A while back, you may remember I got cast or two characters for an animated short film I wrote about in a previous blog post. They just recently finished the animation! It turned out great, I think! It was a harder commission since it took more emotion, and I was playing two very similar characters. One of the characters, Ben, was around eight years old, so I had to sound younger. The other character, Parker, was about 13 years old, so I used my natural voice. The whole process of casting, practicing, and turning in lines took around a month or two. I didn't get to meet the rest of the cast, but that's common for most parts I get cast. Here's the finished animation:

Yesterday I got to visit a real recording studio!! A friend of my dad's who went to the same school as him lives near us, and we just recently found out he's an audio engineer and has his own studio! So he invited us to his house. IT WAS AN AWESOME EXPERIENCE!

Here are some pics I took:

Here's a pic of the inside of his recording COMPLETELY soundproof booth. It was AWESOME! It was my natural habitat! It was so quiet on the inside! He built inside the main room of the house.

Last week I finished episode 200 for the Pioneering Today Podcast! One of my clients, Melissa Norris (or for me M.K.N., da BOSS, or Mrs. Norris), is the host of the Pioneering Today Podcast. I started working for her around episode 115. 

My mom was/is great friends with her, so she suggested that I could help edit the podcast (well actually full-on edit it). She knew Mrs. Norris had a podcast and was having to spend extra time editing it herself. At that time I had already been editing another podcast for a year or to, and was excited to try taking on another podcast. 

As of now, I've edited over 300 podcast episodes! I don't know the exact amount of episodes I have edited, but by looking at the podcasts I can tell an approximate. Also, the average amount of hours I spend editing an episode is around 3 hours and 30 minutes, so that means I've edited for over 1,000 hours!

I've had different ideas of what I'd like my future to be like, career-wise, and here are my ideas for what I'd like to be doing in ten years:

I'd love to still do voice acting, maybe live acting. I'd specifically enjoy voice narration rather than commercial voice acting or character voice acting because that seems so far the type I enjoy most. Most people think voice acting is voicing famous characters for Disney, Dreamworks, Pixar, etc, but you have to be really good, experienced, some-what famous. And almost always there's going to be an audition better than yours. I've heard pro voice actors say the average professional voice actor will get cast for characters 1/15 auditions. But who knows, maybe I could be working for big companies like those. What would be really awesome is if I can be a pro voice actor by the time I'm 16.

As for audio engineering, I would love to get an internship by the time I'm 18 with a professional sound designer or a sound design company and learn as much as I can. I don't imagine myself going to college for voice over or audio engineering, I think there are other ways of getting good training and knowledge info and practice for a cheaper price. Then after an internship, get a job at a sound design company, then maybe a few years after that possibly start my own audio engineering company. 

Those are my future "hopes and dreams."

Ok, you saw the title, so you know what's coming! A few days ago I was watching a video by Mike Russel, and he was talking about using the Dynamics option in Adobe Audition. Now, I don't know a lot about the tool, so I still want to spend time learning how to use it. But basically, it takes out everything under a set number of decibels. I currently have it set to -20 dB, but I can customize it whenever I like. Anything quieter than -20 dB will be completely erased.

I've now used this tool in over 3 episodes and played around with it to find my favorite specific setting on it. It's a pretty awesome tool! When I first used it, it would sometimes cut the end of a sentence to abruptly. But have that fixed now, and I've even used it for my voice over!