Our planned six-month stopover in Seoul is obviously more than just another destination on our globe-o-rama. We’re here to spend time with our buddy Brenda, to get under the skin of a (very) different culture, and live inexpensively while I attempt to actually finish a design project that has gone heavily into overtime. So what else are we doing here? Voice acting, of course! Westerners (a.k.a. foreigners) living here are constantly telling us how surreal life in Korea can be, but nothing can match the world of voice acting for genuine weirdness.
As I’ve mentioned, Korea is not a big tourist destination. We foreigners are rare enough in most parts of Seoul that we still do a double-take when we see another white person. And virtually all the westerners are here to teach English. The “jobs” listings on Craigslist Korea contain little more than endless teaching positions. Despite the demand, most teaching positions are not particularly cushy, and the people who take them seem to become quite drained over time. That said, most teachers stay on in Korea much longer than they originally planned, enjoying a higher standard of living than the same work would net them at home.
All this demand for English education creates a spillover demand for teaching materials and kids’ TV shows in English. Brenda got involved in the voice acting world here several years ago while visiting her sister Lisette, and who was doing a kids’ show at the time. Brenda was introduced to the Lisette’s agent (“Harry Lim”, believe it or not), and soon joined the few dozen North American-born voice actors regularly scrambling between studios all over Seoul to read children’s stories, sing spelling songs, and do whatever else gets thrown in front of them. Brenda had told us that the work was plentiful, lucrative, and not especially challenging – an alluring combination – so we joined Harry Lim’s roster soon after arriving and waited for the phone to ring.
A side note: because our names are both a bit of a mouthful for Koreans, we decided (over a late-night dinner with Brenda and her friend Chris) to adopt new names for ourselves, purely for our voiceover work. Chris was quite adamant that we become Don Johnson and Grace Jones, so we did. Delighted with his handiwork, Chris began introducing us to everyone as Don and Grace Johnson (because we’re married), and it stuck to the extent that we now habitually call each other Don and Grace, even when we’re alone.
My first voicing job was to sing the tag line to a cell phone company’s jingle in a variety of character voices. Never having done anything of the sort before, in a roomful of people who didn’t speak English, and after just having climbed five flights of stairs in communal slippers I kept falling out of, all added a decidedly surreal je-ne-sais-quoi to the proceedings. In our society, a session like this would likely be capped off with the requisite exchange of thanks and compliments, whether or not they were sincere or warranted. Not here. It’s up to you to decide whether you sucked, and to learn to get by without the forced niceties. It’s actually very refreshing, once you get used to it.
The way the voicing jobs come to us is like Charlie’s Angels-meets-Mission Impossible with some Hello Kitty sprinkled in for good measure. One of us will get a voice call or text message (day or night) that goes something like this: “Tues 10am Hapjeong Station Exit 4. Call 011 1562 3121.” So you scour the subway map for the specified station, figure out how to get there, take the train, find the exit, and dial the number. Someone answers in Korean. I say “Don Johnson, exit four”, and they hang up. A few minutes elapse before someone will walk up to me (as the only white guy in sight, I’m easy to spot), or a car honks and its passenger door flings open. While I’m being escorted to some nearby studio (which may be under a restaurant, above a café or buried in an office building), I’m usually asked only if I speak Korean. I try to reply, but probably say something along the lines of “Mongoose travesty. We are pimples”. The conversation pretty much ends there.
Keep in mind that the jobs we’re summoned to cover a wide range of requirements, and we receive no advance warnings. You could be handed a fistful of scripts and ushered into a studio where several of your colleagues are already seated, trying to decide who will be papa dragon, who will be the three flowers, and who will be the mystical stoat. Or, you could be led down a narrow staircase, plopped down at a makeup table, and worked on by several people for half an hour, all wordlessly, and all without any significant clues as to what will follow. In one case, what followed was the assisted donning of a colourful traditional Korean villager costume, my being led onto a full video set to read some hastily memorized lines for the cameras and a largish number of people, then being led back to the makeup table to have the entire process repeated three times. This might’ve been less unsettling if I’d actually had any sort of prior on-camera acting experience, whether or not I was wearing a fake beard and a yellow tent at the time. It was more like being abducted off the street by mute Disneyland employees and being forced to work for them for a few hours. It covered about half our July rent.
Perhaps Harry Lim was trying to empirically determine my forte, but I was initially sent to a bewildering assortment of jobs requiring singing, acting, reading, chanting, and puppeteering, among other things. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the calls for my services fell off noticeably after a couple of weeks. Fortunately, Christine (I mean Grace) has found fairly steady voicing work, most of which has made use of her uncanny knack for doing fantastic kids’ voices. She’s also had her fair share of the less conventional gigs, having provided some splendid acting footage for video game animators to work from, and chairing an English skills assessment interview panel for a multi-billion-dollar construction company. But the mystery calls have recently picked up for both of us, and we anticipate finding ourselves in even more unimaginable situations before our time here is through.
As I’ve mentioned, Korea is not a big tourist destination. We foreigners are rare enough in most parts of Seoul that we still do a double-take when we see another white person. And virtually all the westerners are here to teach English. The “jobs” listings on Craigslist Korea contain little more than endless teaching positions. Despite the demand, most teaching positions are not particularly cushy, and the people who take them seem to become quite drained over time. That said, most teachers stay on in Korea much longer than they originally planned, enjoying a higher standard of living than the same work would net them at home.
All this demand for English education creates a spillover demand for teaching materials and kids’ TV shows in English. Brenda got involved in the voice acting world here several years ago while visiting her sister Lisette, and who was doing a kids’ show at the time. Brenda was introduced to the Lisette’s agent (“Harry Lim”, believe it or not), and soon joined the few dozen North American-born voice actors regularly scrambling between studios all over Seoul to read children’s stories, sing spelling songs, and do whatever else gets thrown in front of them. Brenda had told us that the work was plentiful, lucrative, and not especially challenging – an alluring combination – so we joined Harry Lim’s roster soon after arriving and waited for the phone to ring.
A side note: because our names are both a bit of a mouthful for Koreans, we decided (over a late-night dinner with Brenda and her friend Chris) to adopt new names for ourselves, purely for our voiceover work. Chris was quite adamant that we become Don Johnson and Grace Jones, so we did. Delighted with his handiwork, Chris began introducing us to everyone as Don and Grace Johnson (because we’re married), and it stuck to the extent that we now habitually call each other Don and Grace, even when we’re alone.
My first voicing job was to sing the tag line to a cell phone company’s jingle in a variety of character voices. Never having done anything of the sort before, in a roomful of people who didn’t speak English, and after just having climbed five flights of stairs in communal slippers I kept falling out of, all added a decidedly surreal je-ne-sais-quoi to the proceedings. In our society, a session like this would likely be capped off with the requisite exchange of thanks and compliments, whether or not they were sincere or warranted. Not here. It’s up to you to decide whether you sucked, and to learn to get by without the forced niceties. It’s actually very refreshing, once you get used to it.
The way the voicing jobs come to us is like Charlie’s Angels-meets-Mission Impossible with some Hello Kitty sprinkled in for good measure. One of us will get a voice call or text message (day or night) that goes something like this: “Tues 10am Hapjeong Station Exit 4. Call 011 1562 3121.” So you scour the subway map for the specified station, figure out how to get there, take the train, find the exit, and dial the number. Someone answers in Korean. I say “Don Johnson, exit four”, and they hang up. A few minutes elapse before someone will walk up to me (as the only white guy in sight, I’m easy to spot), or a car honks and its passenger door flings open. While I’m being escorted to some nearby studio (which may be under a restaurant, above a café or buried in an office building), I’m usually asked only if I speak Korean. I try to reply, but probably say something along the lines of “Mongoose travesty. We are pimples”. The conversation pretty much ends there.
Keep in mind that the jobs we’re summoned to cover a wide range of requirements, and we receive no advance warnings. You could be handed a fistful of scripts and ushered into a studio where several of your colleagues are already seated, trying to decide who will be papa dragon, who will be the three flowers, and who will be the mystical stoat. Or, you could be led down a narrow staircase, plopped down at a makeup table, and worked on by several people for half an hour, all wordlessly, and all without any significant clues as to what will follow. In one case, what followed was the assisted donning of a colourful traditional Korean villager costume, my being led onto a full video set to read some hastily memorized lines for the cameras and a largish number of people, then being led back to the makeup table to have the entire process repeated three times. This might’ve been less unsettling if I’d actually had any sort of prior on-camera acting experience, whether or not I was wearing a fake beard and a yellow tent at the time. It was more like being abducted off the street by mute Disneyland employees and being forced to work for them for a few hours. It covered about half our July rent.
Perhaps Harry Lim was trying to empirically determine my forte, but I was initially sent to a bewildering assortment of jobs requiring singing, acting, reading, chanting, and puppeteering, among other things. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the calls for my services fell off noticeably after a couple of weeks. Fortunately, Christine (I mean Grace) has found fairly steady voicing work, most of which has made use of her uncanny knack for doing fantastic kids’ voices. She’s also had her fair share of the less conventional gigs, having provided some splendid acting footage for video game animators to work from, and chairing an English skills assessment interview panel for a multi-billion-dollar construction company. But the mystery calls have recently picked up for both of us, and we anticipate finding ourselves in even more unimaginable situations before our time here is through.
What a hoot! You are definitely seeing a side to the place that most do not! Can we call you Don and Grace when you come back? Or maybe you will have adopted new names by then - one for each country you visit perhaps - oh the intrigue of it!! Wouldn't it be fun to say "I'm Bond. James Bond"? But then maybe you'd be taken seriously and we'd never see you again so on second thought, maybe not.
ReplyDeleteI just ask that you draw the line at any pornographic work. If that's not possible, please send us a copy.
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