Voice Over

Yesterday and today the college where I teach hosted a special event with Zach Hanks, who is an actor and now directs game voices. He has taught game voice acting workshops, and I think, he has presented a variety of topics these past two days at our campus, but we were only at one event last night.

Mr. Fun & I went to that one evening presentation. When Hanks first began speaking, I was sure I'd be in trouble with Mr. Fun because the topic didn't seem like anything we'd be interested in and I was sure Mr. Fun was bored. Before long Zack Hanks had everyone laughing as he spoke about the variety and the diversity of voices that can be brought into a production. He was very entertaining and he spoke in a variety of dialects to example them for us. He also spoke about

pitch: (high/low);
loudness (volume): loud/soft;
rate: fast/slow;
intonation (music of a phrase) varied/monotone;
resonance: male/female;
qualities: clear, strident, nasal, de-nasal, texture, raspy, throaty, guttural, gravily.

He had lots of us laughing and absolutely engaged as he exampled many of these.

He spoke about fantasy characters -- kings, queens, nobles, princes & princesses, wizards, elves, mermaids, fairies, ogres, trolls, gigantic monsters, spirits, vampires, werewolves, castles, and dungeons.

Of everything he spoke about, AND he spoke about many things, "Silence" is one term that caught my attention. He exampled it in several ways from talking slowly and allowing lots of silence between each word to finally just becoming silent; that was powerful. I've known about the influence of silence for a long time, but watching and listening Hanks example silence was powerful and interesting.

It was just about 13 months ago that the college had a 3-day special event with Ernst Adams and his presentations on "Interactive Storytelling." During that event I wrote, "the 'gaming' industry is expanding beyond the world of 'blowing-up and killing everything' to new genres of computer games such as romantic comedies, soap operas, political thrillers. I know zilch about the computer gaming world so this was all new for me."

I still know zilch about all this stuff, except that I do know the field of animation, gaming, voice-overs and all things connected to these is expanding and students who are interested should research the opportunity to get into it while it is still a new and growing field.


Here in southern California, we are now getting a little "January" in our springtime. Rain is forecast and the temp has now dropped and it is chilly. We had little too much summer in January, so I'll take some January now.

Good night,
Rosie (& Mr. Fun), aka