Acting stuff!

Hey! I just signed on with Take 2 for acting gigs. You can contact them if you need a rediculously tall guy to be in you film!

Giving it a shot!

Just signed up with www.acx.com as a potential entrance into audio book narration. Fingers are crossed!

Link-o-rama!

Here are a few links about me and who I work with. Make sure and check them out!

I'm just a normal guy. I have a normal Facebook page. You can find it here.

I do have a Facebook actors page as well. You can find that one here.

If you're interested in my actor resume and want to see a couple of vids I've been in, check here.

The radio serial I'm currently writing is called 'Richard Dickens: Private Investigator'.

RDPI (as we call it) is being created in association with Cyber Network Theater and Swampedge Studio.

Since Swampedge was kind enough to loan me some great equipment, I stayed with a water-based theme and named my little hole in the wall Edgewater Studio. The name was actually thought up by my wife and is a story unto itself. Maybe sometime in the future I'll post about that but for now I'll leave that a mystery.

My 'studio' becomes My Studio

So there we were, trying to make a radio serial on a tiny cramped iso box. It actually worked really well if a single person was being recorded, but in scenes where I wanted multiple actors I had one of two choices.
   1) Record them seperately and have them edited together afterwards, or
   2) Cram them as close as possible in front of the mic.
I really didn't like either option, but we wound up trying both possibilities.

Then the people who came to me for the serial sent me a surprise. Real studio equipment.

We're not talking top-of-the-line stuff, but far superior to what I was using.

So this is what my studio looks like now:

(photo courtesy of Rachel Ungar)

Some real stuff to work with. Of course it's just on loan, but it greatly improved the quality of episodes 2 through 5 of my serial.

I should point out we are NOT using the THX sound system to record. I was just happy to be able to display my framed classic 1980's poster in a surrounding that it fit in.

I was able to cut down on the traffic noise that wandered in from the window by stuffing three inch thick foam padding, a layer of paper eggcrate and a thick comforter over the space. Now it's pretty much silent with the exception of the occasional cement truck and bus. Thankfully that doesn't happen often.

Also, behind the perspective of the photo, the rear wall is covered in foam eggcrate and the ceiling over the recording station is covered in paper eggcrate. I still have more to put up but the sound is really amazing now.

Here's a tip... If you're looking for eggcrate material to dampen sound, check into your local Denny's, Shari's or IHOP. It only took a week for me to get enough paper eggcrate to cover the entire 10X10 ceiling. I just have to get off my butt and put the rest of them up. And seriously, paper eggcrate seems to work just as well as foam eggcrate. You can do this pretty cheap.

With everything recorded for the entire radio serial and currently at the editor the studio is sitting idle, which is why I decided to put it to additional use. I'm hoping audio books might be the way to go. We'll see...

COMING UP NEXT:
   A hell of a lot of links... I mean a ton of them... Who I am, what I do, how to find me, where to find the serial, who loaned me the equipment, where to find them and so much more...

My first 'studio'

About a year ago I was approached by someone about writing a radio serial. I was excited about the prospect and knew that I was going to be able to get a bunch of my acting friends involved. So I wrote. And wrote. And I even wrote some more. I wound up with a five episode radio serial that takes place in an alternate version of 1940's Chicago. It turned out pretty cool.

When it came time to get my friends together to record the various parts... well, I had a problem. I didn't have anything to use. I live - literally - 30 feet away from one of the busiest roads in the area and traffic noise travels really well (pun intended).

So I made this:

It worked pretty well. We still had to time some of our recording between the heavier traffic but it helped quite a bit in cutting the noise down.

I've upgraded since then (which I'll post about at another time) but this little guy - being only about two feet square on the inside dimensions - helped quite a bit. The first episode of my serial was recorded almost exclusively using this iso box.

I knew that it wasn't going to work well for a great product but it taught me some very good lessons like... um, how am I supposed to read while I record? I remedied that with my new setup.

A quick intro...

Well, here I am.

Yesterday I decided to start checking into narration. Mainly audio books. Over the past few years I've met a lot of great people making some great films in the local area and a couple of them have mentioned that my voice would work very well in spoken word recordings.

I'm currently writing and narrating a radio serial that I'm hoping will hit the airwaves soon and I think I have the melodramatic narrator style going but it's a lot harder than it sounds. It's not how I normally speak. So audio books might be the way to go.

I'm going to do my best to keep this blog updated with how my adventures pan out in this area. And maybe shamelessly self-promote any other projects I might happen to be involved in.

So stay tuned. I'm here now, after all...