In August 2021, our School Director, Danny Scott, chatted with Cissy Jones, Melissa Hutchison, and Gavin Hammon — three incredible voice actors who are not only friends in real life but also starred together in Telltale's The Walking Dead Series! Danny asked the fantastic trio about their careers, experience, and day to day life as working voice actors. Then, they shared advice for aspiring and professional voice actors.
In the Q&A video, they discuss topics like their first VO jobs, imposter syndrome, and live recording sessions. Listening to them talk about these insanely relatable topics is refreshing and encouraging. Advocating for yourself is a key topic of importance. Cissy shared a lesson learned from a challenging session where the director kept pushing until she heard something in her voice pop. Melissa shared a lesson from when she was doing a lot of battle cries for a video game and it impacted her voice for weeks after that. Both echoed the important reminder for voice actors to always advocate for themselves. If you need water or if you need to take a vocal rest, find a way to make it happen.
On specific advice for voice actors in the industry, Melissa encouraged voice actors to stay positive, visualize, and manifest. Cissy explained that our job is to create theatre of the mind and to relax and have fun! And Gavin reminded us we're only competing against ourselves; being your authentic self and building relationships truly is key. We couldn't agree more!
Cissy is an incredibly talented voice actor and she's also a sought-after teacher. She's an award-winning actress whose voiceover career spans the gamut from animation to video games and everything in between. Aside from winning a BAFTA for her performance in the 2017 Indie videogame FIREWATCH, you can hear her as Lilith Clawthorne in Disney’s The Owl House and nine separate characters in Telltale’s The Walking Dead: The Game series, including Katjaa, Jolene, and Norma. At Voice One, Cissy teaches Video Game Finesse, where students add complexity and individuality to training and layer emotions, attributes, and idiosyncrasies into creating multiple characters.
Award winning voice actor and two time BAFTA nominee, Melissa Hutchison grew up with an acting background in theater. She swapped the stage for the studio and took her talents to pursue a career in voice over and she's been in the VO industry for 20 years! Melissa's body of work ranges from television and radio commercials, children's interactive toys, video games, and animation. She is best known for her role as Clementine in the award winning game series, The Walking Dead. Melissa is a core instructor here at Voice One and teaches classes regularly such as Character Styles, Characters in Action, Character Deep Dives, and Turn it Up to Eleven.
Gavin Hammon has lent voices to video game characters, educational toys (and super uneducational toys), commercials, animation, narration, promo and plenty of stuff too weird to classify. He’s been a working voice actor for 17 years and has been teaching toy vo, concatenation, and gibberish classes for over 5 years. He was born, raised, and lives in the SF Bay Area. Gavin is a guest instructor at Voice One and teaches classes including Characters in Action, Two Takes on Toys, and Double Your Chances.
Be sure to watch the whole video for all of their words of wisdom! What advice stands out to you?
Creating Characters with Danny Scott
Double Your Chances with Gavin Hammon
Character Styles Deep Dive: Animation with Melissa Hutchison
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