 So you really
want to get started in anime voice acting? Prepare to die horrible, painful
deaths, over and over again...or so say Jonathan Osborne (left) and Doug
Smith (right). The actors told Fanime Con fans about how they got started
in the voice acting business from the bottom and tried to work their way
up the ladder. While lead actors get the roles of lead characters, someone
else is needed to provide the background noises of crowds, the roar of
monsters and screams of faceless minions who are brutally dispatched by
heroes and bad guys. Osborne and Smith call that "scream and die" work,
and they've found that voice directors take the screams of the dying as
seriously as the energetic performances of the lead actors. |
 "You're going
to die a grisly death, so breathe in deeply," Smith recalled as the instructions
from one voice director. Smith handled so much fill-in death work at ADV
Films that "...I started hearing these rumors about a drinking game - every
time the fans heard my voice, they took a drink." But after lots of garbage
roles, Smith got the fan-favorite part of Kintaro in Golden Boy. He's put
his acting career on hold while he works for Studio Ironcat, but Smith
intends to return to voice acting one day. |
 Osborne learned
an important lesson from his first role, that of a guard who is garroted
in Bastard: it takes a long time to die, 30 seconds in the case of his
role. "I had to do this whole gargling sequence," he recalled. And one
voice directors was super-picky about the monster noises he tried to make,
saying that his grunts and groans were too high-pitched. But the effort
has paid off, and familiarity with his multiple demises has gotten Osborne
some roles with actual character names and words to speak other than "aargh!" |
