Wow... sorry for the 6-month hiatus, there. I guess I have a lot of explaining to do.
After my last entry (December 5, 2003), a whole lot happened in a very short time. I got an audition call for a big voiceover project, and on the same day got a call from a lighting company I had contacted sometime back in July or August. So there were interviews. Again, both on the same day.
To make a long story short, on December 10, 2003, I was hired for BOTH jobs.
The voiceover job is STILL going on. I was hired to narrate a series of educational DVD's -- there are 6 disks in the series, totaling about nine hours of final, edited narration. The producer/director is an incredible person from Denmark who has not only written the entire series, but he's also CGI animated the WHOLE thing, all by himself, after spending about five years of his life amassing the necessary research and trial-and-error experience that was his impetus for making the series in the first place. He's also quite the perfectionist... my performance needs to be enthusiastic and engaging, but I have to watch out for sounding "teach-ey" or making it sound like I'm reading it (I AM reading it, but it can't sound like it).
This means that for every solid hour of edited narration, we're looking at about six to eight hours of recording time. Factor in the fact that as we go along (mind you, he wrote the whole thing himself and this is the first time he's heard a voice with the animation) he finds things to tweak and rewrite or rearrange, or even completely do over and re-animate.
It will probably be another two or three months before the project is completely finished. But I am getting the 'Baptism by Fire Crash Course in Taking Voiceover Direction'. And I'm getting pretty darned good at it, too.
But that's not all. I landed the other job, too. I am, again, a film, TV and special events lighting coordinator for a VERY large event lighting company. And we're busy. We light nearly all of the awards shows, like the Oscars, the Grammys, the People's Choice Awards and this year they happened all within about three weeks of each other. Plus we light the Olympics (a good portion of them, anyway), several Broadway shows, two major beauty pageants, a couple of late-night talk show sets... the list goes on.
So, I go to my "Blasted Day Job" (from here on referred to as the "BDJ") at the lighting company from 8 to 5:30 on weekdays. On Tuesdays, up until a few weeks ago, I was still going to the writers/actors workshop. That has since ended, which is another long story. I'll get into that at another time. BUT, on Wednesdays through Fridays, I go to the studio at 6:00pm to record until ten or eleven at night, and then all day on Saturdays.
Somewhere in there, Mom came for Christmas. It was wonderful.
The DVD sessions are now on a recording break so the director can re-write a few chapters, re-do a bunch of animation, and edit in everything we've done so far to see how well it flows. I'm still at the BDJ during the week, but I'm really pressing to get to the next level of the VO and acting career, and get an agent.
Which, of course, is another long story.
