VICTORIES FOR THE WEEK
My commercial reel is finished!
You can listen to it on the front page on my website Listen Here!
I started reworking my recording space
I got GIK Acoustic panels and someone sold me the Producer's Choice of VocalBoothtoGo's acoustic blankets. I need to continue working on the space and check on the quality with an audio engineer but it already lowered my noise floor and upped the quality of my raw recordings.
Updated my website
I wanted to make my website more accessible and easier to navigate. There's more to work on but good job me for making some progress!
The best answer, from my non-medical perspective, is that whenever you’re not at your 100%, that’s the body’s way of saying “Hey! Let me fix this before you do something stupid!”. So whenever my body is having a reaction, I try to give it the time to heal itself and not push it more. With any creative job, including voice acting, however, it tends to be a challenge.
If my foot were to break, I would still record. I even recorded while I was recovering from wisdom teeth removal surgery. However, recovering from open wounds in my mouth would probably have a greater impact on my talking than a foot injury. I heard it in my recordings and in my auditions. But auditions keep coming and last minute jobs happen. So the first two weeks I timed my sessions and workshops with pain relieving medication and was able to tolerate the pain enough to get through my jobs.
The whole body can affect the sound of the voice. Voice actors get direction to sound like we: are tired, have stomach pain, just took an arrow to the knee, and more. The fact that direction like this exists in the first place does assume that if a voice actor were to be tired, have stomach pain, or an arrow in our knee, that it may show in how we speak. The aftereffects of oral surgery might be more obvious to hear in my recordings, but a broken foot could very much affect my performance in one way or the other. Acting while also dealing
with the pain and the possible distraction of a broken foot may prevent myself from acting with my full potential.
Acting while sick. I got cast as the lead in my first musical. Unfortunately, I got a nasty cough the day before and had to deal with it during the first two performances because I had no understudy. I did as much research as I can on how I can tackle a cough and all my musical numbers. One piece of advice, surprisingly, was to take this as an opportunity to learn how to use my voice while sick. Different people might use different parts of their body to sing or speak the way they do. Becoming better performers also means to know how to access the parts of our body that let’s us perform in an entertaining, sustainable, and efficient way.
I don’t try to get sick, so practicing how to best perform sick is not easy. But, when I do get sick, I realized the discomfort is heightened in specific areas that make me hyper aware, that make me want to experiment with using my voice while minimizing the struggle in body parts affected by my ailment.
With a creative job like voice acting, most aspects are an experiment: your preferred acting techniques, your career path, even the equipment that you decide to buy. Whether you choose to work while you’re sick or not, it’s a great time to focus on yourself. In fact, many voice actors use their sick days to focus on the non-voice acting part of voice acting, like emails, marketing, research, and more. No matter what unfortunate situation you’re in or ailment you have, there is still so much to do and learn. The booth door can be closed for a while, but so many other doors can also be opened.
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