The process...

It's good to have goals.  It's great to achieve them sometimes.  But sometimes, it's just amazing to still be trying.  I say this as I sit discouraged in one of the areas I've applied myself while simultaneously more confident than I've ever been in another.  Voice Over felt like it had a strong start this year but none of the audition invites I've had in the past few weeks have turned into anything.  In fact, the only one that got close was cancelled.  Music, on the other hand, has shown some early promise and despite the odds of any of the opportunities I'm presented with really going well, it just feels really invigorating to be writing again.  Creating for a change instead of waiting for things I've put out there to garner me attention. 

This is when I feel most in my element, making something and, in the moment, not caring what happens with it beyond what the director or producer is going to think. That time when my mind hasn't gotten to the point where I'm wondering if the end product will be seen by the right people.  I'm just in my head creating.  I just want to see it get done the same way I can't stand to look at a pile of dishes unwashed in the sink.  I see a project that needs doing and I just go at it until it's done.  The challenge of figuring out the best way to accomplish it, strategically navigating the obstacles of each music cue, the intricacies of the plot and the structure of each scene, that eureka moment when I try something and it works.  All of it is what I live for. 

There was a moment when George and I were going over some of my cues and we decided to try taking two elements from two separate cues from earlier in the episode and melding them together to really highlight a certain change in this one scene.  Unanimous positive reaction and high fives all around.  My mind just buzzing with delight at the accomplishment in the moment.  See?  Why in the hell would I want to do something else besides exactly this? 

I wrapped up the seven cues for the pilot episode (down from a potential ten), just this evening and I'm not even technically done.  This screening on Friday in Boston at the Harvard School of Public Health is a preliminary test screening of sorts and the episode itself still has some phases to go through before we actually premiere it.  A few changes to the edit and pretty much all of the sound design still remain to be tackled.  The idea was for me to get some music on this thing so that it wasn't so rough around the edges when we screen it for the first time.  We lucked out, in fact, that George and I had a good week of nightly meetings since our shifts at NY1 overlap by a half hour.  So we were able to hash things out real time.  Which is a great experience and certainly tops batting emails back and forth and waiting for the other party to reply.

So, anyway, the work there is done for a while but, depending on the degree to which this thing changes and how much the sound design effects my own mix, I will be doing a fair bit more work but the bulk of it is done.  The cues are written, timed, recorded for the most part (though I may re record because, let's face it, I'm a perfectionist), and time codes have been meticulously laid out for start times and all that. But it's an understatement to say that I can't wait for this thing to come to fruition.  We're all hoping it'll open up some doors for us.  But again, regardless, I live for this process so I'm trying not to get up in my head about all that. 

I have another potential job that just came up tonight writing a bumper for a friend, this, in addition to the feature length that I might be doing.  Knowing that I potentially have more work in the future is a huge boost right now.   

Now, I can't even let it get me down that voice over success has not been the same.  The two have progressed at their own rate all along and I've obviously been composing longer than doing voice over.   I choose to take away this from this past two months: I'm still getting attention for my voice and the reasons I didn't get those jobs (besides that one being cancelled) is more likely to do with the clients just wanting a different sound than it is anything to do with my read itself.  Even if it was, that's why I have a voice coach, to whom I'm taking my audio files and those scripts in a week.  In other words, not sitting on my ass and whining about another failure.  I see failure as an opportunity to find out what I did wrong and improve.   No other way. 

With that said, it's late, as it always is when I'm writing, and I should finish this amazing gluten free beer and get ready for another day.  Good night!