I’ve been working with Justin Lassen a bit lately and he got the gig to remix a song for the Underworld: Awakening soundtrack and a song for the score.  When he asked if I could come up with some harmonies and background vocals I jumped at the chance.

The soundtrack came out today on iTunes and the score will be released on January 24th.  I’ll be credited in the liner notes of both.  Evanescence, Linkin Park and The Cure are among the other artists with tracks on there and I’m stoked that I got to be involved!

Booked this one through Nancy Wolfson (who taught me how to read commercial copy in the first place) and the Stars Agency in San Francisco.

I dug up some old influences I had while I studied the Eastern scale – Sima Bina’s singing in Songs of the Ney and Abida Parveen – and listened to them a few times to put myself in the mindset. 

Then I recorded a bunch of takes, edited them and then cleaned them up for Justin to work his magic on.  I think it turned out pretty good!

Haus of Persian Descent (f. NMERCER) by Justin Lassen

Like with anything worth learning, this is a skill that will take some time to actually get good at.  I’ll try to post more songs as my skills improve.  Let me know if you have any requests!  They’re just cover songs after all.

I bought the EW-600 from Electric Wheelstore on New Year’s Day, 2011.

I could go all the way from downtown LA to Santa Monica to visit a friend, pop open the seat, take the battery out and bring it inside to plug it into the wall.  I’ll hang out with my friend for 3 hours or so, the battery is charged and I can go all the way home!

I spent about $1,000 between the scooter and a helmet and I haven’t been to the gas pump since.  This thing worked for most of 2011 for me.  A very cheap option but I have a few details worth mentioning to the potential buyer:

1. It comes with a 48V 12 Amp charger that takes 5-6 hours to charge it but, I found a higher powered charger on EBay that charges the scooter in 3 hours.
2. This thing is technically an electric moped.  It does not require a driver’s license or insurance or anything.  You can ride this thing all over town even if you have a suspended license.  Sometimes the cops try to pull you over and they are not trained on this part of the law.  They ask you were the license plate is.  It never happened to me but I recommend you carry around the following document to show the police should they screw with you.    

   Document to Show Cops

3. If something goes wrong with it (i.e. the head light goes out) be prepared for frustration with the repair department of Electric Wheelstore.  I have NEVER had the correct part delivered on the first try with them.  It takes forever just to get them on the phone.  Then, when they send you your light, it doesn’t fit and you have to start all over again.  They have lots of posts in their feedback section about this.  G-Bike, out in Santa Monica sells models similar to this one and has a service center.  Much less hassle that way.

4. The EW-600 was just a little too big to go on the trains.  You can tell the people under ground that it’s electric but they are always like “okay, just this once.”

5. It’s fun but it really only goes like 30mph and that speed is killed when you go up a hill.  Some steep hills it just can’t climb, even on a full battery.

The EW-600 scooter is ideal for a fairly short and flat commute in a mild climate.  You can park it anywhere!  If I were to do it all again I might go with the local buy at G-Bike so I can get easy maintenance if it comes up.

If you can park it in your garage, do it.  Plus it has an alarm so you can hear if people mess with it.  But I had to leave it parked in the middle of Hollywood sometimes so I was looking into a GPS tracking device for it.  Didn’t quite get it in time=(  I parked it in a sketchy area earlier this month and someone must have thrown it in the back of their truck and taken off.  The idiots failed to notice that there was no battery in it.  I’ll bet you I’ll be seeing it on Craigslist any day now.

For a while I had a mountain bike, which would go on any bus or train and worked very well to manage the pot holes in the streets, but it was just too intense for a long term transportation option.  I’m all for a good work out but not every time I need to go somewhere and you really couldn’t ride that thing unless you had workout clothing and shoes so I just felt like I was lookin’ like a slob all the time!

I swapped that bike out for a pink Roxy Schwinn beach cruiser.   A bonus with the bike was that, if I was running late or needed to go an extra long way, I could take it on the Metro trains or pop it on the bike rack of a bus.  It was a much more relaxed ride than the mountain bike but it didn’t feel great to ride for long stretches.  It was too casual.  I wanted to slouch and ride with a low seat.  Then my knees would start hurting.  Though I could wear a skirt with this bike if I wanted it still wasn’t quite enough for me.

I also had a Schwinn electric scooter that I modified to go faster and farther.  It was fun, that’s for sure.  This could also go on the Metro trains or sometimes I could carry it on a bus, when the driver was in a good mood, but a little too small and rickety to go long distances.  At this point, my voice over stuff was going strong out of my studio and I was venturing out all over LA for other auditions.  I needed something that could get me there but I didn’t want to back to a car just yet.  I’d been driving on the freeways of LA for 8 years, sometimes at an average of 70 miles a day.  I didn’t miss it yet at all.  Oh, also worth mentioning, if you ever buy a Schwinn scooter – or bike for that matter – write down the serial number.  This scooter was stolen and then my neighbor found it for sale on Craigslist a few months later=)

Anyway, I sold both of those and got an EW-600.  I LOVED this thing!  In fact, it’s worthy of it’s own blog entry.  I’ll write about the EW-600 Electric Scooter next because I have a list of things to consider if you want to buy one.

Her latest blog entry in particular, about what it means to be a working actor, is so spot on.

What it Really Means to Be a Working Actor from Dallas Travers on Vimeo.

My day job is voice over work and I approach it as a business owner.  It’s still acting though, and there is no reason why the same approach can’t work for me with on-camera acting.

Anyway, her entry was something I could personally relate to, for voice over work at least.  On March 1st, this year, 3 out of my 4 on-going clients had contracts that were ending.  It was nothing personal and my work was great, but the contracts (which all ranged in length) coincidentally ended or the work was completed at the same time.  My big mistake was seeing it coming, and still not doing anything about it until March 1st.

When I had those on-going clients, I’d still have down-time.  Sometimes I’d have a day or two where I had no work to do.  I could have been planting seeds all over the place.  Doing marketing and emails and phone calls to prepare myself for the dry spell.  But I didn’t.  I goofed off.  Which was fun but paying for it sure wasn’t.

So then, when most of my clients dropped out and I had to dig deep back into the auditioning game, I was shocked at how long it took to get the momentum going again! The slowness in finding more contracts could have been from a lot of contributing factors; gas had just spiked, I’ve now noticed going back through my records that I’m slow every year at that time and….I didn’t keep working.  The work that Dallas is talking about, that an actor, or any business owner must do to keep the work coming.  The “beating the pavement” work.  It’s totally part of our job description and it’s supposed to fill up the rest of the work week outside of when we’re not on set or in the studio.   It took everything out of me to get that ‘momentum’ wheel back turning again because if you don’t crank it a little every day, it stops.  And, just like with physics, stuff that’s in motion tends to stay in motion.  Stuff that’s not, doesn’t.

It’s taken me so long and SO the hard way to finally understand this.  Now, when I get a job (VO I mean), I try to make it a rule to audition for 1-3 more jobs BEFORE I sit down to do the gig that I currently have.  Doesn’t have to be an audition either.  It can be an email, a phone call, a mailing or whatever else I can come up with.

I suppose you don’t have to fill in the down time with that work but, if you don’t (or at least when I don’t), you don’t progress, you just survive.  Incorporating all of this into on-camera acting is now the real challenge for me.  Thankfully, Dallas is a huge help with this.

I’ve sent out loads of announcements about this but I think everyone’s busy or not interested (perhaps because it’s not video, but a podcast?  I dunno).  Dude, nobody knows what they’re missing!  The world that Bear and Monette create, along with the audio bed the Drabblecast laid the story in, is so detailed and so cool that I’ve been having dreams about it.

Here’s the second and final part of the story.  I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Click here to listen to Boojum Part II

It’s an awesome Sci-Fi and the Drabblecast Podcast is great for raising the money to pay people to create this stuff.  Norm Sherman produces these podcasts beautifully.  If you can, put it on your iPod and play it while you exercise or in your car – like an audiobook.  Each part is probably 10 minutes long or more but the story is so great it stayed in my mind for days after I recorded it.

Boojum Part 1

A cop car was checking on a noise complaint or something across the street so I made a quick music video out of it.