2024-11-12
1 小时 21 分钟My guest today is an American voice actor and activist.
As a student at Wesleyan University, she performed in a variety of theatrical productions and radio plays.
After graduating, she moved to Brooklyn, New York and was working as a stage actor when she fell in with the New York game development scene and decided to commit her life to the art form of voice acting.
She moved to Los Angeles and began voicing characters in blockbuster games such as Fortnite, Halo Infinite, Gears of War 5, as well as critically acclaimed indie titles such as After Party Pyre and Gone Home.
During this time, she began working as a liaison between game developers and the actors union SAG aftra.
Today she sits as chair of the union's interactive media unit, working to secure workplace measures that are common elsewhere in Hollywood.
Welcome, Sarah El Male hello.
Hello Sarah.
We're going to talk about your path into voice acting today, but I wanted to ask you first about your campaigning work, which I know is very much ongoing.
It's a time of great uncertainty across the creative industries and VO work is certainly not immune to the threats posed by AI and many other things.
What are the major challenges facing people who do your work right now?
I think.
Well one, I think you're right that it is sort of not.
Not immune is one way to put it, I would say.
You know, we've been saying more like a canary in a coal mine, sort of like out of the forefront of being affected by this.
But I guess, you know, when you have this tool that can create performance when you're not there, one, I think, you know, if folks haven't haven't done this exercise or made like a, you know, it doesn't because it doesn't take very long to make a voice print of yourself that can talk back at you now.
It takes like only a handful of seconds.
So you've never done it and heard yourself say something either silly or if you really want to test it, really offensive or something that personally you would just never say that.
You know, that experience of personal violation is really pretty intimate and when you add layers of, you know, how that isn't, might be in conflict with your artistry or with your, or with your career in terms of like, you know, us making our living doing this, you know, that gets to be a pretty serious consideration for me as someone who, you can see on my website I talk about collaboration like Left Brain center all the time.
People are probably tired of me talking about collaboration, but there is this built in concept of consent and agency and, and collaboration negotiation back and forth in terms of what you contribute what you say, what you actually say and what you're comfortable putting out into the world is built into this process now.