Diving into work...

When I get depressed or just harried or when things don't seem to be going my way, I tend to throw myself into my work. It's gloriously therapeutic and has the strange effect of helping me to change my perspective on a lot of things. I remember that I'm lucky to have something I'm passionate about and that things are going to swing back and forth from good to bad, overwhelming to underwhelming, good times will come and go. The ever popular, "This too shall pass." No matter how bad things get I remember that at least I have the basic things I need to be happy, right here and right now and that whatever is bothering me probably won't last too terribly long.

That having been said, this is the perfect time for me to be feeling like that because I have a lot of work to do. Sunday night I finally saw the scene that I've been writing music for all this time. It fits amazingly. I watched it about three times in a row with my music over top of it before actually sitting down Monday afternoon when I got up to put it on a timeline and line up all the hits. There were at least three points in the animation where we wanted to have the music accent and sync up with the action on the screen. So that only took me about an hour or so. I had to play with the length of the oud solo a tiny bit and then cut down the electronic part at the end so it would finish with the end of the scene.

But seeing it with my music was pretty awesome. I actually got chills a few times! This is going to be a great film. The rest of the week will be devoted to getting the mix to pop. I'll be trying it out on a few different sets of speakers and headphones in order to really fine tune it.

On top of squaring away all that, I've been plowing ahead with my new VO demo. I've decided to get some peer reviews on this, first to get an idea of how the quality of my equipment measures up and then to get an idea of how my delivery is. Additionally, I've decided to compose the music for all the scripts I'm reading and have gotten three of them done so far. But this won't be finished until I get the peer reviews. That's key. I can go on Edge studio's website and upload it to get people to review it. They have system where once you've uploaded your first, you have to review two other people. And then each subsequent time you upload you have to first review two other people again. So, I can at least expect to get some attention up there. Either way, I've found other online VO forums as well that I can tap into.

It occurred to me that this was the way to go. I'm not going to be able to jump to where I want to be without acknowledging where I still am. So, I decided to back off of trying to jump to getting a paid gig right away and start to work on honing my skills even more. That doesn't mean I can't submit to jobs and auditions but I feel I should spend more time on presenting myself professionally. Just a few things at a time. The next thing after re-doing my demo is going to be to train a little more and then eventually, when I'm confident I can get one, to go look for an agent.

Incidentally, this is also attached to something I've realized a long time ago. The best way to achieve a goal is to break it up into manageable increments. If you tell yourself, "By next year I want to be blank," and blank happens to be a monumental task, it can get overwhelming thinking how you're actually going to get there from where you stand. So, I find, you should set the goal and then just focus on the next step. You can't reach the goal from where you're starting, you can only reach the first step, so worry about that first. It's sounding a little bit trite and obvious the way I'm explaining it but you get the idea.

At any rate, I'm pretty confident about the first few steps. Once I finish those, the ideas is I'll be confident about what comes next until I'm doing what I couldn't have imagined doing a few months ago.

Anyway, tomorrow I'll spend some more time on the mix and then devote the rest of my time on getting a first version of the demo together for uploading to Edge's website. I got here late today because of the trains so I have to stay a little later and then I get to sleep. Glorious hours of sleep.