The Voice Choice Vodcast, Produced by CMD

This is the story of Hollywood’s biggest movie trailer voice over artist Brent Hagel. He did not get there easily. He took classes for seven years before Paramount and all the major studios accept him onto the A-list. So, in this episode, Brent explains how to achieve what so few artists can ever accomplish.

Hillary Hawkins is an A-list voice over actor who does not audition, she is offered all of her work because of her reputation. A composite of the 1% of black women who work in voiceover, she is very different and very powerful and has become a millionaire in this business.

She has a black belt in karate and is fluent in seven languages, and voices over in them all!

Tim Friedlander is a VO artist in LA and owns three VO studios for high end production.

He’s an artist in VO and true studio business-owner and commands top respect in the city of angels.

Edwin Oldfield is the voice of Tesla and the voice of Earth X, a series running across platforms about the environment and taking care of the Earth.

Edwin started voiceover in the United States, but relocated to Lima, Peru where he lives a tropical exotic life. And, his VO career is unaffected because you can do it anywhere.

And he does.

Sean Letourneau is the voice of Microsoft. Sean is the voice, or one of them, of the computer giant. He has only been in business for a mere two years. He auditions one hundred times per day. And, his forte is Extreme voicing for things like violent animation games. So he has two personalities.

He strives for violent voices and he gets cast as a smooth buttery voice. He is, extraordinarily young for this type of booking....that is Microsoft. So he's a vocal dichotomy: he wants evil voices and he gets cast for smooth corporate ones.

Cylk Cozart is an actor, producer and director who got his big break in the movie “White Men Can’t Jump.” In all Cylk would accumulate (70) film and Tv shows. Ten years ago, he moved home to Knoxville from LA to care for his Mother.

Cylk began to develop Documentaries and narrates the films “Ball of Confusion” and “Inherit the land.” These films are unreleased at this time. Cylk is the 2022 recipient of The Joe Biden Presidential Lifetime achievement award for humanitarianism. He remains an active filmmaker and is set to shoot another documentary in the near future.

Brooks Moore is the famous voice behind The Discovery Channel’s “How It’s Made.”

He has become synonymous with his voice representation of The Discovery Brand…and continues to be the voice that people know, but they have never seen his face.

Episode 10 of The Voice Choice is about the nationally known medical narrator Anna Garguzza.

Anna worked in orthopedics before she got into medical narration; she is an expert at medical articulation and explanation.

Anna stands out because she operates her narration business as though she were operating on a patient in surgery. She’s all business. She’s very precise. She’s very serious. She’s very very “medical.“

Dave Jackson, who is a narrator and used to be a heavy-metal musician, characterizes the medical narration business as “the job that nobody wants.“ I went through nine different medical narrators before I could locate Anna and create the show and possible story.

Wendy Zier is an internationally known voiceover artist. She has been working at the national level for 28 years. In this episode she teaches the beginner how to get into voiceover from inception.

Stephanie Southerland is presently the star of the biggest animated video game in the world Genshin impact. Since it’s release, it has grossed 2 billion in revenue, 577 million in China alone. Stephanie is educated with a masters in musical theater, but diverted from NY and Broadway and entered voice over where she is uniquely booked to sing ads of which she impressively does and the show illustrates. The game revolutionized her life and resulted in a gigantic explosion of producers wanting her quirky voice on their games. She is at 35, a superstar overnight. Yet, amid this success, she takes one class a month and believes in continuing  education.

She’s sort of childish in personality and became the best guest we’ve ever had. This is episode 8.

This is the story of the original voice of Siri, Susan Bennett. Susan became Siri without knowing she had been auditioning…because she was not told by the engineers.

In this particular episode she explains how Siri literally changed her life and gave her a new career at 68 years old.

Episode six is the story of heavy metal musician Dave Jackson. At 55 years old, Dave created a career pivot from singer to narrator for the very well-known and famous MR Forbes who writes about science fiction.

Extraordinary as it is, Dave had no training, no mentor, no money, no connections, no education in voiceover, no anything. Yet because his girlfriend sent a tape of his voice to a Russian organization, Dave became a book narrator and now works full-time reading for audiobooks.

Arianna Ratner is a professional voiceover artist who lives in Los Angeles, California. She is known for children’s voices which she did in Sims 4, baby voices and baby cries, and is cast as the evil vampiress for video games within the Blizzard Entertainment organization.

She is an A-list voiceover artist, whose father is the very well-known A-list artist Bill Ratner. She has been working professionally since childhood and as a member of SAG-AFTRA. She is degreed in Theater from NYU, but elected to not work in stage as a career but instead chose to work in voiceover acting only.

Eric Hollaway is an octavist who has a voice that is one of the lowest in the world. He is booked as “The voice of God, next door” and presently has crested 1.6 million likes on TikTok for his amazing voice.

David is a self-described renaissance man who left Louisiana for San Francisco in the 60s with 230 dollars and no one in California expecting him. He parlayed that risk into a voiceover career that led to a producer and director career.

Follow along with the episode transcript here.

Bill Ratner is one of Hollywood’s most dependable and versatile A-list voice actors. From video games to documentaries, movie trailers became his hallmark. Bill spent 40 weeks per month for six years just training his own voice for the future that would unfold. He is now heard around the world daily in everything from character voices to major motion picture movie trailers.

Follow along with the episode transcript here.

Christine Schyvinck is the chairman of the board of Shure. Chris began her career at Shure straight out of college in an entry-level position as a mechanical engineer. She has spent over 30 years at Shure, where she oversees 34 locations around the globe where Shure has facilities and sells to 140 countries globally.

Follow along with the episode transcript here.