London UK based comedian, voiceover artist, impressionist and highly versatile voice actor Sean Ruttledge, well known as the man of over 9000 voices, providing character development services and characters voices for animations, video games and movies
Before I ever did any form of voice-over work professionally I was doing impressions of famous people, I've always been a parrot, mimicking interesting sounds I heard daily and at least one of my kids is exactly the same
One of my VO pals was recently boasting about her versatility and she reeled off every single area of the Voice-acting / Narration / Voiceover canon she had worked in, claiming quite bullishly that it represented EVERY niche of commercial voice work
Sadly I had to disappoint her, she'd never done any Voice-Match work! this is where you become a voice double for celebrity voices that are commercially in demand but for one reason or another won't work for the product / money / principle of what's being offered, sometimes they are deceased and advertisers want their great voices to live on
Here's my latest reel showcasing a few of the famous voices I regularly voice match including Sean Bean, a man who not only shares my first name but my home town, Richard Burton & Patrick Allen, two of the greatest British voices ever who are now sadly long departed, Movie trailer legend Don Lafontaine and finally the always in demand "Voice of God" that is Morgan Freeman
I regularly get requests to impersonate celebrity voices in my home VO studio, if you've got a required get in touch, I'll see what I can do for you! www.seanie.com
Here are my brand new showreels for 2014, Firstly I have a new commercial voice reel showcasing my deep, rich and educated tones ideal for advertising high quality and luxury brands, the second voicereel is my video games voice acting show reel, my highly versatile range of character voices has won me voice actor roles in a number of video games as Narrator / Advisor and indeed several distinct character voices in the same game
OK so I've just had an exciting gig doing voiceovers for multiple characters in the same video game, I was pretty confident with nearly all of them, Scottish, Cockney, Street Yoot, Movie Trailer Guy (Don LaFontaine) Yorkshire, Deep South USA, West Country, a parrot voice LOL a female (Python pepper pot) Mexican wrestler, Camp Old Wizard....all well within my comfort zone, they also needed a James Mason Impression and I have to admit that I struggled for some time to get his voice right and couldn't quite work out why, I kept sounding more like Prince Charles who has a very similar manner of speaking, I tried hard to drift out of the Prince Charles Zone and in doing so I drifted into Tim Shishodia territory, Tim is a lovely man and a rising star of the London stand-up comedy circuit, he won a few major competitions and was New Comedian of the year in 2010, here's a video of him performing at the awesome TNT Comedy Club when I was MC'ing there, his hilarious stage persona has quite a hint of James Mason in the voice at times
Oddly enough I find it easier to learn a new voice not by listening to the subject themselves but by listening to an impressionist mimicking them, I could barely find any inspiration on this front either, I watched a couple of old James Mason movies, his voice was very rich and he had quite a range, I struggled to find many videos of decent impressions of him though, there were only two half decent examples on Youtube who's attempts I would say bettered my own by only a tiny margin
Interestingly I found an Eddie Izzard routine where he uses Mason's voice as the voice of God, I was comforted that Izzard can't do a better Mason than me and he's mega successful ; o )
So, after sweating on it for quite some time I think I managed a noble attempt in the end, I won't be adding it to my voice reel as it's not as awesome as I'd like it to be, the client feedback has not mentioned it and I can rest in the knowledge that my effort, whilst a slight disappointment to me personally is better than Eddie Izzard's and certainly in the top 3 James Mason impressions I can find on the tubes
UPDATE June 2013 the game in question has now been pre-released in alpha mode so I'm permitted to talk about the voice acting and character development I did during the earlier stages of this video games development, I voiced all the character roles helping to develop an audio story board, flesh out the characters and build the narrative, below is the video showing a prototype cut scene from the development stage where I voice all the characters, a miner (South Yorkshire accent) Lumberjack (Deep South USA accent) Bernard, the games protagonist (Gruff cockney gangster a la Ray Winstone or Bob Hoskins) and Stone Mason (James Mason impression) The clip contains an interview with Games Foundry's project lead Simon Dean who speaks very highly of my talents, bless him
You can download and play this awesome new game on steam early access
Hi I'm Seanie, well known as "The man of over 9000 voices" welcome to the first ever post on my OFFICIAL SEAN RUTTLEDGE BLOG
I'm a voiceover artist & character comic from the UK, my new years resolution is to blog frequently about the major passions in my life which are
Comedy
Impressions
Voiceovers
Character voices for cartoons, animations, video games etc
Accents & Dialects
My comedy goals for 2012 are to perfect 3 new 7 minute comedy routines based on my ability to do impressions, accents & character voices, I will be perfecting these on the London comedy circuit and you may even see a couple on TV later in the year, I'll keep you posted
