I use the term voice actor somewhat loosely so you don’t think I’ve lent my voice to large video games. To some’s surprise, I have voice acted in a video game. The game itself is largely unknown, but it was a football game in which I voiced the quarterback. I never thought I’d be in a video game before so it was a cool experience.
This track of narrating on Youtube and being involved in a video game stemmed from my work in a local retail sporting goods store.
We used to get newsletters from the mall that store was located in and to humour my coworkers, I’d read these newsletters rather dramatically. I enjoy making people laugh with my wacky impersonations and funny voices - taking rather boring subjects and making them entertaining.
In college I was nicknamed “Mr. President” because of my pretty good George Bush impression.
Anyways.
I’d read these newsletters in a charming fashion. One of my coworkers told me I should start a Youtube channel. The details are a bit hazy on why I chose my current niche (narrating fictional horror stories, thrillers and the odd romance). I decided to take them up on that a while later.
I began by looking up narration channels on Youtube and came across a channel by the name Corpse Husband. If you’re into indie, off-brand music, you might also know him as CORPSE. the stories he read were interesting in a way. The first one I remember listening to was about a person who hired a hitman on themself.
I was intrigued by the prospect of narrating stories and creating content people seem to enjoy. It would also be fun to tell my coworker that I did such a thing. So began the channel “Stories After Midnight.”
This channel gave me enough audio to use to apply for this local position as the Quarterback in the game I mentioned.
Over time I honed my craft of narrating stories. I began to enjoy the act of putting on a performance. To separate myself from the other channels, I usually put on different character voices and try my best to be engaging and memorable to the listener. It’s rather enjoyable trying to come up with a new voice and dramatization.
As of writing, it’s been roughly seven years of content creation. I’d be lying if I said I still enjoyed it as much. Since then I’ve amassed over 10,000 subscribers on Youtube and 15,000 followers on Spotify. Nothing too special, but it’s fun to see a growing community of people who I enjoy talking to.
This experience bled into other facets of my life that I didn’t expect.
It gave me a confidence in my voice and delivery. I’ve heard more times than I can count how nice my voice is to listen to which is such a weird thing to hear sometimes. But, I’ve taken advantage of this and used it to run intros/outros for other podcasts, create Youtube tutorials for the company I work for, that video game, podcasts for myself. My confidence in my speaking ability is at an all time high and after seven years, I know that I’m good at it - nothing like online validation.
My sights are leaving Youtube and setting on something else. I believe it would be a fantastic opportunity to voice act or narrate in more video games.
I’ve been playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2 lately and I know it would be a cool experience to voice act in a game like that even if it is a pipe dream.
For those of you who are wondering, yes you can get used to hearing your own voice without cringing out of your pants; it just takes a lot of time.
It’s surprising the challenge that comes along with narrating. I’m not sure how people narrate audiobooks as after 40 minutes of reading, my voice is pretty tired. I empathize with streamers and people who talk for a living, I don’t know how they do it.
The last thing I’ll mention here is how my first big app idea came to be. I must have one of the most niche apps on the planet.
Typically in narrating work such as mine, if you’re not using true stories submitted by viewers, you’re finding them on Reddit.
This is a wildly time-consuming process that consists of finding stories in a subreddit such as Nosleep, navigating to the author of said story, crafting a subject (in my case I used the name of the story) and a message asking if I can read their story on my channel.
This whole process can vary greatly depending on how quickly you can find a story. And that process is for one story, now repeat N times.
I can honestly say without my tool, I wouldn’t be a narrator based on the time commitment to finding stories alone. This is assuming that I don’t have multiple viewer submissions in my inbox.
The idea builds upon the Reddit API and allows you to automate this process. You can search through any subreddit using the same filters such as “Hot,” or “Rising.” The benefit of this method is now I can get up to 1,000 stories and use my own filters to find what I’m looking for. Not to get into the weeds about how it works, but in my app I can filter by number of upvotes, keywords, estimated reading time etc.
A user can build a queue of stories in which they want to read, and with a saved initial greeting and recurring greeting, they can send these same requests with pre-filled data.
What used to be a monumental undertaking that could take up to 30 minutes if you’re lucky and looking for a few stories, can now take seconds. I remember one morning before work, I send 25 requests in 25 seconds (it didn’t take long time find either, maybe a couple of minutes).
Pair this with an inbox connected to your Reddit account, a custom website to receive submissions and three categorized reading lists, it’s the perfect tool for the scene.
The app is called (Reddex)[https://reddex.app].
All in all it’s been a fun experience and I hope it can springboard me into new adventures, but until then I’ll either keep on growing the channel and it’s related community spaces, or I’ll quit.