I was so taken with Pamela Vanderway’s concept of using a dialect donor when you need a model for a certain dialect that now that’s the term I think of when I hear somebody who speaks with an accent. If you need a great model for a 2nd generation Italian-American accent from northern New Jersey, you’re [...]

Yesterday’s post was inspired by a video at Pamela Vanderway’s blog, and this morning I took a bit of time to look at some of Pamela’s other posts.  What a delightful experience!  She’s a dialect consultant and has such an interesting perspective.  If you’re an actor, whether on-camera or in voice-over, I think you’ll enjoy [...]

For those of you working on your Scottish accent, you can’t do better than this.

A few weeks ago, fellow voice talent and friend Philip Banks challenged his colleagues to a competition to see who could perform the best British accent (native Brits obviously ineligible). A few dozen souls took up the challenge, including me. At the end of the week a tie was declared between my dear friend Maureen [...]

Yesterday I received an entertaining email from one of my favorite clients, Richard, for whom I’ve done several large jobs requiring accents. His company produces educational software and he hired me to provide an Australian voice for “Miss Melberry” in a maps and graphs project, and a Georgia accent for a lizard (“Miss Lizzy”) in [...]

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I love languages and that I’ve been taking Spanish for a while with the goal of being able to offer voice-over in Spanish. The language I’ve studied the longest besides English, however, is actually German. I started taking it in 7th or 8th grade, [...]

Today was the culmination of all our hard work in Dialects for Actors, in which we presented our scenes and monologues to a small audience at the Curtain Theatre. The Curtain Theater I should have been a nervous wreck, since I had never had to perform memorised lines on stage before, ever. I was far [...]

I wrote last week, and not for the first time, about the importance of getting out and doing things. Like going to a climbing wall (and by the way, yes I did go again, and yes I did try the more challenging route again and this time was successful!). But sometimes it’s far more routine [...]

In some way I have always been somewhat jealous of people with routine – people who have the discipline to run a few miles every morning, who always read the newspaper and take the dog for three daily walks. Some of the people who do this can do it because they don’t have a lot [...]

I’ve written here before about my early voice-over influences – more specifically, the “funny voices” influences. They were, unequivocally, Beyond the Fringe and to a lesser extent Mike Nichols and Elaine May. These people were funny. Funny enough to attract the attention of a 9-year old and keep it for the next several decades & [...]