FREE Voice Over Tips & Insights – From a 25+ year Pro
Borrowed Time: What Bobby Darin Taught Me About Swinging Anyway
A kid told he would not see 16 became a Grammy winner, an Oscar nominee and a cautionary tale. What Bobby Darin teaches us about making the thing anyway.
Everything you loved as a kid… was RESEARCH!
What a Muppets panel at D23 accidentally explained about my entire career... and about a Crow T. Robot audition I had been preparing for since high school.
An Audience of One: The WHO Behind Every Story You Tell
Storytelling is essential to our human identity. The stories we tell are how we know who we are. And as voice actors, we do something both ancient and profound — we share a great story with an audience of one. Here's what that means for every performance you'll ever give.
You Are Part of Someone Else's Hero's Journey. Act Like It.
Joseph Campbell spent his career identifying the universal pattern underlying every great story ever told across every culture in human history. Pixar knows it. Disney knows it. Every great video game writer knows it. And voice actors who understand it — who know exactly where their character lives inside that journey — don't just perform a character. They tell a STORY. Let's dig in.
If You Can Tell Me a Story Without Sound... Guess What I Guarantee You Can Do?
I say this in almost every class and workshop I teach. It comes directly from my puppetry background — and it stops actors cold every time: "If you can tell me a story without sound... guess what I guarantee you can do?" The answer changes everything about how you approach the mic.
The Suspension of Disbelief: Your Most Powerful Ally — and Your Most Tenuous One
Last week I re-watched WALL-E with my four-year-old. I cried three separate times. Over robots. That don't really speak. In a movie I've seen before. And I knew — the whole time — that I was watching computer animated images on a screen. So why was I weeping? And what does that have to do with your next voice acting audition?
That's Not How You Play Guitar.
I've been deep in a YouTube rabbit hole lately. Jimi Hendrix. Stevie Ray Vaughan. Jeff Healey. Watching young people discover these legends for the first time and completely LOSE THEIR MINDS over it. And all I keep thinking is: every single one of these men was told — implicitly or explicitly — that they were doing it wrong. Every. Single. One.
Mel Brooks at 100 — A Love Letter From a Kid Who Grew Up on His Films
Today is a HOLY DAY for anyone who has ever laughed at a movie. Mel Brooks turns 100. I wrote him a love letter. It got personal. It got a little mushy. I'm not sorry.