VoiceOver adventures in Ireland: Prologue
The end of September and the first half of October have been crazy busy for me. Traveling a whole bunch and having all kinds of adventures. But I wanted to take the opportunity to talk over a few different posts about an experience that I had at the end of August that literally has changed my voiceover career and my life.
For those of you not familiar, J Michael Collins is a very prevalent name in the world of VoiceOver. In addition to being a world-class talent he was also an amazing coach, teacher and demo producer. The last few years he has been hosting his JMC VO Euro retreat. Is a week-long intensive retreat featuring some of the top teachers and performers in the VO world. The amount of attendees is held to a small amount and so there is opportunity for a lot of one-on-one time and small class sizes. One class that I went to had just two of us for three and a half hours. It was amazing. In the past they have been held in locations like Barcelona Spain and Normandy France. This spring they had announced their Fall 2019 retreat would be held outside of Dublin Ireland.
For those of you who know anything about me you know that I absolutely love Ireland. The first time I was there years ago I 8000% fell in love with that country and everything about it. Then when I saw the listing of who the instructors and mentors would be for that week I absolutely had to go. In addition to sessions by J Michael teaching narration and eLearning he also brought in Joe Cipriano to talk about promo and in-show announcing; Debi Derryberry, who taught on animation and developing characters; Kelly Doherty who is the queen of all radio Imaging talked about that in addition to live show announcing; Dave Walsh, who taught on his TrueTell method of connecting with scripts (his sessions completely blew my brains up); Marc Scott who is just a genius in regards to voiceover marketing; finally AJ McKay who has been J Michael’s longtime collaborator as far as demo production but also has a very long track record himself in regards to radio Imaging and production.Seriously, when I saw this list of presenters I knew I had to be there.
In addition to all this, when you go it is all inclusive and is five-star, top-class. The resort we stayed at was just amazingly immaculate. It was called the K-Club and it is in a town just outside of Dublin called Kildare. The food, service and atmosphere was just beyond what I would have expected.
Not to mention when you go, JMC Demos produces two demos for you as part of the package. The beautiful thing is they never expire so you can get those done whenever you feel you are ready and prepared. Don’t worry, you don’t have to do them while you are there. I’m planning to do mine in a couple of months.
Okay, I just wanted to use this particular post at the setup to get you interested in what I’m talking about. Over the next few episodes I’ll talk about all the different individual sessions and working with individual teachers. Just a note if you’ve ever thought about doing anything like this, do it! The benefits and relationships so outweigh everything else that would be a roadblock to you not going.
Okay, I’ve got enough for now. Next post I’m a star talking about the individual classes and the overall experience and things that really changed my life in ways that I’m just even now can barely understand. But definitely for the better more than I ever expected.
That’s it. Thanks for reading. See you later. Bye