Award Winning Voice-Over Artist Sean Ruttledge Nominated for 2 Golden Trailer Awards

HASHTAG HUMBLEBRAG!

Many of you who know me as an actor, comedian and voice-over artist, will know that I'm not usually massively boastful or big into self promotion, it's not like I go around calling myself an "Award winning voiceover artist" even though I won the Voices Pro Radio Drama Competition back in 2013

HOWEVER...

When I learned I'd been double nominated for Hollywood's Golden Trailer Awards I think I was so excited I swore! then I posted repeatedly about it all over various social media outlets, much to the annoyance of many of my online "friends"

Don LaFontaine Award for Best Voice Over

Best Voice-Over for a TV Spot

Let me apologise in advance for further mentioning this accolade here, as an artist you experience many highs and usually an equal amount of lows, many voice actors and commercial voiceover artists I know in London, and for that matter most actors and comedians I've met on the UK comedy circuit often live a "hand to mouth" existence, humbly chasing a vocation that they love above any kind of lucrative material aggrandisement

So why shouldn't you capitalise on your high points?

Well, you should, I've been hungry and impoverished chasing voice acting fame in the past, I've had hundreds of audition flops and "Thanks, we'll be in touch" failures too, so I'm jolly well going to shout about this high point! here's the story ....

I was lucky enough to be chosen from 50 odd auditionees to voice a number of trailers for the movie Mortdecai, the chaps who chose me were from Burbank California, a super cool outfit called Tiny Hero who make kick ass promos and trailers for the TV & Movie industry

In actual fact they auditioned and re-auditioned me so many times that at first I thought it was a practical joke, it turns out they're just perfectionists, I love perfectionists, I'm a bit of a perfectionist myself, but perfectionists can wear you down with their constant "do it agains"and their unceasing "say it this ways" and "try it that ways" bless 'em!

Most professional voice-over talent will know what I mean here, you often feel that your first read "nailed it" and each subsequent read gets gradually less and less awesome as your confidence and patience wane, but as a professional you continue on and on and on as directed, you may then start to feel inadequate and can doubt your own talent, I've often left lengthy VO sessions with perfectionist producers feeling drained and incompetent 

But then the trailer comes out, you see the perfection in it, you understand why the auditions and recording sessions were so long and why so many re-runs and pick ups were needed, even though you suspect the takes they finally used were the first ones you ever recorded, the trailer is perfect!

The icing on the cake is when you later learn that this awesome work you all achieved together has been nominated for prestige industry accolades!

My great comedy hero Charles Chaplin was also a perfectionist, his feature films from the 1930's 40' & 50's would often take 2 years to shoot with some scenes being shot hundreds of times until he was finally happy, he also wrote the score, starred in, directed, and distributed his own movies via his company United Artists in order to have full creative control of his masterpieces, that must have been frustrating as hell for most of his coworkers but the end result was always perfection

The Golden Trailers are kind of like the Oscars for the Movie Marketing Industry, winning film & TV Promos and trailers are chosen by a panel of industry expert judges

The two I was nominated for were "Best Voice Over for a TV Spot" and the prestigious "Don LaFontaine Award for Best Voice Over" this is the one I'm most happy about

Don LaFontaine was another hero of mine, the original "Movie Trailer Guy" Voice, throughout the 80's 90's and noughties DLF as he was known voiced some 5000 movie trailers as the "voice of God" he passed away in 2008 yet his legend lives on, many movie trailer voice artists still imitate his deep amazing voice, its fair to say he created the archetypal trailer voice, he wrote the immortal line "In a world" and like Chaplin his life's work will transcend his mortality living on for many years after his earthly demise, as a voice-double I've been hired for a few voiceover gigs doing DLF style trailer impressions including one for Newsday on the BBC World Service that has a global audience of hundreds of millions of listeners

The great thing about my trailer voiceover in the Mortdecai promos though, is that it's not your typical archetypal North American movie trailer voice, it's in fact a character voice, based on a quintessentially British "Jeeves the butler" type character, to draw another Charlie Chaplin parallel, its a rare treat for a "Limey" to be making waves in Hollywoodland!

 I worked long and hard in partnership with the wonderful folks at Tiny Hero on this, they truly are perfectionists and I'm glad we've achieved a movie trailer masterpiece that breaks the mould and the cliches of the genre, winning the DLF award for a non-DLF style movie trailer voice-over would be a real coup, but one of the nominees is a female and we've all seen the film "In A World" haven't we!

Get in touch sean@ruttledge.com
www.Seanie.com
UK Tel 0776 777 1850

Voice Reels 2014 - Sean Ruttledge UK Male Voice Artist with London based studio

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

Commercial Voice Reel 3 mins Medley

Video Games Character Voice Actors Reel

One Video Game, One Voice Actor, 12 Characters, can it work?

Potential video game developer clients often ask me what my voice acting USP is, (USP = unique selling point), well that's easy, my highly versatile voice allows me to play a whole host of distinct character voices in the same project, saving them valuable time and money, instead of auditioning and selecting scores of voice actors and then going through the logistical minefield of getting them all to work in harmony together they can have all their prototype voices from just one actor, me

 Couple this with my background in character acting & comedy writing and I become much more than just a voice actor, more than merely voices I am able to help games developers to create characters, give them unique personalities and truly bring the narrative of the game to life

You can download and play this awesome new game on steam early access

http://store.steampowered.com/app/224440

Have fun !

Games Foundry: Folk Tale Blog: Storytelling In Folk Tale

Games Foundry: Folk Tale Blog: Storytelling In Folk Tale: by Simon Dean, Project Lead Folk Tale

The blog post above highlights how my voice acting of all the characters in a new video game helped to storyboard the development of this brand new, groundbreaking game and build the overall narrative during its development stages

As a business proposition for video game developers, the versatility of my wide ranging voice acting combined with my character comedy skills & background is second to none and a far more cohesive and efficient route than hiring and coordinating a team of disparate voiceover artists

For the scratch audio development I provided voice acting and character development services for ALL the games characters, including a somewhat pythonesque pepper pot female voice and anthropomorphic animal roles (a foul mouthed parrot which later became more of an owl)

Other voice actors were rightly brought in at later stage of the games development to give variety to the roles but I'm still proud to be the voice of the Narrator / advisor, principle hero character Bernard, some very street / chav goblin yoot and of course the villainous slave master Urzal in the game you can play today

In the words of Project Lead Simon Dean

"With the script signed off, I contacted Sean Ruttledge, a UK comedian with whom I'd previously worked. Sean convinced me he could bring enough variety to the voices to get the job done for a prototype. Sean's early voice development and recordings really helped flesh out the characters, and proved an essential resource for Tom our animator to work against. Scratch voice audio is definitely something we'll do going forward.

Tom set to work animating the characters against Sean's lines, doing his best to translate the voice acting into waving arms and nodding heads. Working without scenes he'd render out video clips with proposed camera angles for us to review and iterate on."

All in all a highly enjoyable process, check out my Folk Tale character voice acting showreel below, believe it or not every voice you hear in this is performed by me, even the ones having conversations with each other, and hey! if you need a single voice actor with over 9000 voices for your video game development  project I look forward to more of this kind of work in the future, call me

Folk Tale is an awesome RPG / GOD / RTS / Sandbox game now selling like hot cakes in Alpha release, but don't take my word for it, get it on steam today

http://store.steampowered.com/app/224440/

Video Game Character Voice Actor - James Mason Impression

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

http://store.steampowered.com/app/224440