My Friend's Idea

“I feel ridiculous; I can’t do this,” I laugh. Marcus just shakes his head over the discord call and encourages me to try again. The lines on the paper I’m supposed to be reading sound silly when I say them. Every time I play the tracks of what I have just recorded, I cringe.

“Everyone hates the sound of their voice at first,” Marcus tries to reassure me. “Eventually, it will stop bothering you, but we don’t have time for that, so just ignore it.”

“You tell me when one of these sounds okay,” I sigh as I adjust my headphones again. I take a deep breath, and I start the lines again, and this time I don’t laugh.

Marcus and I are on a discord call, just chatting, when he has the idea. After landing on the topic of anime and talking about recognizing popular voice actors in different shows, he looks thoughtful for a second.

“You have a nice voice,” he says.

“Thanks?” I laugh, “bit of an odd compliment, dude.”

“No, you do. You have a nice North American accent. It’s not harsh the way some peoples are. You could do voice-over.” Marcus smiles at his brilliant idea, but I just roll my eyes at him. I tell him I wouldn’t be very good at it, but he keeps pitching the concept over the next few weeks.

“Just try it,” he says. My protests that I have nothing to record with are shut down when he offers me his music recording gear to borrow. Now I have no excuse.

“If I try it once, will you let it go?” I ask. He agrees that if I audition for just one thing, anything, having to do with voice over, he’ll leave it alone if I don’t want to try it again.

It only takes a few hours of searching online before I find a creator for a video game mod who is looking for people to voice the characters in her mod. The instructions for auditioning say to record the lines at the bottom of the page and send them to her email by the deadline. It’s in three days.

Marcus wastes no time helping me put together a makeshift recording studio in my bedroom closet using thick comforters to dampen the sound. It looks like a pillow fort from the outside, but on the inside, it’s a crowded jumble of wire surrounding my desktop and my chair. I have to be careful when I’m recording not to move. Otherwise, the rustling of the comforters will be picked up by the mic.

It's a couple of hours, a lot of Marcus’ encouragement, and a couple glasses of wine before we have a recording good enough to submit. He adjusts the recordings for me, cutting out the bad takes and condensing the audio files to be small enough to email.

I submit my audition only a couple of hours before the deadline, and I wait. Two weeks go by, and nothing. I find myself checking my email several times a day, hoping to hear back. It is exactly three weeks to the day that I submitted my audition that I finally get a response.

It takes a couple minutes of rereading the email for the meaning to sink in. The mod creator loves my voice, and she wants me to voice one of the characters in her mod. I immediately call Marcus to tell him the good news.

“I told you so,” he smirks at me. I roll my eyes, even though he can’t see it over the phone.

“I know,” I sigh.

“You are going to take the role, right? You can’t quit now; at least finish this one project, and then if you want, I’ll never mention the voice acting thing again,” Marcus says.

“I’m going to take the role, and… I can’t believe I’m doing this. I think I want to give this a shot,” I chuckle.

I’ve been academics-oriented my entire life; creative arts was never in the cards, according to my family. To be pursuing acting of any kind feels completely irresponsible, but I want to try. I had gone in completely blind and with no idea what I was doing, and yet someone had thought it was good and wanted me to record more for them. Then I have a sobering thought. I might have dipped my toe into this, but I have no idea where to go from here.

“Marc… How do I do this?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” He sounds confused.

“I mean, how do I really get into this? What do I need? I’m not the creative type here,” I try to explain.

“Well, you’ll need a portfolio and likely some headshots. I know it’s voice acting, and it doesn’t really matter what you look like, but it couldn’t hurt. You also need to…” I don’t hear the rest of what Marcus says as my head starts swimming. This sounds like a lot of work and definitely a bit of money upfront if I want to give it my best shot.

“Jess? Still there?”

“Yep,” I sigh.

“Hey, we’ll call tonight and lay out a plan. I’ll be your guide to how to be an artist,” he laughs.

We work on my portfolio over the next few months, and more of my friends become involved in the effort. One does my makeup, so another can take some good headshots. Another friend shows me how to promote myself on Instagram.

Marcus always vets my tracks; I only want to put the best of them out there. I want to be like the voice actors in video games and tv shows. I want to give a voice to a character and help share their story with the audience. But that’s a long way off if it ever happens at all. It would take time, resources, and finances that I just don’t have yet. That’s alright, though.

Right now, I don’t need to give my voice to the hero of a video game. I don’t need to be the voice of Eve Frye or Kassandra right now. I’d be happy to be a nameless extra in the background to help flesh out the story.