Hey! I'm a singing chick! (Really!)

How cute is this?

Some months ago, I started doing voiceover work for the award-winning PBS tv show Peg + Cat. I LOVE voiceover work, especially animation. It's fun to pour everything into my voice.  When it's educational, it's especially gratifying to know that I'll be teaching children how to read thanks to Word World and yes, basic math skills thanks to Peg + Cat.  That kind of blows me away. My friends kids are watching, where ever they are all over the country -- and all over the world, really. My little nephews and cousins are watching. My 3 year old Goddaughters Evia and Avia are watching. Television is a powerful medium. I still love Schoolhouse Rock.

One particular episode is dedicated entirely to Billie Holiday, and is set in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. (As arranger/composer/musician for the series, Emmy award-winning wonder J. Walter Hawkes did brilliant work on this one.) I got to sing -- and talk! -- like Lady Day herself. I remember thinking, what a great way to introduce little tots (and adults) to an iconic jazz vocalist.  There were other moments that I forgot about, voiceover work in other Peg + Cat episodes that came and went that had me singing all kinds of things, and now they pop up inadvertently, like this little blip on Twitter the other day.

I am a work-from-home dad and I have all the Peg + Cat info you need pic.twitter.com/5gFplmzEcK

— Phil Dzikiy (@phildzikiy) September 10, 2015

What's cracking me up is, I think this little chick looks just like me -- if only for the way it's standing at a tilt and putting the flower just so.

Here's the song.



Cute, right?

DIY

if you're an artist, you learn pretty quickly that you are your own business - especially if you're an actor. maintenance and upkeep on all fronts is understood. expansion, vision and growth? now, that's something else. i don't get actors who don't do anything except act. they don't sing, they don't dance, they don't make a pair of pants. nice work if you can get it. most actors can't.

if you want to work steadily, you have to do more than one thing well. voiceover work is just another skill, like singing jingles. how much i work has everything to do with how i handle my business. how strong is my hustle? i'm never sure. it's always been a stick and move situation and like a shark, i can never keep still in this town. but it's stronger than it ever was. and that's something, i suppose. in a way, it's everything.

now that i've included medical narration in my voiceover skills, i've had to seriously think hard about what to charge clients. of course, i asked the internet and needless to say, i got some great answers, most notably from mcm voices voiceover blog's wonderfully concise and well-written entry setting rates in the voiceover business as well as a comprehensive voiceover industry rate card from the edge studio's voice design group. everything is up and off the ground now. i love doing voiceover work!

oh, yeah. i almost forgot. if you want to hear my demos, click here.

yes, another voiceover audition -- "pulp friction"

whether i'm singing or just talking, i've been twisting my voice around to make it sound like whatever i want it to be ever since i can remember. if singing is this close to the bone, can voiceover work really be that far off the mark? isn't it all some form of vocalizing? both have their own skill set but either way, i'm acting my way through it. and now that my commercial demo is up and at 'em online, there are a lot more voiceover opportunities coming at me all the time. weird, the way doors that i've walked past for years can suddenly spring open out of nowhere. i always thought, i have a nice voice, i should do voiceovers -- but i didn't have a clue as to where to begin and once i got ahold of that clue, i didn't know how to put it all together. but i'm past all that now. thank God.

i can't remember the last time i did an audition on a sun-drenched saturday afternoon that would normally find me running a 10 minute mile but i suppose there's a next time for everything. this one was for the pilot of an animated series called pulp friction that's similar to what you might find on adult swim. i knew that they wanted a monologue but i just didn't have one in me. after writing 3 one person shows, improvising whatever i need in the moment when i have to yammer on cue for 2 minutes has never been an problem. they warned that that they were videotaping, so i threw on a little makeup and, preoccupied with what i looked like, i zipped out of my place without a headshot/resume. super-smart, right? right.

i didn't even realize that i didn't have what i needed until i was in the elevator on my way up to ripley-greer studios. by the time i signed in with the audition monitor, i felt like a complete idiot. but that "i'm a complete idiot" feeling wasn't enough to make me not go through with the audition. i figured, whatever. the bottom line is, i'm here and how i feel about whatever ball i've dropped is irrelevant. feelings fake me out all the time. it's not that they aren't valid or real. it' s just that when the stuff hits the proverbial fan, they aren't the main thing i should be paying attention to. and too often in the past, that's the way the ball bounced. the smoke clears and phrases like, "i felt that this was..." or "i had a feeling about how we would..." feelings, whoa, whoa, whoa feelings. whoa. let's think this through: i'm not afraid to look stupid, probably because i know that i'm smart.

so i get in the room. it's a guy behind a camera and in front of him are three guys sitting at a long table. they are upbeat, genuinely interested, affable and friendly. how ideal is that? i told them that i forgot my headshot but that i'd email it right away. no problem. then i told them i had no monologue. that wasn't a problem, either. the guy all the way to the left gave me a copy of the onion and told me to read anytihng on the front page. just make it funny, he added good-naturedly, and as he did, they all nodded. funny, huh i mumbled as my eyes scanned the page. my gazed crash-landed on an article out of the ATL. i considered that to be a sign from God and began to read it in my best texarkana accent that i could muster. as i did, a strange thing happened: i killed. after a minute or so, they gave me a few pages of script and asked me to review 2 characters: clayton, the alcoholic easter bunny and craig, the reindeer that's also a thug-wannabe. both guys. when i began to ask questions, they showed me artist's renderings. i really loved the bunny. he was way too pink and cheery looking and fuzzy, and he clutched a bottle of hard liquor in one hand, and he looked really really fried.

i sat outside, a little dazed that i'd gotten that far and made some mental notes with script choices. when i went back into the room, i asked them if they knew who foster brooks was. i thought it would be interesting to play the bunny that way. all i got was blank faces all around, except for the camera guy, who remarked that when he was reading it that's who he was thinking of.

immediately, i thought of ozzy ozbourne who remarked that he'd never take up with a younger woman because they'd have nothing to talk about. sometimes when i get to talking about whatever i'm thinking of and i start bouncing stuff around to illustrate what i mean, i get blank looks like this. ew.

and yes, my friend knows who foster brooks is. thank God. but i digress.

i made it through that instant callback with flying colors and skipped off to the gym on 125 -- so happy, i ran a mile in 10 minutes. we'll see if i got the gig or not. the good news is, i didn't leave. i drove it home with one headlight.

i've got the cigar -- sort of...

i went into voiceovers unlimited/aaa voiceovers a few days ago and did the voiceover takes for each minute or so of commercial copy for my voiceover reel. i bounced in and out of the studio listening carefully as dan duckworth edited all six of them together with the music that we’d already chosen for each one, then cut all of it into snippets of mere seconds each and trimmed the excess fat (breathiness, etc) away. fascinating stuff. protools is a little miracle.

by the time he was done, the running time for the whole thing was something like a minute and 10 seconds—because no one has a real attention span and because of the nature of voiceovers, they don’t have to. they can get the gist of it in short order.

when i heard a rough cut of the end result, i was floored. it sounded so good, i could hardly believe it was me.

now i have to wait for the whole thing to be edited and synched and polished and all. that should take something like two weeks. here’s how it goes: they’re going to email it to me and then they’re going to make 12 copies and a master copy for me to pick up. i’ll also get a mailing list, so i can do a postcard mailing to let agents who represent voiceover artists know that i’m available – and that means registering at sendoutcards.com so that i can take care of all of that asap. my goal is to have all of this done – the demo, the mailing to agents, the master copy in my hand – by my birthday on june 30th. with that as a present to myself, anything else is extra.

yay! i’ll be working from home as a voiceover artist in no time!

See more progress on: Finish my voiceover demo

i'm versatile

every once in awhile, a voiceover gig would fall into may lap and i'd tell myself that i would make a demo and start my voiceover business for real. and then i'd forget about it until some other voiceover gig came out of nowhere and i'd go, wow, i really have to get it together and make a demo. and then i'd go back to whatever i was doing before. back and forth i went. you'd think i would have learned my lesson from the voiceover work i did in lackawanna blues, but no. it took a year of residual checks from that oh so happy afternoon in the recording studio with george and most of the cast of caroline or change that made me think, am i nuts or what? and then another gig fell in my lap: a musician who'd seen me with jc hopkins' biggish band found me via j walter hawkes for a PBS children's cartoon called Word World that had me playing "elephant" and singing a little song called "bit by bit" about putting words together. sooooooo cute. i was in and out in less than an hour and the check was lovely. and it was fun! hm, i thought. wouldn't it be great if i could do this all the time?

i'd been getting newsletters every month from dan and carol duckworth at AAA Voiceover Casting/Voiceovers Unlimited for God knows how long, so when their "january jumpstart" came around this year, i jumped on it. their total package is more like total immersion. they don't just help you put together a demo, they show you how to run your business, for real: classes to develop and maintain your skills, regular mailings to business contacts, seminars to teach you how to market yourself, workshops and one one one sessions to hone in on your weaknesses and strengthen them. everything is so goal-oriented. and i'm a compulsive list-maker, so that's going some, for me to say that. i loved the way dan kept referring to everyone as the president of our respective companies.

once i realized that recording at home to audition and take voiceover work via your laptop, garageband and a mic was the wave of the future, i thought, hm -- wouldn't it be great if i didn't have to leave the house to go to work? then again -- wouldn't it be even better if i could do this voiceover business anywhere?

dan said it in our first marketing seminar, but i've always known it to be true: most actors just call themselves actors. they don't know how to treat acting like a business. they don't know how to hustle, how to make it rain, how to generate work for themselves whether the phone rings or not. they don't know how to market themselves. here's a perfect example of what i mean: most actors don't do mailings regularly -- that means a postcard with updates every month, to keep everyone up on the latest things you've done, after you've sent a headshot and a letter of introduction. it goes without saying that you having all the talent in the world doesn't mean anything if the casting agent in question with the perfect gig for you has no idea that you even exist.

i have one friend in particular who is convinced that the postage to spend on such things is a waste of money. whatever.

all i know is, i'm versatile. and i'm pretty sure that's a part of what can keep the residual checks rolling in. whaddya know: i'm only a few weeks into this total package and i just found out today that an in-house corporate gig just landed on my head. nutty.