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Voice Acting Journey ft BlowfishmanTV || Chatsu Shorts
286 Plays3 years ago
In this episode of Chatsu Shorts, long time streamer and aspiring voice actor BlowfishmanTV discusses his journey into the world of voice acting.
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Transcript
Episode Introduction with Bluefish Man TV
00:00:05
Speaker
Welcome to Chattsunami. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of Chattsu Shorts. In this episode, my friend and fellow streamer, Bluefish Man TV, will be diving into the world of voice acting. Without any further ado, please enjoy.
Origin of Voice Acting Journey
00:00:36
Speaker
Hi, I'm Blowfish Man, a Twitch streamer, a musician, and video editor. But today isn't about any of those things. This is about my current ongoing journey as a voice actor in training. But before that, a little bit of context of what got me started. As a huge nerd, both in a metaphorical and literal sense, it all started back in my days as a high schooler. I was considered that weirdo outcast for being into anime and manga. People did poke fun, but I did my best not to mind their jeers and quips.
00:01:00
Speaker
It all started when I read the manga of Naruto Shippuden and would try to read them out loud in different kinds of voices. I also did watch the anime so it was easier to do that with context. Needless to say, my family thought I'd gone crazy from the many voices I was doing, the monologues I've recited, as well as the amount of emotion I would put into reciting those lines.
00:01:18
Speaker
Afterwards, I started looking more into video games, and hey, what better game to start with than the Mortal Kombat series? I would always do my best version of Scorpions, GET OVER HERE, with as much oomph and aggression as Patrick Seats, and you best better believe my classmates who played the Mortal Kombat series thought it was awesome.
00:01:34
Speaker
Again, I'd get the occasional hater who would think it's totally stupid and annoying, but hey, that's a tale for another time. Afterwards, my university years came along. I didn't do as much reciting and get over here as I used to with the workload they'd give us and the brand new set of friends that I've made. Though that didn't mean I was done with voice acting, oh no. I slowly started to dip back into it during those years by doing the impersonations of random celebrities.
00:01:56
Speaker
mainly Arnold Schwarzenegger because my friends absolutely loved that one. And looking back at those old videos that my friends took of me, I could just think, holy dear lord, I could do way better.
Challenges with YouTube and Family Discouragement
00:02:06
Speaker
So among my group of friends, I became the guy who could do a great impersonation of the former governor of California. Come fourth year, I started doing impersonations of League of Legends characters, CWDC universe characters, as well as supernatural characters.
00:02:19
Speaker
This got me to play around a little bit with audio engineering in order to make myself sound bigger, demonic, as well as much more evil, and of course to clean up audio when needed. I was playing around with the program Audacity at the time, and no, just to confirm this is not being recorded on Audacity, it's recorded on Reaper.
00:02:36
Speaker
Then came my university graduation and I thought, huh, maybe I should continue on with this voice acting stuff instead of using my double major in psychology and ecology. But where and how to start was the real question. And my start was recording weekly YouTube videos under the name Blofishman. I did impersonations of video game characters as well as did an original 150 Pokemon noise voiceover video the moment Pokemon Go dropped. I did see some success in these videos as I would get at least 100 views consistently on each one.
00:03:04
Speaker
Then I was invited to do fan dubs of the anime One Piece as Frankie, Don Quixote, Doflamingo, as well as Blackbeard since the folks running the fan dub loved my gruff voices. Then came the infamous and horrible YouTube algorithm. I started seeing my views go down from 100 to barely even getting to 10 every video. Needless to say that this really demotivated me to drop content and I went into a horrible spiral of questioning whether my abilities and content were any good and just stopped.
Pandemic and Passion Revival
00:03:33
Speaker
that and I was discouraged by my family members not to do it due to the fact that it was a tough career and that voice actors get treated horribly in the industry. From that point on, I decided to try and live a normal life. I started volunteering at a cat shelter, then I got a job as a dog groomers assistant, really a fancy title for a dog breather, and honestly speaking, life wasn't so bad. In 2019, I also began to play my first ever Dungeons and Dragons campaign and the DM of the game, who is now one of my best friends on this planet, is a voice actor.
00:04:02
Speaker
He told his story with such vigor as well as incorporated character voices for NPCs and villains which kept things very interesting. Needless to say, this got me out of my shell to try again, and I put on a very deep Thor-like voice for my dragonborn barbarian Zio Sinclaw. Zoomed to 2020 and the COVID pandemic occurred. I lost my job and I couldn't see any of my friends, my D&D table mates, or my loved ones. Life was very strange and I began to think, what the heck am I going to do now?
00:04:29
Speaker
Then I remembered way back when that I loved to do voice acting and content creation. So I thought, okay, Blowfish, you have two options. Wait out the pandemic till your job comes back and God knows how long that's
Streaming Success and Training
00:04:40
Speaker
gonna take. Or try again, but in a different way. Thankfully, I took the road less traveled and decided to try again, except this time, I took up streaming instead of YouTube video editing. My first stream ever was playing a dating sim called Hatiful Boyfriend, and I tried to voice every character like the mad lad I am. Needless to say, people were very entertained and energetic in my chat.
00:04:59
Speaker
This re-sparked this light of hope in me in order to try this again, but there was still a little bit of self-doubt around me, but that didn't mean I wasn't going to stop streaming. I was on a roll and kept wanting to do it more and more, which eventually got me to cross paths with Mr. Satsunami. Funny how things work out, right?
00:05:18
Speaker
After your success with stream, I began to think, should I try this voice acting thing again? No more holding back and no more approaching it half-heartedly? The answer was yes. I immediately signed up for my first ever voice acting lesson in animation thanks to the help of my lovely DM who hooked me up.
00:05:34
Speaker
I was super nervous needless to say since I didn't even start building the studio that I have now, but that didn't matter to my teacher. She was really cool with what I had and she taught me many different things just within an hour that I didn't even know that I could do with my voice. She was also a casting director and she thought that I had a very good grasp on voiceover as well as to hone those improv instincts that I have and that I should be able to do this kind of work with more training. This really gave me hope to truly give this voice acting thing a whirl and I signed up for more classes and workshops.
00:06:03
Speaker
All of those things taught me so much about myself, my voice, and the industry itself, and needless to say I'm very thankful that I took the road less traveled. I eventually ended up getting taught by someone named Kim Herden, who's known in Canada as the Queen of Ubisoft since she's casted for games such as Far Cry's 5 and 6, Assassin's Creed Syndicate, and For Honor. She taught me what it's like to work in the video game industry, and that the work I'd mainly be getting would be soldier NPCs and those FPSs that yell, GRENADE, GET DOWN, INCOMING, COVER ME, and what have you.
00:06:32
Speaker
I did impress her with how I yell, thankfully. Now.
00:06:35
Speaker
Zoom to today. I was getting taught by a vocal coach named Darcy Smith, who taught me how to last in sessions that require such extreme voice acting, as well as overall vocal health and how to take care of yourself if you do end up hurting yourself in the booth. Today I got tested to see how extreme I got with my NPC noises, and the person in the examiner's seat was the voice director of the newest Guardians of the Galaxy game, which really took me by surprise. He liked how intense I got, but helped me out with getting better on how to sound when getting set on fire.
Motivational Message and Encouragement
00:07:05
Speaker
And now we're here, recording a podcast short for one of my good friends that I've met on the Twitch platform. I suppose in a way this would be my very first narration gig. How did I do, everyone? Let me know. Thanks so much for listening to my ongoing journey, and I hope to make anime dubs more tolerable, as well as to make it into video game voice acting. Oh, and one last PS. For all those who struggle with self-doubt, for all those who don't believe in themselves,
00:07:31
Speaker
I would say just do it, because you never know where it's going to take you. Whether you want to be a voice actor like me, whether you want to be a dope content creator, whether or not you want to be a game dev, doesn't matter. Just do it, do your best to tune out the noise, because you never know where it's going to take you. Seriously, I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Thank you.
00:07:56
Speaker
Thank you for listening to this episode of Chatsu Shorts. If you want to check out more content from Blowfish Man TV, then you can check him out over on Twitch. As always, stay safe, stay awesome and most importantly, stay hydrated.