know what I mean? Then on screen, you can use gestures when you're doing theater, drama. And improv could be good. So you're quick on your feet, those two things might very much help or enough, what what kind of talk in terms of coming up with different voices and being able to sort of, you know, carry that direction? What are some of the levers that you can pull, because I know with my, my voice, you know, I've got the deeper register down here, and I've got my normal talking voice. And then I've got kind of a higher voice up here as well. And things like making those sound natural, but then there's also like their raggedy old tone, and then like young tones, I noticed that you've got lots of different levers that you can pull in terms of accent pitch, rasp, Enos, what are some of the things that we have to do, and this is when I'm coaching people, I will tell them, you've got your pitch or textures and your accent. I mean, that's the easiest way to of course, you got attitude and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, when you go to a kung fu class, you learn your kata, and I kind of made this up as a coaching link where you're going, you know, and you're hitting things, but you have been below your belly button. And if you want a deeper voice, by putting your lips forward, who you create more of a inverted chest, so you make yourself into a base metal. You know, Enzo, whoa, ha, ha, ha, ha. So it's, it's, it's formulating not only your body to cave in your chest to be deeper. But also, if you put your lips forward, it places the voice in the back of the throat, which is a great way to get a British accent by the way. For me in the morning, right? Yeah, that's how I tell people to do that to get into it. Because it's not it's not call me on the morning. Call me. Not that British people talk. Like that's a good way to get into it, you know? Exactly. So you've got that and then the texture stuff, is I tell people find sandpaper like Clint Eastwood or zombie? You do. You can start out with a loud whisper. I see dead people. Now add a little bit more. now. Go ahead, make my day then. I'll ask if I would ask you I'm gonna put you on the spot here. Okay, I want you to be a general think patent. Okay, patent or George C. Scott or a tough general with a gravelly I'm use that term, gravelly voice with a lot of rumbly texture. Okay. And I want you to say and bite your consonants, which means you know, you hit them hard. Get that mo over here now. Okay. Get that I'm over here now. Nice. Nice. Now I'd like you to try it. Have you ever played with trucks or gun? I'll try to grow like a dog. You have to flap your voice a little bit more make more air because your voices like a carburetor a mix of air and voice. So if you went and try Can you try her? Mo to me over now you got it. Let's see. You can also know that's great. Because you can lead into it you can go get that out even I mean you can lead in to do that kind of thing. And that gives you another voice you know that you could you could also do it. You know you could do all that kind of thing. So that's the different leavers as you call them, that you can do is to get the pitch. And now if you're cool, you can give them my accent. I had a funny story I told you that Wizards of the Coast THAT THAT DOES MAGIC and Neverwinter, which I do the casting for. never went to we were making the dwarves would be Scottish musket. ELLs are going to be British and the dwarves are going to be Scottish. And to help differentiate between all these races, and so that would give them a Scottish accent or whatever. You're ready to do. And then they came back say Scotland wasn't invented yet. It can't have Scottish accents. Right? Wait a minute, Britain was invented. But Scotland wasn't invented. I don't have my history that well, but it was one of those moments but yeah, so also, if you're doing accents or dialects, if you have a phrase that can get you into the right thing, it helps to learn either maybe some, maybe some of the language if it's a foreign language, you can, you know, almost die and getting you got a little bit more of that kind of a thing. But for Asian, I always use the most honorable pasa. So you put in phrases move on about, like three words. And the backup British drop their ers, like after over, under. It's the same way but you're not in the back of the throat. Hmm. So instead of saying I'd love the chance to die, I love that. turnstones ansata There we go. You can talk like British but you make phrase over under after, not over, under after? I think I mentioned when I searched earlier how when I ask people do you do British they'll say oh I do British accent. And inevitably a lot of men will pull off. You know, and or they think that Cockney and people who don't know where Cockney really originated from coffee. It's not what American Theatre is turned. What's our, you know, Mary Poppins? I know. It's actually a rhyming language like apples and pears means stairs, you know. So the point is that usually RP, Received Pronunciation. Patrick Stewart, drama Picard. That's the thing. But the mistake a lot of people think is that British always sound pompous and aloof. They don't you don't have to say no. So you just have to know a little bit more about that. And like I said that David Attenborough, cheap, you're doing voices that sound that you're really interested in what you're talking. And then we go to the script issue. If you have see spot run, see, spot run, you know, but many times you have to ask, Is this quick? How many seconds do we have? Well, this is in game. This is a shout out this is during battle. So you have to go see spot run. All those things are things which a voice talent should ask if they're not getting the directing? back? Is this stealth? Is this over battle? How quick do you need this? You know, those are questions because there's nothing worse than a bad director except for a bad scrap. Great quote. I like that. So with accents, because it's something that I someone specialized in in terms of like there's a difference between doing authentic accents. And then you can fool a native and then there's like, kind of stereotypical trope based sort of accents like you say, Have you like, how do you go about Did you just learn languages? Sorry, accents by osmosis. Do you just listen to it and kind of and follow the stereotypical form? Or do you go hang out with people who have been? Very nice check over time. It's hard to hang out with. But I will tell you an interesting thing about that. I listen a lot to maybe actors on screen. Okay. Game of Thrones, whatever. I'm not intentionally trying to listen. But if it's Scottish, I will listen to somebody. Now you know, Glaswegian and Edinburgh are two different accents, right? You want the one that is the most intelligible? And the most pulled back because everyone's afraid of offending? Somebody? No. You might be afraid of offending the real Brit. But I can tell you honestly, no two Brits think that each other's accents worth a shot. I've been in England, I've recorded a name. I was, you know, during this game, and I recorded in Southampton, and then I was brought up to London. And they would say, Okay, this was a ring cycle game for psygnosis. And it was not very good. But they were saying, We want this to be a cross between Manchester and Liverpool. And I go, well, Manchester is kind of more, you know, and, and liberals like john lennon. And I say, how do you expect to cross that there? Well, we could do that we'd be doing it ourselves. No one would know. So oftentimes, you know, it's, it's again, for most games, I think that you don't have to find the real person. Because, but here's here's a little tip for people who are bipoc, which is black, indigenous people of color, or binary, or trans, or whatever, that no, now everybody's asking for the complete f neck. You know, Stu, they're open to all ethnicities. This is what you're going to see in auditions a lot open to all ethnicities, blah, blah, blah. Well, I would say start taking theatres. Taking drama if you belong to one of those, okay? Because you would be a big fish in a small pond. Oftentimes people who are of a native thing are not voice actors. And I mean, or if they're getting into voice acting, they might have not had done characters, because when you're doing localization, a lot of those localization companies have native speakers that know how to do voice work, but they're doing medical transcription, or they're doing some sort of educational or, or online, whatever it is, and not games, not animation, things of that nature. So when it comes into looking, always listen, when you're around people listen to them, you know, try and pick up different things that you can watch TV, people told me once I know another guy that does coaching. And he said, I always tell people to go to a radio station online. For that country. I got to put this person down without telling them the name. And he says, and, for example, I'm going to play you something here. I've taken German and Spanish and French. But it's playing this radio station, I'm not going to be able to say it all in German, because I'm not that fluent in German. But you can take a fossil, you can do it with a rocket. Oh, okay, not Did you hear that, I'm going to play that part B bar, the bar, the dial. And so now I'm going to let you hear something from some guys that are not really German, but they're going to give you the good German accent. I really don't like your bond. I hate the music. I hate everything you're doing. Well, nobody wants Arnold Schwarzenegger, especially you have to kind of know something culturally that Germans kind of look down on Austrian, just like Japanese may look down on Korean. And it has to do with history, and stuff like that. So you want to be as nondescript, non regional as possible. Sometimes, for that reason, political reasons, and things of that nature. So you do have to listen, when you can listen to people talk. But the style of acting German actors, they kind of deliver everything like a machine gun. And because I've gotten the German lines from the game, and the actors, and here's what we did, and they will assign one actor, nine roles. And they all sound exactly the same, but they said they're not together, but they're not gonna care if a sound sounds the same. That's not how I do it. But okay, so that's the thing is that also Japanese, when you're looping are doing stuff over Japanese, usually, stereotypically anime, may have girls that are more of a high chip monkey kind of thing. And the guy's own monster, or they could be very kind of boring, you know, but it's a cultural thing. So you have to respect the culture. And looping is something that some people get into, it's the more difficult, but it is a different mindset, you can be a big star, and do ADR, you know, but you're not coming up with as many original voices and the ability to do timing on your own. As you're matching the timing of the lip flap, you know what I mean? So it's a more constricted thing, but you can be a big star in that field. But it's kind of like, in my opinion, and no offense, animate people and loving people, but it's kind of like the want to be DJ, that is a traffic reporter, you want to be it's just a different, different application of the voice. I'm not saying traffic records are not important, but it's a different set of you're not able to be as creative because you're limited within that time space to match the coming back to the you know, imitating foreign voices and you know, trying to inhabit the skin of others and being like an actor because I one of the things I've I've been thinking about the last especially well, especially the last year what with with the kind of with Black Lives Matter and, and lots of issues being highlighted around authenticity and, and privilege and that kind of thing. Like one of the things I've struggled with is someone who does accents and does imitations is like, when does it become socially unacceptable now because I feel like the ground has shifted in terms of being an actor because you know, you're if you're if you're imitating someone and it's meant to be funny, then that can seem like it's kind of mean. So I mean, have you ever come across those those issues yet? Or are you are you is your awareness heightened around those kind of things, I think is probably like gearing saying that in the last year or so that the attention is being given to not even allow us who could do a respectable accent, you know, and be believed by the big people to saying we need to give the opportunities, the people of color. And then there you have a lot of people in the Caucasian world saying, I'm not even going to touch that. I want the job to go to the right people. Now again, right, in my opinion would be who sounds the best and does the best work. Given all the people the chances who are of that ethnicity, sure, you know, but in my opinion, again, if those people aren't giving, you know, you can go way out of your way to try and find just to fit that bill, where you may have someone that fits it right then and there. So I think you have to have a little bit of leeway. But you're right. It's getting really political correctness. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for me, like, I've kind of made the decision where it comes down to intention, if it's like, if you're, like, if it's anything to do with making fun of anyone because of their accent or whatever, then it's totally off the cards. But like you say, if you're doing a genuine performance of someone good, and you know, you're not kind of like, just, they're not just coming to you because you're of a certain ethnicity. Yeah, you know, maybe they're your audition like kind of with those notes. But it is it's, it's it is, it's a bit of a minefield, it's challenging to the world, isn't it? Especially as I was told you before, that the oftentimes, black people, and there's not many games that normally have gangbang stuff anymore, but they used to be, you know, you gotta be tougher, like you're born to the ghetto, you know, I'm saying, at versus the Hispanic up. What are you doing, man? There have been games like that. But a lot of the black actors, some of them that I've tried, they take offense, when I say, can you sound a little more ethnic? Because they're trying to sound like I went to drama school and they don't sound black at all, you know? So, there has been that challenge of, you know, when when I'm asking people, they wanted you to sound black and you don't, right? tries different types, isn't it? Because stereotypes, yeah, they are things that we they're like cultural hooks that we we recognize and it's an extra, it's like, well, I'm gonna I'm gonna put it on that hook. But then, like, the political correctness has meant that we don't want to stereotype people, people can be whatever they want. But you still you can see that there's a tension there isn't there between, you know, what people will recognize and what's actually being sort of, you know, racist or offensive, it's, well, have you noticed that with your accent, that, you know, the, when I was at at a trade show, I was down in the lobby once and I was listening to people that were from Australia and there for a game company. And I am sure you know this, but a lot of people don't, that if you sound like Crocodile Dundee. It's kind of like the Cockney version of English isn't, but you know, good, I might, or whatever. And you might be able to do Outback Steakhouse or something like that. But in general, I said, You guys don't sound Australian at all. And they looked at me and they go, what do you think Australian sounds like? And they say, That's because we're educated. And, you know, like, okay, so I haven't I think South African I think your accent if it's, you know, Kiwi. I think it's wonderful. And there should be more of a of a call for that because it's exotic. And it's not, you know, good IMEI is it's not offensive. It's not that kind of thing. But even South African, which is a little bit more cross between British and you know, Australian or peewee has an exoticness about it. This is no small portion. Hello, you know, are you being served that kind of thing, but it's got a a lovely like, Wow, I can't identify that, but I should like it. It's a It's a lovely accent. So I congratulate and I think that more people should be looking at, you know, the trouble. I think the trouble is, a lot of people who write for these parts. Don't know that any of the cultures they don't know what people can sound like, and they don't if they did, and I have had some weird requests. Like we want to cross between Peter Lorre and Daffy Duck. We want to cross between pig bud Bundy from married with children. And Dean came from Superman. You know, they give you these weird things that is an abomination that you're going okay I want to cross a rabbit with a jeep. They want it they wanted these this certain race that look like zombies with skulls hanging all over them but they were supposed to be smart astrologers they wanted a cross between ancient Peruvian and Celtic or over can't get Celtic will do Welsh. Or the farther north you get from England, the more of a little you have. I like to play rugby and oh, and can you imagine these zombie looking bangs? Are you big beasts? Yo guys, I want to play rugby Oh, you know, that kind of thing. So I think it's the problem that we have of the designers and the people that are making up some of these things that we could have so much more fun and so much more ability to use Kiwi accents and an Australian if they knew a that they could find the people that are out there like yourself right and be that it would make it a lot more interesting instead of here's your I think the most call for accents are British Russian. Maybe the Houston for that sir. Yes, sir. The soldier, you know kind of thing. Everything else. If you want to be a Scandinavian warrior or Valkyrie, maybe you would stand out if you could do it. Nigerian or a Kenya accent? You know jumbo holiday? You know that kind of mystery Santa's that kind of a thing. But in general the writers aren't writing. Yes, true. Going back to strange directions. I think you've just inspired me to come up with an annual award for the strangest direction. Yes. I think there have been some strange things like that. The combination plate of Yeah, make it a combo. And I would say I have said, that's like trying to cross a rabbit with a jeep. You know, it's just, it doesn't make logical sense. It's like a musician getting told. Can you make your music a little more plaid with salsa? Exactly. I mean, typically, musicians go through this too. Mm hmm. And so like, you must have because you sort of specialize or you, you have come to specialize in kind of alien noises. Like, like strange kind of sounds? Do you have to know what like animals sound like? Do you study kind of like what animals sound like? Or is it just purely it's not animals, because when we do our things, like when I was working for Starcraft two, and we were doing zurg and ezard, Kwame, we didn't know what she was gonna snipe, I was doing all these weird things. And then they would take you as 130 seconds of the sound file and add lions, tigers and bears. So that's what the sound designer will try and take your really unique thing. Like, why this is flapping my call? I am not doing a growl. You know what I mean? Yeah, this sounds really good if it's pitched down. But I was Philippa and Tim, to mock whatever, for darksiders. And was this giant creature with wings, you know, and then silica was a spider. And I fully expected them to put sound effects on it then, just as it was. Okay, so you never know, when you're doing a creature thing, whether you're going to have a really creative sound design in this kind of layer, you have so much You can't even understand what it is you're saying. But it has helped me you will have games that require you to sound like an animal. And sometimes they will provide you with a link to YouTube for the animal noise. But you'd be surprised that if you're going to be a lamb versus a sheep versus a goat, I don't think they really want the real thing because lambs and sheep side they're in pain. They also want you to, they want you to convey human emotions in those animal voices. And that's one of the toughest jobs you can do is say, Now we want you to imply that you're that you want someone to come over and pet you. But it also helps when you're doing animal things like like birds like to make kind of a big crop for a frontal beak. To get to get the facial, the emotional, physical thing of the animal really does help. And also to kind of look, act, pitcher face like and this is another thing where you're getting into different character voice This is going to mirror crop Come on funny, Frank. You know, that kind of a thing. So you can at least know how to change your voice. So if you may put that in your so called library and say, Okay, I can do yoga. You know, but they don't want you there. But maybe you can make this for another voice and say no, I'm using this kind of a thing for another character. So you can have people have done that where they make little recordings and have their own little libraries and things of that nature and then they can go back and pull on there. So that's just alone or whatever they can do. But conversely, if you're asked to do a Scottish accent, and all you can do is Sean Connery. I've had that happen. Okay, but I'm sure you know what I mean. So you can't just be a Sean Connery doing a Scottish accent you have to be able to apply it toward other sounds, not just do you use mnemonics to keep track of how many voices and get back into those those characters. Explain as in like for accents, for example, you like for say, Irish you have like hoity toity for lady potato and like so the little set pieces that just get you back into that vowel sit and that face shape. I wish I had them. That's a very good Have you know I will tell people that the call me in the morning over under after I'd love the chance to dance with you British thing? I don't do it myself because I've kind of, you know, got it already but the hoity toity the Irish thing is harder for me to do the oil, the oil, you know, that kind of thing. And they're more in the flesh than those aren't they? You know, they have a mother loyalty kind of a thing. But the other accent I won't do is French Canadian or pagent. All right, you know, all of all, boo, boo les and because it's kind of like an aberration of French. But I I just say no, I don't do that one, you know, but what voice what accents? Won't you do? That's a good question. I won't do accents. When it comes from authentic accent like I've got like, I've got three tiers of accent, I've got like, I can do this until the local, I've got like, this is a good party accent. And it'll form like a lot of people, especially slightly drunk people. And then like, the third one is just like, I just don't even know where to start. And that list the last list is getting fewer and fewer because I like to like when I come across one of the speakers like my thing I got obsessed with I listened to what's his name, The Daily Show the new guy, Noah, Trevor Noah his book a and it's funny that talks about his his whole past and he is amazing with African accents. He can just any. And this book, the audio book, he goes through, he reads all these different things that happened to him in these different African accents. And after that, I got a little bit obsessed with African accents. And I young, I just went went around trying to to find what the essence of the accent was. And I know that's not that's that's completely blunt, like consonants and and like, really the way it talked like this. And and when you hear someone doing it authentically, you suddenly like when you do it and just normal life, you kind of think like, Oh, is this a bit like, is this a bit racist? I feel a bit funny about doing doing, like, especially accents like that, but then you think I'm just talking in a different way. Like, this is just for me, I just want to explore how this feels in my mouth. And I think and that's good. Well, because not a lot of people can do the African accents. And I know that there's a difference between Nigeria and Kenya and things of that nature. But I will tell you when I was working for I think it was Diablo three, there was a witch doctor. And I was cast for the Barbarian and a witch doctor and I didn't. I ended up being released. But it was really a strange situation. I'll make it short. The Witch Doctor kind of made it a combination, almost like the Pirates of the Caribbean. Not the Voodoo priestess. I wasn't trying to make it. So African, you know, whatever I was, you know, and the one line was supposed to be they asked you how do you know he was lying? He admitted it to me right after I cheated his minions. Okay, so I would say that and then she'd say she'd go through and have me go back and she'd play me my, my part already that I done to stay in character and I wasn't dropping out of character. So I was getting a little bit weirded out. But then she says at the very end she goes, can we play the male? witch doctor? I swear to God, it's one of those guys who cannot talk English at all. You know, he's got it because yeah, a minute. After I did this minute, I said, I couldn't talk like that. You want me to talk like someone who does not speak English that way? Is Never mind. I got fired on the way home, you know, and it was not because I don't know. And then I heard later What was the chosen voice and hardly had any accent at all. So I'm saying there it is that you should really epitomize on what you're doing. But to they're going to make you pull it back and pull it back and pull it back because I was hired to do the world of avatar Disney promo. Hmm. They thought I was Caribbean. And it was like poem, the mystical mountains and a magical Villa floating mountains. mystical Welcome to found out I wasn't. And so it was a it was one of those things that they liked it. They still wanted it. And would you believe we did the whole thing and was just marvelous. I had a great time. And at the tagline It was like, now open it there were at Disney World Resort. They wanted that the same voice but no accident. World of avatar, only at the Walt Disney World Resort. Isn't that good that I was taking the other one. It breaks. It breaks the smell. I know. So I would never be afraid if you are not of the right. Color. Try it anyway. I've asked my agents, by the way, when it says we're looking for, you know, actual this ethnicity, I would say do you want me to do it? Or not? You know, I will ask permission. Do you want me to do it? And they'll say we're not gonna find the real one, do it? Or they might say yeah, we want the real thing. Just like when they're asking for kids. Kids, bless their hearts can be a special thing to deal with. And I'll leave Get a bat. But put it this way, if a kid's like we had this happen with tails for Sonic where all of you for that sake hit I wish us women. Hey, Shawn, it you know to do the kids voice and we're better not were easier to direct. You know what I mean? Usually, we are faster things of this nature. But they decided that this time they wanted real kids. Well, we went through three kids because they each reach puberty. by sea, of course, we had to use a guy's brother. Yeah, I know. And so that's the other thing too, is that when people who are saying, I have a kid to get, okay, try and get the kid in the business now. And but if you are hiring a real kid, realize that can happen. Depending on if you have sequels and things of that nature, that, that that can be an issue. But the fact that there are real kids and Disney wants kids, you know, they want the real thing. Just like they want celebrities. Imagine if Bart Simpson was voiced by an actual kid Originally, it would be like two seasons. No way did I know. And that's pretty much her natural. She has much of that natural voice. And Andrea Romano discovered her I guess listening to her at some ways and said you're on Did you hear how SpongeBob SquarePants got a story now, he was speaking at the convention center here at Comic Con. And you have to excuse my language because I'm going to swear, is that, okay? Because I'm going to quote, I'm going to quote where you said, I can kind of alternate a little if you want. My funny listening to him as well. He was on camera during a green screen, I think was insurance commercials or something of that nature. And they had a break. And he went down the hall and there was a Christmas commercial being filmed with elves, small people, you know. And there was one very irate one saying Gary, and they were cast me as a mother. But then I'm gonna kick somebody in. Now, he was telling the story at a hollywood party. Someone tapped him on the shoulder and said, come into my office tomorrow, I think I have a part for you. And that's how we got it. So that's another thing about being in the right place at the right time. Unfortunately, sometimes it's who you know, who you, you know, I'm saying it's to us. And so it's people say, Well, how do you break into the business? It's a lot of serendipity. It's a lot of who, you know, it's a lot of being recommended by people that are in the business. Sometimes it's a paid audition, where people pay to get a class from a casting director, and you better make it an active one. Because sometimes in this business, those who can do and those who can't teach that is a paid audition to be seen. Yeah, yeah. And I like that adage that luck favors the prepared. In terms of you've got to be ready, because that luck train comes along occasionally. And if you're ready, it'll pick you up. But if you're not really, it's just gonna go right by. That's true. Very true. So I think you've done a marvelous job, especially when you're coaching people and everything and, and I congratulate you, and I'm gonna probably ask for your coaching staff. Just before we wrap up today, I wanted to cover like a couple of things, because one of the things I've I mean, I've only dipped my toe into the kind of like the character and video game world. And it's, I've realized that it is such a different world to the commercial voiceover that you have to learn everything again. One of the things I really struggle with in these sessions is well, there's two things, there's exertion scripts, which I'm very familiar with, because, you know, exhausting and last days, what let's talk about acquisition scripts, and then we'll go on to the next topic. So once you're sort of, how do you go about because I just figured they were like, right, okay, now you're climbing a rope, can you do that for 20 seconds. And then like, you know, jumping on the table, and they all ended up sounding kind of the same all like six noises, like strategy. Let's just talk about generic and this could be different. I think that a lot of guys sound like gorillas going to the forest when they're doing a tax write. First strategy is always use your body and since I'm holding the stone, excuse me, for all the movement that I've had in here, but you've got to use you got to use you know, and then you've got to use your body to do the attacks and in general attacks would be consonants or the rough and that the being attack would be the and I didn't direct it. Okay, now you're hitting the eye now you're hitting the throat now you're hitting the guy, you know, so you can do your or I can make them juicy. You know? that kind of a thing that but nowadays they don't have action specific so you're not being throat slit head bashed, jumping into hot lava, you are light, medium, heavy, light, medium, heavy, and your death. You have to ask, Are you showing the cause of your death in your Yes. And how long do we have to die is only very few have allowed you to be hit balled your knees and do a faceplant. Most of them are like, you know, like, one second or two seconds. Because the fact is, most of these people that die or respond, and they come back immediately, and I'm going to sound like, I'm a gamer, right? But the fact is that, to do some weird things like the jump, bring your arms up. Now, you ask them Do you want the land? So it's the same thing as trying to ask people to do a natural laugh. To go haha, know, if you would do the spit take or something to release most of your air first. That little leftover makes it sound much more natural that Haha, you know, you don't want to have that whole thing. So you can do that. You have a two stage attack where you're maybe, you know, winding up that kind of deal. But when they're telling you that you're jumping over a log and somersaulting on the ground, you're going, Oh, look, you know, you have to be prepared to be asked some strange things, but in general is just the maybe the jump when the rope climb. And the breathing your boy, you can get hyperventilating really nicely, when they're saying doing your breathing. I always say do you want it so you can move it? So you might do three breaths like by doing similarly, not? Because then it would sound stupid. You know, and then you're doing the more out of breath ones, you know, like, but you you ask them that because you can really get hyperventilate and start getting dizzy during the breath. But that is one of the amounts that you'll probably be asked for is the breathing. And you could do a fall. And you have to ask how far do you fall? I always want to go away from the mic and fall away. No, no, no, be like right now. You got to be like with your face, right? They want to be able to cut it usually. thump as you as you land. But yeah, I think also use your body a lot. When you're doing that. And imagine that it hurts. Also, you're going to be asked to talk and pain, wounded. The wounded sound. My funny direction is pinch a loaf. Oh, I can't I'm trying to hurt it. But you know, I'm constipated. And that's one way to think of it to be sounding like you're in pain. When you take kind of turn your breathing and sounding like you're, you're gasping for air, you know? So those are little tricks that you can use. Fantastic. It's really good. Another one another big, big advice because this is another thing I struggle with these sessions is doing screams doing falls doing deaths. Exactly. It's hard on your voice. Like what's that? Exactly. But like, I have you? Like what's your strategy for maintaining voice health? Do you have warning signs where you're like, No, I've got to stop now. Otherwise, I'm gonna lose my voice. Or you just go I always tell people if you don't if you're not willing or wanting to ruin your voice stay out of the game industry. No, it's because sometimes they will. And I don't say it lightly because some games like iCast don't even have the amounts. But sometimes they will say this will require physical exertion. do not accept this audition if you're not willing to do it. In other words, if you're not willing to kill yourself, stay out of the oven. We're gonna remain. Yeah, so the trick is that you will always depending on now some people can be really snippy and say I'll only give you three I'll only give you one you know, you can do that and limit yourself but then what happens after I got through doing sendowl for Mortal Kombat. They had me do Shiva. And I said wait a minute, aren't we doing her emotes? Oh, you can do emotes in a different voice. Well, yeah, real this is from a top it was like technical their studios in LA with around now. But they were went to Vegas. I said nobody's ever done that before. Oh my god, I was a superstar because I could emote in a different, you know, voice which is hard for a lot of people to do. But I'd say that the hardest thing the screams are not as hard as the as when you're clapping your voice and you're doing things like that, that that or the likes of the pig or those kind of things, or the clicker wasn't so hard. That's not really hard. But those kinds of things when you're tightening up the scope. I've had it so that I couldn't drink water. I mean, they'll give you the honey and the tea and everything else that you'd throw Spray, whatever. When you're tight, you're tight. And you're kind of done. If you can ask for maybe 10 minutes, 15 minutes, you may have your throat and sweat a little bit. It might not, you know, so you just have to be prepared and be prepared that maybe the next day, you're not going to be able to audition for much. Yeah, that's tough, isn't it? Like, that's definitely the thing that I've struggled with most is that, yeah, it takes me out for for for a day afterwards, I make changes my fundamental voice, my normal speaking voice for the commercials close. Yeah. And then, so you asked to do everything last, including, if it's difficult for you to do a deep voice. You don't want to strain yourself during your higher voice and all the emotes first, because as you need the loose cords to do the deep voice. So you might notice that if you were he'd been screaming in your higher voice, it's gonna tighten up your throat, so you can't get down into your resonant voice as quickly. So you want to do your deep voice stuff first, and then your screen. And those kind of stuff would do last otherwise, you're gonna sound kind of like this on Joan Rivers, you know. And so you're going to actually have this, this sound of being very, I know, you probably had it when you're when you have a voice that you're out of your voice, and you're trying to sound like this. That's what's gonna happen. When you ruin your voice. You're gonna sound basically like this. Yeah, exactly. Well, it's terrible, isn't it? So, like, and finally, like, how do you keep it? You've been doing this for such a long time? You obviously don't get bored of it, you're still How do you keep enthusiastic about it? Do you? Do you have those days when you're like, Ah, man, we should get a different trouble us still, like 100% I love this. Well, because you went from all these different people, and different characters, and everything is a new challenge. You always have new characters that come up. So that's the newness of it, and being able to make something better than it could be see spot run, you know, I mean, you're able to bring new life, it's our job. That's our job. I mean, why are we here? If it's not to bring new life and to find people and give new people opportunities, I do that all the time. People are always thinking me, you know, I want to be added to your talent pool, that kind of thing. So I will give them the whole rundown. I think that's what makes it fun is because it's always a new scenario. Even if I'm doing another Star Trek thing. We will have new characters, we're sure you have your captains and your admirals and whatever. But I love it when there are especially I love it when there's creatures what have you. But when you're working with a whole different group of people, that's your family. You know, I mean, and me being pretty much alone. That's that's enabling me to vicariously live in an outside world and not have to play the games to be part of. Well, thank you so much for your time today. Just before Did you still do that? There was that great monologue that used to do which started which started we'll start out as babies. Oh, yeah, we'll do that one. Could you perform that one for us? Sure. I'll start at a baby. And then as days go by, we get a little older material. We shouldn't cry. It goes through school trying to be cool. And then we graduate. Some of us might be mommies, others work or even date. As we grow. We wonder what are we smart are just a full. Now some others are back in diapers again. And others even draw. Well done. Thank you so much. That's that's one of my favorite monologues. Perfect. Thank you. Such a pleasure. And you're such a great Interviewer And I hope we did okay. We did great. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Interview with British American Voice artist Susannah Kenton

I recently had the opportunity to speak to my dear friend and voiceover colleague Susannah Kenton about her career as a voice artist. And we discussed many interesting insights into the voice industry and our approach. Here is a video and below, a transcript of that interview:

It's my very great pleasure to welcome to the gravy for the brain Oceania interview Susanna Kenton who I've known for a number of years, I've been trying to remember how many years it is but she has been one of my kind of voiceover inspirations. And she's in Christchurch, New Zealand. And I do want to just tell us a bit about where you are at currently with voiceover at the moment Susanna. You know, I oddly enough, I've been in it for a while and I am loving it more than ever, for really strange reasons that are very kind of inner The reason being that i i love the art of trying to find the truth in any given situation with any given script, no dive straight into like the deep end. But really, um and so what I noticed is there was a time when I was like, I really want to be voicing scripts that are more in alignment with my values What I love most and then I realized like what a blessing it was to have work when during this you know, period of lockdown when everyone was struggling and frightened about what's next. And I became just so grateful for the next project that would come into my inbox. And what I loved was the opportunity to to voice it to really honor the the product or the company and the acting job to find the right voice for each project which I think is something very nebulous, you know, every every project Every company is different so so what kind of have you put yourself into some into a genre or an accent or area of voiceover? Um, you know, mostly Toby I've, I've voiced from my natural accent, which is probably mostly British, but because I've lived in the States and other places, it's kind of a, it's a bit softer. So it's not, it's not a very strict British accent. And sometimes when I hear strict British accents, it makes me realize how far from that my accent has has moved. But yeah, I don't I sometimes do voice an American accent as well, because I was born in the States. And that comes fairly easily to me. But I wouldn't say that I specialize in accents. I'll have give one ago when somebody asked for one. But what I found is, and I think this is, this is true for most people that are doing well in voiceover is more to do with the delivery than any particular accent. And it's more to do with kind of coming from your heart and connecting with something that then translates people hear it. It's, um, you know, I've said this to you before, that I tend to go by feel and you know, you and I recently had a question, a chat about rates and how rates change and what you should do and make sheets and you have the most amazing setup for that is very sweetly sent me a rate sheet. And I was just blown away by how, how beautifully thought out it was and appropriate and kind of fair for companies of all different sizes with your tier system. But for me, across the board, I tend to go by feel with most of what I do, maybe that's a more of a female thing, the male thing I don't know. So you're more of an intuitive sort of you feel your way around that things. Seem to Yes, I completely agree with you, though, in terms of like, people get hung up on accents. And I feel like I went through a phase where I was trying to do the accent perfectly. And then you kind of almost break through that and do realize that people are not actually listening to the accent necessarily. And if you can tune into, like, for example, like Americans, how Americans speak, it comes from a different place to the way British people speak. And if you can find that place, rather than find the vowel or find the consonant or whatever, then, you know, it's about listening more than is about doing I think, and yeah, totally right. You know, for me, too, yeah, to come from an intuitive place. There's an American spirit. That is, uh, you know, I was, I got to live there for seven years in Los Angeles. And there's a way that Americans talk that's just kind of free flowing. And it's just kind of easy. And it's not, I mean, that's a California or California way of talking. But if you get for those of us, maybe you are right to be maybe I am intuitive, but those of us that tend to go by feel, it's, it's catching the vibe of it, and letting that just kind of come through the voice. Because if you're voicing a piece of copy, and you're trying to get the accent, right, think about so much of your brainpower is going towards trying to get it right. Whether if you whereas when you can just kind of relax into it, then you can focus more on on the intention, you know, as an actor behind the script. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's so true. I've often one of the things that I the best advice that I heard for doing American accents was that Americans speak in. And they speak in concepts rather than sentences. So it's like, there's one point of the sentence and, and it's easy to like, no, like, I'm going to go, I'm going to go get my coat from the car, rather than I am going to go and get my coat from the car. Like it's like coat the car, and you just make the leap yourself, you know, so it's like focusing on the intent of the script rather than the actual words itself. Yeah, and also, I've heard it said that Americans focus more on values rather than consonants. That's I'm gonna go get my coat from car I'm gonna like they draw out the vowels instead of etc. And he also still voice in French. You did French for a while, didn't Yeah, I lived in France for seven years. And there I was an actress and so I would act in French, but with a kind of a British or an American accent. I actually did a play there for two years where had an American accent speaking in French, but I don't I mean, there are so many people that speak better French than me. So I just let them do the French voicing Do you mean it's like a. And I really believe you know, for people that are just getting into voiceover it's about finding your own kind of excitement around it and what, what inspires you like people that love to do a lot of different accents or character voices are very well suited to animation or video games and stuff. And that can be so much fun to do, you know, the sort of stuff that I do tends to be more corporate. I would say you know, and, and not I'm not as much in that realm of of playfulness. Hmm, absolutely. So speaking of bad people who are just starting out in voiceover, how did you first come across voiceover? How do you first start out? So I was an actress for about 12 years. And during that time, voiceover was just kind of something that would arise. So as living at the time, after I finished acting school in, in the UK, I went to live in Paris. And I think one of the first acting things I was doing things I started to do was, we would dub films. So it would be a film that would be being dubbed. You see, I think we would dub it again, into French but with an American accent. And it was amazing, you'd be in this huge sort of Sound Studio room, and the film would be there. And they were so clever, like they'd write in handwriting across this band that moved across the screen. And it was all beautifully synced to try to coordinate like a character was the actor was putting their lips together. In a sound they try and match like the French word. We were dubbing it into English. It was French ones that we were definitely into English. I think that was it for the American market. But um, and another I remember another thing back in Paris there was just kind of in voiceover thing I just I guess I was very lucky. I didn't know it was a thing that you did. And I think my was my acting agent just said one day Oh, you're going to go do this. I didn't even audition for it was like a pizza ad commercial. Where had to dub Cindy Crawford. So she obviously had tried to speak no, she was speaking English and the English version. Then I had to do her bigger voice in French. The weird thing was a week later, I had to dub Cindy Crawford again. In an ad for Revlon. I think it was funny. You could be one of those people. You know, there are these there are actors that just dub films and the like the German guy that voices Keanu Reeves, for example. He's the one that always dubs Keanu Reeves. So you become like a surrogate in another language for that voice. Because when people go, and it's a different thing, like that's not Keanu Reeves. So you could be, you know, doppelganger voice with French. Yeah, that's right. And, and the people that do that, Toby, they're so amazing. They're so skilled, you have to do that. Because, you know, they have to be in the right energy, they have to watch if the character is moving fast, or if it's, you know, intimate, so not only the emotion and reading the script, but also conveying it to the size of the shark, for instance, might be a feature so many things to multitask, and they don't have the physicality of acting as well, like they have to kind of come to that from somewhere, which isn't, yeah, and I actually think like, oftentimes, people that dub films, well, they do use their bodies, you'll see them, you know, moving moving around behind the microphone, and they try to imitate so if the character is you know, has just gotten up off the ground or something that they'll be that they'll do an effort to put that into the voice. That actually brings up a really important point because people ignore their bodies when they do voice over a lot, I think. And I'm always very careful. Like, I often voice early in the morning being in our timezone, because I work with the States or Europe or whatever. And, and I'm always really careful to warm up first, because it is a whole body experience. If you're voicing just, you know, from sort of the neck up that it doesn't have the same fullness, as if you're as if your whole body has woken up and ready and kind of the feeling of the emotion is moving through all of you. So interesting. Yeah, you do some sort of warm up. I know you said to roll out of bed. And that's like you have this great gravelly morning voice. Exactly. That's actually the thing I was about to say that, that my my warmup is not warming up because I'm warmed up. I lose like a whole octave. So yeah, I usually get up and voice first thing in the morning is great. And then last thing at night as well. So the whole if I try and voice something about now about sort of them, it's actually not too bad today. But I've got also always got a lot of tension around to three o'clock and my voice and I've had sessions, where I've really struggled to match the audition either first thing in the morning isn't something to consider. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And, and going back to the sort of physicality of voice work like I've really, when I've had to do a voiceover that sounds excessively kind of ponderous, or basically almost bored. You like is to like have your setup so that you can head put your head on the desk and just voice it from a completely bizarre voice because then you'll sound so different from all the other auditions because you can actually, I'm amazed that microphones pick up everything, even the way your body is sitting, you know. So you know if if I'm doing games where someone's like running or they're, they're basically up and excited. I've got one of those desks that you can there that goes up and down electronically with all my gear on it. So you can see I can stand up and then actually start running and doing other stuff like and it really does come across On the mic, so I try and get around to make sure they've got a really flexible set up for that reason. That's great. Yeah, I mostly stand to voice but there are some projects where I do. I do sit. So did we talk about, we talked about how you got into voiceover like from that first gig. And I mean, you know, talking about getting into voiceover, you're kind of the reason I first got into voiceover because I used to own a studio in Christchurch. And tandem, I think you came in for some reason one time and, and you were like, you know, I'm a voiceover artist, I'd usually voice from home and I was like, that's a thing, you can do that. Amazing, inspiring. So thank you for that. But um, but what was your mindset? I have to Can I just say something on that subject. I spend my go around spending my life trying to like lecture people on how to make their lives better, like how they should eat, what kind of healthy food, how they should move, whatever. And it is such a joy to have seen you take what smidgen of voiceover like inspiration I gave you and just run with it and explode with it across the planet. All the things you've done, I'm so, so immensely proud. And so yeah, honored to jump into that, I think you know that it's right there when when you when you you hear about something so small, and it just gives you so much energy on a constant basis. Like I say to people that you know, if you if you're doing auditions, and it's getting you down, that you're not getting any work and you're just not into it, then it's like, well, it's probably not for you, like you need to absolutely love it like love every audition, you do love the challenge, love the craft. And if you do it enough, then it just you you get work. And it's you know, it's like a rolling ball gathering snow or moss, whatever totally. And that's not to say that sometimes it's not really challenging or you're reading a piece of copy that I had a very funny experience. I was once voicing it 100,000 word endoscopy project full of medical terms, like really complex complex that went on for ages and ages. And I like one day I was in the booth and I started to, to voice and the sentence had the word monotonous in it. And when I hit that word, I started to laugh, I started cracking. So I actually have that recording and it put it in my blog on my, on my website. But the funny the funniest part was, the person who hired me was the only person that saw the blog. I don't know how he came across it. Maybe he like, you know, a Google search for endoscopy or something. But he wrote a really sweet comment, but I thought it was hilarious that the one person that was sort of like would probably be embarrassing if he saw it happen. Classic, yeah, we all do have those gigs occasionally, which are a bit of a struggle that you do have to dig deep. Like I've definitely voice like a 35 or 40,000 word like TTS training demo for text to speech and to train. Speak. And when I was gonna ask, yeah, no, it didn't, it didn't go anywhere in the end, unfortunately, as the company when done it, but I'm involved. And the worst thing about it was that you had to read sentences. That didn't make sense. And you weren't allowed to put any emotion into it, you had to make it really flat, which I really struggled with, because that's the one thing you want to do is for servers breathe life into things. And this was the opposite, we had to breathe life out of it. And that was a lot more of a struggle than I thought or when, like telephony stuff. And you have to read like one to 1000. And you have to do exactly the same and not very the way you say it, which is so challenging. Yeah, what astrological sign are you I usually say pirate. But Scorpio, your Scorpio, okay? Because I'm Gemini. And Gemini is love. Like they're very changeable. And they love all sorts of different things. So the idea of doing like one flat, monotonous thing. But I love your trick about putting your head down, voicing that way. And listen, amazed at how little you have to do. And even like I sometimes still do some on camera stuff. And when I do that, it's always when I'm auditioning things. There's always the note from myself or somebody directing me do less to do this. That's the advice I ever got the best, the best piece of work that was like one of the milestones in my voiceover career when I had some voiceover metric from a great American voice coach who just said, do less and every time I read she said do less and she just wore me down over like half an hour to just being absolutely flat. And then I thought this is gonna be awful and they listen back and I was like, that's like a car commercial rate. And I was just like, you know, it was it was getting the voiceover out of voiceover, you suddenly become getting out of our own way. You know, I had I did a project once for Starbucks. It wasn't an ad. I think they were just talking about some charitable work that they were doing or something. But I was directed by two directors that really knew what they were doing. And they got me to do it and i i think that's on my website somewhere as well. It's just like they just they just go Me to, say doing an American or Mid Atlantic accent? I don't know. They just got me to talk in such an easy way. And it's like, falling off a log. Exactly. And I like you, I thought, Oh, that's not enough, you got to push a bit more listening back with like the new. Exactly. And it's isn't it nice when you get really good directors, it makes so much difference to have all six. Exciting. Yeah, um, so like, I often say to them, like, I like compliment them on how well they direct because when you get a bad one or someone that's like fresh out of the gates, and they think they know how to direct it can be an absolute train wreck. And I've I've actually come up with a way of, of trying to defuse if you ever get bad direction, or someone's doing something, because because often what happens is directors will, they'll tell you what they want, or they'll tell you how to do it, right, because they, you know, their job is to get what they want out of you. So they'll go, that's wrong, do it this way. And they'll have the worst ones will give you a line reading and actually, like try and voice it. And it's just an app, it's horrible. Because you anyway, you know what I'm talking about. But what I say to them is like, instead of telling me how to do it, tell me what you're trying to achieve. And then let me do that. Because it's like, with a builder building a house, you don't say you're putting that nail in wrong, you're doing that thing wrong. You tell them what kind of room you'd like, you know, you'd like I'd like it this dimensions and to feel like this. And then you let them do the thing that they're really good at. And so if you explain it like that to them and say like, I really want to get you the result that you're after, tell me what you're trying to achieve. And I will try and get there with you. Beautiful. No, that's great. That's great advice. And I love that you are confident enough that you can hear when someone's doing that you can recognize and pick up as soon as you hear somebody giving you a line read. You know, anyone in the industry knows that you never ever ever give an actor a voice artist ally made its most insulting. Yang. Exactly. And not the way to get the best out of someone you know? Exactly. Yeah. So when Tell me about a bit about the sort of tech side of your setup, because you've been 70 years, have you been doing this? establish just how long you've been doing it for as long? Yeah. So I don't I don't really know. Because like, while I was acting, I was still voicing. But I think in terms of like, pretty much doing voiceover aside from some acting and some writing. I think I've been doing it for probably 15 or more years. You know, yeah. And I was, I was thinking about like, when I started, I didn't have a studio home setup. And I actually went to do mother plains FM radio station in Christchurch here. And they very sweetly offered me studio space in exchange for my doing some radio liners for them. So I might I don't know if that's still a thing for people that are beginning I think nowadays, it's, it's a lot easier to just have your own setup and, you know, fairly inexpensively you can start to build that but that that worked out really well. So once or twice a week, I would go in and record my project and had an engineer who engineered it for me. No soundproof studio nice mic. And from there I think I I must have bought a decent mic and I I began recording in a cupboard in my home. And it was tiny, I took the shelves out. And it was just like being in a coffin. It was about the size of a pocket. And I checked myself in it kind of like not at all like swing your arms around kind of get loosey goosey with it and but I did that for a while and then built a five sided studio, which you've seen Toby used and which I just love, it's all black on the inside. And it's pretty well soundproofed it has a door that kind of is like a safe door that cranks over and like blocks out the outside world and even has a ventilation system, which is really nice in the summer, which brings cooler air in but with a very soft fan that you almost don't hear. And for me that's kind of like a magical space. It's like in, in the theater, we have black box theatres, and I've always loved them. We had one at university and it's just like, in that space and that black space, anything can happen. You know, it's not big, like I can reach the walls like this. And if someone's too tall, they have to sit to voice in there. But I have that and I work mostly with anointment TLM 103 Mike and I've I've messed around a bit I'm always on the quest for improving audio quality and always neurotic about it not being good enough. But over the years I've learned about plugins and things and learn to do a bit more of my own audio engineering. Well, obviously I do audio engineer my projects, but what some software to use to record into an edit. You know, I use a software that's I work on Macs and they use a software called Sound Studio, which I just love and I've tried other ones. When it first started out I used cool Edit Pro which is Then became Adobe Audition. Is that right? That's right. Yeah. But I also have twisted wave, which are sometimes used on other devices like an iPad. But I love Sound Studio in its simplicity, because it just has really what a voice artist needs. And for someone like yourself, who's also an audio engineer, I would say that the, like EQ and things like that are a little bit crude. But for myself, it's just so simple and looks very clean. And every time I try and move into another door, I just like, come back to it. Yeah, it's interesting that Isn't that how it's just like it feel so comfortable. That kind of glove, put on that stuff. And I mean, it's interesting, interesting that, I mean, a lot of engineers now, especially if you're working in certain areas, like something that's going to have post production, like commercials, or other kind of higher end elearning projects, that basically they just want raw audio these days, they want you to have a good and a good room. But basically, they just want the sound as raw as it gets. And then their engineers will do and, and they actually don't want anyone to mess with it. They don't want compression on the way in because you can't get rid of it. Like it's you know, once it's gone from raw, it's gone. So, so you know it, I think I always say people like simple as best, you know, it's nice to be able to know how to use compression. And I always give clients both things were given the raw and then I've given like a process question to use, depending on what their setup is. Yeah. And you never know, do you which kind of client you're working with. And yeah, and there are some you know, sometimes you work with a company and they don't know, they know, much less than, you know, even I know about audio engineering. So yeah. And you often hear ham, like projects that have gone to gone to the web or something where there's voices got no processing and sounds really distant and really kind of small, like, you know, they're really quite weedy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I think I'm a little bit too hyper vigilant around noise floor. And so I do use a high pass filter. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely want to get rid of the rumble. I'm trying to show off to be. There's not that much. But I also do us a slight noise gate. Because I find it easier to then work with the voice file. And if there are, I don't know, math clips, or things that I need to take out. It's just you can bring it all down very quickly, but interesting to kind of open up the discussion a bit with you. And to know that most audio engineers and good ones like it to have the flaws still in there. Yeah, yeah. Cuz because, you know, audio engineers have often got quite advanced tools for getting rid of noise and for getting rid of rambles and noise and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah. anything these days? Yeah, I mentioned the I'd like this in French thanks, Adobe edition. Auto translate, I bet it's about 10 years away. You ever engineer other people's stuff? Or it's mostly your own? Yeah, sometimes? Yep. Sometimes I am. I'm in a project. And they'll say Who else? Do you know who does voiceover so I'll kind of end up casting for them, and then giving them all of the files at once. Because it's clear that they don't, they're out of their depth. In terms of audio, you just want to map that Toby finesse around? Exactly. So, so yeah, sometimes I do do that. And it is interesting, how many, how many things I've learned from from other people giving me audio. And then me going, Oh, this is actually a lot harder, like I prefer it, you know, and I've given feedback sometimes in terms of, like, if you ask, you know, three takes from someone, and they give you three identical tags, and you're like, well, there's no point in that, because I've got three copies of the same thing. So like, do something not wildly different, but do something like quite different, so that you can choose to write down your head on the table, try one with me head on the pillow, it's up to you. Because I'm I tend to with most of the projects that I do, I record a piece of copy, let's say it's a two minute video or something, I'll record it, maybe I'll do one read to warm up and I'll record a couple of takes. And then I just take the best take, but if there's any bit of it that I don't like, I will choose another piece that does that, you know, I am very perfectionistic around delivery. And I like like even if the emphasis is in the wrong place in a word that shows that my mind was kind of wandering at that moment, and I wasn't really focused on the meaning then I will you know, steal it from somewhere else. But I know a lot of voice artists, they do send two or three takes on a project. What was your what's your policy? For me? It kind of depends if I'm doing a like a project at the bottom of my rates where it's quite a long project like over five minutes and it's and I'm not charging that much for it but I'm telling to just in one and say there's nothing wrong with it just an extra engineering. exactly it is it's it's a big deal to do to multiple dates. If it's something like you know, if it's if it's a 15 second drop for something, then you're given three texts, you know, because it's so easy and quick Pull off, was it just the multiple start to really add up a few anything beyond five minutes? You know, because it turns into quite a bit production to record three texts or five minutes and edit those suddenly you're at an hour, you know, in terms of studio time. So, yes, it depends how much how much they're paying for. But, I mean, I often, you know, do stress with clients that, you know, if there's anything wrong with this, and rerecord to completely free as long as it's my fault and not changing the script, for example. Yeah, that's, that's really, really reassuring, I think and leads to having repeat business, which is great, exactly. But the flip side of that is if they're in a hurry, because I'm in a different time zone, and they'll only get it sometimes the next morning, and that'll take me six hours to respond. If I know that time is of the essence, I'll give them as much as I can on the front end, so that they don't have to wait to come back to me. Yeah, exactly. So you do get, I think this is one of these intuitive things, going back to being a bit intuitive that you pick up from clients. And you kind of you get used to working with different sorts of clients, and you get to know how to recognize them. And then what are the things that they hold as a priority? Uh huh. Yeah. So I want to ask you about where you get your work at the moment, because some you've got a wonderful website, and you go and do pay to be any part of any voice platforms like voices.com, or voice 123. Yeah. So, um, for a while, and especially when you're starting out, I did voice 123 dot com and voices.com. And eventually, I got like, a lot of clients. And, in fact, I think one of them I think it was voices came to and they said, Hey, you know, you should try us Super Deluxe pay thousands of dollars version, platinum, platinum. And I said to them, honestly, I really appreciate you inviting me to that. But I don't want more work than I have, which was like such a, you know, privileged place to be and they were like, No, okay, good for you. I'm so at the moment, I still have a voices account, it's not the Platinum one, but I think it's premium or something. And I don't do a huge amount of auditions through that. But so I tend to set the rate fairly high that like, you can choose which jobs you want to audition for. And I don't want my inbox flooded with voices audition. So it just maybe get an A one, one or two a day, something like that. But um, some of my auditions come from other agencies in the States. And otherwise, a lot of my work these days is just sometimes through my website, but also just, um, clients that I've worked with for some, some of them for years, you know, and we just, we know each other well, and it's just like, it just seems repeat business. It's amazing, isn't it? How it just builds up over time? Yeah, blessing? Yeah, it is. Absolutely. Because I think they this, you know, be interesting to actually, like, find some statistics on it. Like, you know, one out of every 15 clients will turn into a long term client, and they'll give you work every three months. So if you if you get like every 15 clients you get, you'll get one of those, and then that will give you more work every three months. So it's kind of like it slowly builds up until I can envisage a point in the future where it's just residual work, you know, and you don't actually have to market yourself or go to get new clients, because you're just busy servicing kind of an old pool of clients. Plus, they referred to if you give them an exceptional experience, which has been my focus for the last three years, then and they become a real fan of yours, then you know that they're in the same circles as other video, people. And they'll recommend you usually, yeah, which is lovely. Yeah. And also, I mean, think about it, once you've established that connection with a client. Like they want it to be hassle free. They don't want to have to do huge auditions, every time they have a project. They just want to know that, you know, you've got your act together on the, let's say, the performance side on the technical side, that your turnaround times are fast that you're nice to work with. And then they're just Oh, thank God. So it really is win win, you know? Yeah. And you can tell the clients where you that you know, that they're just like, they say something nice afterwards. And it's like, they they found that they kind of like, Oh, thank goodness, I found someone that's a really Yes, I really, I used to I do want to say, Oh, sorry. I used to work in radio. And it was you know, we'd have copywriters, so we could go on to do voicing, and he wasn't you the ones that were best at voicing, and we're just so quickly and super easily and you just go to them by instinct, it was just because, you know, you knew it was gonna be easier for you. So if you can inspire that feeling and other people have just like this There were just so easy to work with you will be the first on the list that they call. Yeah, absolutely. I want to say as well like I really feel for people in the current climate with the whole, you know, COVID situation and there's a lot of fear and anxiety around around earning a living. And there's a question you know, when you are when you earn your living like pretty much my whole life I've been I suppose freelance, you know, I mean, I've you know, I haven't had a job set for one and a half years when I was a copywriter in a company. But so I've had to really trust kind of that flow of the universe and what I've learned a couple of things about it and one is that I always say to my myself. And so I say this to your listeners too, if it feels like the universe is withholding abundance from you, what are you withholding from the universe, staring straight into the camera. And, you know, it can be like that you have some hidden talents that are locked away that you haven't really been sharing, or it could be even that you are angry about something. But you've got that anger locked up and sad, whatever it is, just listen in and see like, what do you need to unleash? Because I do believe in the flow. And I do believe that there's enough work to go around, that we don't have to be competitive one another with one another, we can find a niche. And we can think about this the other day, Toby, there is so much voice work in the world. So many companies and projects and artists need voices. So you know, just a little faith and a little trust in the flow. And know that even for those of us that do and are living this way, there are times when things are slow. And then you just turn your attention to building your home, for instance. Exactly, say thank you universe for a little bit of a break. In a free house, I've only I still I still have weeks and sometimes like longer periods where they're just they they're the work doesn't come in, and I don't get the gigs. And I think I there's this really like dark sense of me that thinks, well, that's the dreams over time. So this is that like most just No, it just for whatever reason, that's just not gonna happen anymore. And then like I and then I think No, no, no, this has happened many times before. Just go and do something like treat yourself, this is your vacation, you don't get to go away any other time of year because your voice artist, so like, this is your time to do some work or do some marketing if you feel like it. And then it always picks up always, right, I know, I don't, I don't get that number, I love that you thought you would share that. And it's exactly the same for me. And I have the same, you know, demons that are just like, Oh my God, that's it, nobody likes you, you know, you've slipped in your ranking, and it's over. You know, but I also trust, like, if there comes a time, when voicing isn't what I'm here to do anymore, that something will take its place. So really, we don't have to worry. And I want to say to anyone who just kind of started to get into it. I mean, to be you and I just share this immense gratitude for this path of earning a living. And, you know, you knew what it was like before this. And you were already working in a creative industry when you would, you know, producing and directing and audio engineering and things. But you also knew that there were like these hours of a day, it wasn't really you were too creative for that, you know, for that space. And you were you felt kind of locked into it. And in my one and a half days and a half days, one half years of working in a company, I felt like I was a veal, like put in a box being ready to be slaughtered, like with no light coming in, and they put me in a cubicle eventually. It's just like, I just couldn't do it. You know, so for those of us that, that a free spirits in that way. Just believe in it. It's such a great thing to you, and you learn and grow as you do it. And don't be too hard on yourself, because it is a real learning curve. A lot of people start out and they think, Oh, well, somebody said had a nice voice. And then they you know, they pick up a piece of copy and they start to read it. And they think that's voiceover. And they pretty much think that anyone could do it. But there's a real learning curve and a real art to it. I mean, I noticed that for you like when you started off, you were booking jobs anyway. And you had some avenues in. But there came a point where you actually understood what you didn't know. And you started to coach and your voice work just went to a whole nother level. My two, my two it's like, we can say, Oh, yeah, no, the words coming in, I've got this, I'm really good. And then you coach with somebody really good. You're like, Oh, my God, I had no idea. technically true. Different realm is so true. And there are just those I just love how there are these paradigm shifts where you get comfortable and you get complacent. And you do think you've got it all sorted. And as you say, you get you have some kind of experience or a session or a thought that just breaks it down. And you I love the fact that even when I'm sort of you know, voicing this level, which is more than more than I ever thought I'd be doing in the world, like 10 times as much. I still know, there's room for improvement. And there are other echelons to go to like I think though Yeah, that's not that's not like, Oh, my God will ever get there. But it's just like, what a ride. What a journey. Exactly, you can always do better. I have to be careful because I tend to be really hard on myself. And like the upside of that is the perfectionism that, that just takes great joy in finding getting it just right. I love working with a client who's really fussy because I'm really fascinated when we were like, no, let's see if we can get it better. Yeah, that was it. We nailed it, you know, but the downside of it is to be like sometimes I'll be editing my something that I've recorded and There's a perfectly good take. And I've gone with my dog clicker. Do you use the dog? clicker? I just use it. No. Oh, you do? Okay. No, it's just a device that used to call the dog and puppy, are you putting a spike in your file? Oh, you've graduated beyond that. Anyway, what I'll notice is in my file is that there was a perfectly good take. And somehow, in my mind is like, I'm not good enough, you could have brought out more on that word, or you could have, like, lighten up a bit. So, you know, it's self management, isn't it? On the subject of self direction, because this is another hard thing. Like I, you know, I run a voice Academy here in New Zealand and in person. And people love the fact they get in the studio and they love, you know, they do reads and you and you say, Oh, you know, you were doing this, and I was doing that and everything. How do you? Do you have advice for people on how to self direct because it is a skill entirely separate from voiceover? Because it relies on you listening to your performance as you're doing it and judging it? How do you I can't remember when I started self directing, or I mean, it helped that I was, I was directing talent. So that kind of came first to me. But for someone who, like, you know, how did you realize to self direct and start that process? I mean, I think I've been self directing in every area of my life since I came out of the womb. But, but it's, it's a really, it's a, it's an interesting thing to look at. I think, for me, I voice best when when there's a sense of freedom and flow. So if I'm too hyper vigilant, maybe too caffeinated. I'm not going to do my best voice work. So this is way back at the beginning, I was talking about, like warming up the body and getting into the flow and feeling that the voice is just very kind of clear and free. And then Oh, yeah. Okay. So Toby, let's talk about this, like, you know, how in invoice coaching, they often talk about, like talking to a person. Mm hmm. Right? So is that something like, do you visualize a person and start to talk to them? Never know, it's almost like I don't know, it's almost like I'm voicing to myself in a weird kind of way. And see, I think that's super valid. And I often will voice to myself, because I'm the harshest critic. If I can convince myself my own authenticity and attack, then I'm doing pretty well. But one of the things that I do, I think of it in terms of dropping in, so you drop into that alignment, which is right for that particular project. And for me, it's almost like, it's a consciousness thing. It's just like, okay, it's almost like I set an intention, before I begin, I like to take a deep breath in and let it out, funnily enough, before I start to voice, and you think, oh, you need to take a deep breath in and start talking. But try this, you take a deep breath, and you just let it out. And there's a sense of relaxation, and then you begin to speak. And it's like, you're already the placement of the voice and the relaxation is already better. And then one of the tips from one of my voice coaches was, and I quite like this, was that you just read the first line several times until you're ready. So it's like, it's not that thing of like, the fear of the bank blank page, or the blank audio file, you know, it's just, they just start off. And there'll be a certain time, maybe three, you've repeated it three or four or five or six times. And then you're like, there's a yes. And then you just carry on from there. Yeah, cuz To me, this idea of like speaking to a person, sometimes, I'll use that as a starting point, especially if the, like, say, if I were doing something that was for, I don't know, a young audience, and say, I wanted to have that kind of intimate connection, if I were talking to my 18 year old niece, for instance, and I might just, you know, imagine her, but then quickly, just kind of let that go. Because if you're trying to put your focus on the person you have, again, it's like your mind's having to multitask on too many things. And that's so true. I'm going back to what you're saying about the like, you know, doing little things before your voice, I realized I had this real realization recently that when I was looking at my sessions, I've done live directed sessions, and I usually clean them up for them, you know, before, before I send them through, and I noticed that I slept the tape like I do with live drinks. And so I go, you know, this is a test, take one, read one. And then I got exactly the same throat clear every time I compared them. And it's an idea and I do it completely. I don't do it because I need to clear my throat. And I don't do it because I'm conscious of it. But it's just it's a bit like I'm in rugby too, because I'm from New Zealand Rugby analogy, right. Then when it's not in the habit, it's almost like you know, when the young guys about to kick the ball through the posts, and they have a little weird routine and so they drop the grass, or they lick their finger and put the wind and they take a number of steps backwards. It's always exactly the same because they've been trained to do this. mindset thing, I realized it's exactly the same for me. And I didn't even realize that I've made this like, it's like a mantra or something. It's like the thing. Yeah. Go into character. And yeah, so and I don't know just how how people come up with that thing but, but be conscious that you can have a little thing, even like a little action like a like a rubbing your hands or something like just to get that could come and coming home to yourself, you know, and even where I've always I have a few things that are that inspire me like I have. I love redwood trees. And I have the in Northern California, the redwood trees, that's where I was born. And I have a picture of them in my booth and just things that kind of tune me in and uplift me how it might be a quote or something, but it just, I love redwood tree so much. I'm just in the North Island, there are some Yeah, that's true. Right? Yeah, for a tough match in Hawke's Bay that summer, as well as a plantation not know, as near as big as the ones in Northern California. But yeah, still lovely trees. And I think you're totally right with your, you try and make your place you voice if you can, if you're able to make your place a sanctuary, I can make it a place that feels feels nice, even if it's just a cupboard. put something on the wall that that makes you feel, you know, nice, like a like a picture of a view or something, you know, like, at least, you know, try and trick yourself into thinking that it's, it's not a claustrophobic cupboard. You know, this is the place I get to do my creative thing, which I really enjoy. Yeah, I've got in my in my studio, I've got a window. And it's one of those windows where there's two pieces of glass, but they're sloped or something or one sloped, I think so that it doesn't reflect the sound in the same way. And inside between the two pieces of glass is a little turquoise frog. I love frogs and and so it just like it's there was so yeah, just little things like that. It's probably the frog is directing every session I do. And it's quite important for people to have the place they go to do voicing, I think, like, I realize some people have to kind of set up in their lounges or set up temporary studios to do practice or to do auditions. But if you if you can have a place you go to do voiceover and that's all you do there. I think that really helps with this whole because it is such a mind game. Voice it is it is and it's amazing how we have to be feeling relatively well to voice Well, I think. And I think you can't really fake it. And when you know, I did a number of years acting in theatre, and I made the commitment. There was one time I did a show in the I did the played Anna and the King and I am musical in touring the states for a whole year. And it was hugely demanding as it was amazing, but huge, hugely demanding. But even when you know, you'd get up at five o'clock in the morning and go to the next place and fly or bus or whatever, and you get there and you'd be so tired and had to do two shows, whatever it was, I always was cognizant of the fact that that audience, a lot of them were, you know, in the middle of the country, maybe they didn't have much money, maybe they'd saved up for that event, it was like, maybe the first time for some of them that they went to theater. And I was made the commitment to be true, and to really show up and to be real and not fake it because when you've done a play over and over again, sometimes it's like, Oh, here we go again, same lines, whatever. But I would, you know, really forced myself to do my best to be in the moment and give it my all and because because people feel the difference. They You know, I think it's funny that when this T shirt that says authentic. But they you know that people deserve authenticity, and they're not stupid, and people can hear the difference. And you know, you and I Toby because we've been doing this for a while, you can hear that voiceover you know, as soon as like you hear somebody that's like in stuck in a rhythm, or they just sound like they're reading the script. And the art of voiceover is to make it sound like you're saying it, and that it's just the next thought that's arising and then you just know you're feeling and that you're feeling it. So I love that so and we've both coached with Marla Monica urban in New York. And, and one of Marla's things is that, you know, the, the copy travels in through your eyes, and it goes into your brain. And then it needs to drop down into your heart and connect with your feelings. And then it comes out of your mouth, you know, and that journey, it's like, just seeing it and put going in your brain and having come out, it doesn't do it. No, it's got to also have that you know that circuit and be connected. And when somebody is if it's not moving you then how do you expect it to move your audience? Yes. And we all do bad voiceover at times. I remember one time when you were here, and there was a file on my on my computer that said bad voiceover and you saw it immediately. Like it was just on my desktop you like what was that bad voiceover and I had Actually gathered like, I don't know where I got them from but two peoples the male and female was because I wanted at some point and I've never done it. I didn't want to shame anyone. But I wanted at some point to say, Okay, listen, this is an example of somebody who's just reading it, or somebody that thinks that that kind of automated robotic read his voiceover and it's interesting how the market has shifted in terms of like, it used to be about the, the the trailer voice and no one actually talks like this. And and now people have cottoned on especially with advertising and it used to be the hard sell kind of mattress commercial sort of like it kind of feel but now it's it's so much more like people have woken up to the fact that they're being advertised to and it must they must be hooked, there must be a scam somewhere. Because of the way this person is talking, instead of it just being like your friendly neighbor who's got a great suggestion for you. Yeah, that's right. And when you when you hear TV, ads, radio ads coming at you, and then all of a sudden, you hear one where the person's dropped in, and they're just speaking to you like a person, you hear it. And the rest of it, you learn to just switch off and tune out of because it's just not interesting, or whatever being, you know, smacked around the head by this car salesperson or something. Yeah. So in terms of like the connecting with your reads, and the script, like, I know, when we talked on the phone, we're talking about like, what, what you wouldn't wouldn't voice and whether you need to really kind of believe in something like what's being advertised in order to, like, engage with it. And to make it sound good? Do you reject jobs? Or kind of what's your process for that in terms of betting what you will or won't voice? Yeah, so um, it's, that's a really important question. In fact, I had it with a friend of mine. And this week in Los Angeles, we were talking about, okay, what can we still, from an ethical standpoint, feel okay, about voicing and where do we draw the line. And as, you know, somebody that came up through through the acting world, it was like, your job was to act. So even if you didn't believe in the character you didn't like the character didn't like the project, you showed up, and you act it. And for a lot of my career in voiceover, I've done that, like, I am a health nut. I love health food. And I have voiced for McDonald's and unvoiced for Coca Cola, you know, so you can say, well, that's conflict of interest or whatever. But I've considered them you know, acting jobs. And my job is to say, if I'm voicing about eating, you know, some I don't know, highly processed, whatever food that I wouldn't put in my body. I might do a substitution and voice it as if I'm eating a beautiful. I don't even know what so yeah. Yeah. But But I do, there are projects that I just cannot do and when auditions come in that are it's especially a way to reject auditions and I'm not getting up sorry, not gonna go there. And on the days when I have plenty of work coming in anyway, I'm like, Yeah, no, I love the luxury of being able to say no, no. About for you, Toby. What's, what's a no for you? Um, I've kind of boiled it down recently, in terms of like this, I've always had one, which is that I'm not a religious person. And when I when I get scripts that are that are trying to convert people or, like insist religion is is real, I can't do it for myself. Like I just, you know, yeah, but you are a pirate. I'm a pirate. So I would do pirate scripts. No, exactly. Yeah. Um, but the other thing that came up recently was I started voicing for, for some kind of movement called the total human thought movement or true human thought on something. And they had a very vague script, which, which, which was sort of, you know, about, like, there was going to be some kind of world shattering event, and everyone was going to be involved and, and I did it, but I was very uneasy about it. And in terms of like, I don't, I don't know what what this is actually for, like, the language is so vague a bit, it sounds like it's quite important to or, you know, which, which, if I don't understand where something's going, it kind of makes me a bit nervous. And then it came back with another script that was like, something about it basically sounded like a cult, and it sounded like they were gonna exploit people because it said, you know, you can own your house within five years, you won't pay any interest and anyone can afford this and, and it was like, stuff that was like, this cannot be true. Or everyone would be doing it. And I just said, Look, you know, I'm happy to post a script. Can you just tell me what you're advertising and how how people get this? And they wouldn't, they wouldn't tell me. They just flatly refused to explain anything until I was like, Well, I don't I can't be involved with this if I don't understand it. And I feel like so basically, I've kind of boiled it down to if it's if it's morally unethical to do it. Like if it's a one of the biggest voice jumps that I regretted ever doing, which one of my first voice jobs I took it because I I really wanted to be a voice about this was like recording like prank calls. For people. Like there was a website where people could record like someone doing it, and I just, I did it and I just thought that's, that's my voice just hurting people and it's awful. So yeah, that was I really honor you for that. I had one that was that I had to throw in the towel. And I actually can't remember if I just I think I just let them not pay me or did a kill fee or something, but it was spandex. And it was all about like telling women how to you know, flatten their bum, or make their bum bigger and flatten their belly. I don't know what it was, but it was just so disgusting to me. And they wanted me to really push it. Oh, this looks like one of the lines was like for a perky of bum. And I was like, I'm just not going to be a part of body shaming for women. Yeah, it was no thank you. And it just it just didn't feel right. And I have a thing in life, which is if it's not a yes, it's a no. And I and I honor that whether it's, you know, say you're out shopping and you see a T shirt that you quite like you think that something is to say, if it's not a yes, it's a no. And just you know, same with voice. It's not a yes. It's a no. And you know, there's that mentality of well, beggars can't be choosers. But I think that you can trust that when you align yourself with your own values, you will attract the kind of work that is more appropriate for you. And oftentimes If you say no to something that just disgusts you something else really lovely shows up so small black animal, welcome. Okay. Well, we're nearly done. But before we go, I've got a couple more questions. Small ones, which are basically I was gonna ask you what your biggest voiceover gig you've done, but I was gonna change it to say, what's the voiceover you're most proud of? Because that's a bit more affirming. Beautiful question. Mmm hmm. put you on the spot. Now it's hard. I know, it's hard. It's hard to choose, isn't it? I was very proud of this. About a year ago, I was hired for several months by a company that was doing work that I really believed in. And it's a company called possess, which is a sleep app that helps people to, to go to sleep with stories, and they were so sweet. And they actually hired me kind of with their salary and everything. And I had a company email, which is really unusual, because most of my projects, it just you know, and we work together, I just love the people, they were so young and kind of smart tech, technically and four months a voice and then wrote and voice scripts to help put people to sleep. And I, I loved the possibility of helping, you know, being of service on the planet. But people that were, you know, struggling to sleep sleeps important. We got into doing some other stuff. There was another, there was some spin off apps that had to do with meditation, and I got to write and voice meditations. Yeah, so that's, I don't know that I was very good at putting people to sleep. I think I'm probably more interested in consciousness and waking people up out of like, the matrix that limits them or or restricts their freedom. So I think that they, they have a wonderful, a wonderful voice artist who actually I became friends with and she'd left the company. But she's now back in it. And I'm really happy for them. She has an American voice. And she just amazing to fall asleep. She's one of the names Bethany. And she's one of the top insight timer. Do you know that meditation app, it's called insight timer, I think it's the most listened to one on in the world. But she just has a quality. She's not a voice artist. But she's she began in corporate work. And she just found this kind of groove and she loves to guide people. But it's so soothing and beautiful, amazing. When you come across someone that just has that as their special skill. They just have this amazingly lovely to listen to voice. Yeah. And she's kind of felt that way about me. And I felt that we were house like, you're the good one. And we had this mutual admiration society going on. But he is he's way better at putting people to sleep. And it is I love how voiceover by extension when you go out into the world and you meet all these different people like I really like I love finding interesting voices, not necessarily nice voices, but just the ways people speak is so interesting, because it tells like reading like someone's someone's poem or something like you can tell a lot about them, you know, by the way that they speak, and then terms of their life that they've had and that who they used to hanging out with and who they think you are almost because we're all kind of social chameleons and we'll change to each other. Yeah. But you know, it's it's once you go down the voice rabbit hole in terms of analyzing However, in speaks, it's just bottomless. You know, there's, you know, what you talk about learning accents and and you know, you're like, you know, American accent which American accent and you go out with text and then you go which takes an accent you know, you can you break it down into infinitely variable, you know, segments. I love your passion for it. Oh, I just thought of another project that I that I loved, which was I don't know if he ever came across, you know, slavko Mart enough. Yeah, it's not code. Did propaganda. As long as it was a pet that was like, Oh my gosh, it was amazing. And and what was funny about it was a very sort of politically, how would you describe propaganda? There's quite a daring film. It was documentary effectively was mockumentary. Yes, that is like North Korea and sort of very covert and stuff. And I had to do this very flat read almost like a expressionless, like BBC World wasn't that. I'm weirder, weirder than that. And Glasgow was amazing at directing it. But I was gonna say that what about oh, my gosh, that was one of the comments that people had because it went up in sections on YouTube. And one of the comments someone had is like, there's something really spooky about that voice, like, they're hypnotizing or something. It's like they're gonna take you know, and it's just like, it was so innocent. I was just gonna voicing just like when in the groove of what we decided we were going to do. But his his project ended up winning like michael moore's best film in a tribe. Some festival wasn't his first ever city. Yeah, yeah. Which is amazing. That was great. Fantastic. Oh, well, we've had such a great chat today, we're nearly sort of at an angle, but it was there anything else that you wanted to want to talk about? And talk about for our listeners? Yeah, um, I think I just, I just want to inspire people really to trust themselves. And you know, like, you're saying, Toby, everyone's voices unique. And don't, don't think like, you have to sound like somebody else. You know, who you are, is enough. And it's good enough, and just begin and practice and catch the joy of it. And, you know, there is tremendous freedom in being a voice actor, and we do voice in our pajamas. At times, and because what do you love about about being a voice actor? I love that I work with people all over the world, I find that really interesting. Is to Mongolia of late. That's what we're both involved in a project. That was great. Yeah, and, and I think I just I really, I, I like that I found something that I not only enjoy doing, but I turn out to be fairly good at. And, and I, you know, it's, I wouldn't say it's easy, because like, a lot of people think voiceovers, you know, it's just, it's really easy to just, you know, it's short hours. Because the actual work you do in terms of when you're voicing in front of a microphone, is maybe 5% of the time it takes to run the business, get it do the editing, you know, all the other stuff that goes around it. So people think that it's all just that, but it's, it's most of it's finding the work and promoting yourself. But some, it's also like you have to work like I, you know, get up at seven in the morning, come straight down to the booth and do three hours and then do other stuff during the day. And then I go come back to the studio and work sort of through through till quite late at night to catch the European. got nice and gravelly, again. Exactly, yes. So it's, um, so it's, I really enjoy having the middle of my day free, which is really nice. But I wouldn't call it easy because you do have to, like, I have done sessions at like, three in the morning, when I've needed to. So you know, it's, it's sometimes you really have to kind of realize what a privilege it is, and realize that getting up at three in the morning, once every now and again is actually part of the job and it's fine. And the fact that when you go on holidays, you're never really on holiday. You always have to take your gear with you. And you know, but but if you love it, that's the thing I love. It was Oh, if you love it, it's not a job. It's something I really enjoy doing. Like, you know, yeah, that is such a great approach. Yeah, it's the one that created the success you have because it's just that that's contagious, you know. Thank you so much. It's been just utter joy talking to you today. So we need to do it again. We'll catch up and have another chat. So yeah, thank you so much for joining me. Good luck to everybody. voice on Absolutely.