Take Action #4: The Business Side of Acting

As actors we can sometimes become too focused on the craft of acting and neglect something that's equally important: the business side of acting. This may not be as "fun", but just as important as tuning your vocal instrument is finding out who might hire you to use your voice and where they are. It's a pro-active way of forwarding your career in voice-over. So for a moment look at VO as a military objective. This week's exercise focuses on selecting a few targets and doing a little recon, or research. And you won't even need to get your hands dirty. Start with what you like. For example, if you really like the show Naruto, you might search and find out that in the United States, Naruto is licensed by a company called Viz. A little more looking (with your friend Google) might turn up that the English dub for Naruto is recorded at Studiopolis. Voila! You now have a production company to add to your hit list when you have a demo to mail out! With commercials, you might have to be a little more investigative, but there are resources (such as adforum.com) out there that can help you find the ad agency who produced the commercial and who's associated with the promotion of that product.

So, for this exercise, pick an area to start with: animation, video games, or commercials. Now choose three of your favorite shows/movies, video games or commercials. Begin to do a little Internet legwork. Find out who the production company is, and in the case of commercials, the ad agency who commissioned the spot. Try and discover if the company/agency casts their projects in-house, or if they have a relationship with a separate casting company. In some cases, you may even find that the same studio/ad agency produced more than one of your selections, then you know they're definitely somebody you want to target.

There is plenty of information available on the Web, and a little digging could turn up e-mail addresses or maybe phone numbers that you could use to contact the company and find out who might be best to send your reel to. Start a file and keep the info you find for future reference. Good hunting!

Vegas, baby, Vegas

I  can't believe it's been a week already since Yuri and I were in Las Vegas at Anime Vegas...we had a great time, and got to meet a bunch of fans as well as seeing some familiar faces in the crowd. We even had some help with the documentary that our friend/documentarian Boris Kievksy is filming of us going to conventions this whole year. At our panel on VO, the audience helped out by playing along and chiming in on some of Yuri's VO tales, and (hopefully) much fun was had by all. Vegas is also a special city for Yuri and I, since it's where we got married almost eight years ago. Being crazy as we are, we were driving cross country from NYC to LA and hit Vegas and eloped! For the Vegasites (Vegasans? Vegasians?) who may know, we were married (long before even becoming voice-actors) at the Wee Kirk of the Heather Chapel near Fremont Street and Old Vegas! For those of you not as familiar with LV, the Wee Kirk is known by the many famous marriages it's held (Madonna/Sean Penn; etc.)

But, mostly, we had fun, went to a great con, met a bunch of cool folks, signed a bunch of autographs, went to the pool (Wave Pool! Lazy River!),  did some panels, ate tons of tasty food, celebrated Boris' birthday with his folks, saw the Lion King (!) and thoroughly enjoyed Sin City (which for us is more of Win City!) :)

Thanks to Rich Stott for another great Con, the guests and fans for making us feel so welcome, and to the city for treating us nicely while there!

t:)