Paul:

Well, I'm especially excited today because I get to talk to not only a dear friend, but an accomplished actor and voice actor in her own right. She is also the head of casting at Sound and Fury and for my money and literally for my money, she is the best commercial VO coach in America today. I'm thrilled to welcome Tina Morasco to the podcast. Tina, thanks for joining me.

Tina:

Thank you so much for having me. That’s quite an intro.

Paul:

Well, it's all true. You know, I tell people this on a regular basis. You have changed my life. Oh my god. Because the coaching that I had got me to a certain level and I had a lot of success in this business. But what I'm learning now through your coaching has really upped my game substantially. And I can't tell you how grateful I am for that.

Tina:

Oh my gosh. Well, you're doing the work and you're, you know, you're a good student.

Paul:

That's funny. That's exactly what I tell my students too. So, thank you for that. I want to because we do know each other. I don't want this to be an interview of inside baseball. There's a lot I still don't know about you. So, I want to start out with that. How did this entire Odyssey your start as an actor, how did that start for you?

Tina:

Oh gosh, it goes it goes back. I have such a circular. I have. I joke around that I've sat in every chair in this musical chairs game of voiceover. So I started way, way, way, way, way, way, way back in the nineties as an agent. So I was first, I was an agent trainee at William Morris, which is now WME, but back then it was just William Morris and just pushing the mail cart, picking up Julia Roberts, dry cleaning, that kind of thing. And landed in the, on camera, voiceover and soap opera department.

They were all lumped together, those three departments. So this was in New York? In New York, yes. All in New York. And I ended up becoming an assistant on the desk of this woman, Carol Baker, who was like the voiceover maven. And she taught me everything. I remember she would talk about voices with adjectives that I was like, what she'd be like to describe people's voices as like velvety or like, you know, it feels like, you know, they're like a warm blanket that you just read. And I was like, what are you talking about?

It's just a voice. And then, and then all of a sudden it was like this education of like, learning that, you know, different people's voices have different timbers and different tones and textures and all of this. And, you know, I look back in horror because it was William Morris. So we represented tons of celebrities. So they would literally throw me in a closet with like Alec Baldwin and Peter Gallagher and they'd be like, Tina, go put them on tape. It was like literally on cassette tape. I would be putting Alec Baldwin down for an audition. Wow. 24 year old me. I can't even not even I was probably 22. Can't even imagine the stupidity that came out of my mouth. But he was lovely. They were all lovely. Everybody was great. I used to have Gilbert Gottfried coming in like tugging on my shirt going like take me to the wee wee room. Take me to the wee wee room like, like, like, Gilbert, it was just a absolute like, just a circus. It was just like this concept like a ball. It was it was a ball. It was so fun.

And so I did that for a little over three years. And then ICM kind of tapped me on the shoulder. because they only represented celebrities and they wanted to start a department for people like you and me, like what we call the scale voiceover actors. Now, that term isn't as popular anymore because that's a union term. It's meaning like you and I would work for union scale as to celebrity overscale money, right? So they wanted like the day -to -day commercial voiceover actors.

They wanted a department that focused on that. And the guy who was over there running their celebrity department didn't want to do the scale voiceover anymore. He had done that for years. So he brought me over, his name is Steven Arcieri. He's still one of my nearest and dearest to this day. And he and I together started that department from the ground up, but we decided we weren't going to steal clients from other agencies. We were going to go out every single night to Broadway and off Broadway and performance art and stand up.

And I tell the story all the time, like I once saw a juggler on the street that had a cool voice and it was like, Hey, you want to learn how to do voiceover? And we brought these people from all different walks of the performance life into our fancy pants office on 57th and Fifth Avenue and, um, and taught them how to do voiceover. But we also grabbed because it was ICM, right? Like we had the cache. So we would grab people like Lee of Schreiber out of his Yale showcase. We had Jeffrey Wright out of angels in America. Like we had, you know, the most, you know, Christine Baranski, like the best theater actors on the planet.

And then we taught them how to adjust what they were so excellent at for voiceover. And, and we started this department from scratch. And so that's really where I cut my teeth because nobody had ever done a voiceover before. So I had to produce fake demos for every single one of those clients. So we could launch like an ICM departmental demo to send out to producers and stuff. So I literally produced probably 60 demos. Like we would bring everybody in, I would pull copy for them. Like we would get, you know, an engineer, we would have music and mix and all of that stuff.

So that's how I learned how to direct. That's how I learned how to produce demos. That's how I learned how to like, you know, like really get in there and coach a good read out of talent.

And somehow, and it was so successful and it was so much fun. It was the hardest I've probably, maybe the second hardest to sound a fury. It was one of the hardest I've ever worked in my life. And I was really, really proud of it. And I just kind of woke up one day and felt like there was still something missing. There was still like this performance bug that was like somewhere rumbling deep inside of me. So I secretly like totally on the DL auditioned for one graduate acting program. And I was like, if I get in, I will go. And if I don't, then I'll just stay the course. And I just was going to leave it up to fate.

And so I auditioned for Rutgers because William Esper, who's like this very famous Meisner actor, acting teacher was the head of that program at the time. William Esper had, has a, had a studio in New York where he was like the consummate Meisner acting teacher. And he, for, for many years, um, was the head of the program over at Rutgers. So I decided to audition and see what happened.

And sure enough, I got in. So I quit my job with the cushy corner office overlooking Central Park to go to like a dirty classroom floor in New Brunswick, New Jersey and studied acting for three years and got my MFA in acting. So I got, you know, all the acting training, the voice, the speech, the movement, performance experience, all of that in this little cocoon.

And then when I came out of that cocoon, I was like, Hmm, do I want to go back to New York where everybody already knows me as an actor? I mean, as an agent, or do I want to start fresh in LA as an actor? And so I moved out to LA to become an actor. And, um, you know, you put all of that previous voiceover knowledge combined with all of the acting voice and speech training. And it was like kind of a no brainer that I would have a voiceover career to start.

And I went on to do lots of on-camera stuff, lots of co -stars and guest stars and recurring roles on a few things. But voice over was always like my steady boyfriend. It was always that it came so easily, came really naturally. And it was just always there to be my bread and butter as I explored these other things. Did that for like 20 some odd years. And then always coached all along the way as like my kind of support gig side hustle.

And then about almost six years ago now, my agent at Atlas Carly had left Atlas to go join forces with Sound and Fury. And she was going out on maternity leave. We were chatting about a lot of stuff. And I was like, hey, do you need anybody to cover while you're on maternity? Because I just felt like, oh, was the thing that I for sure could just kind of slide right into.

And she was like, actually, maybe. And so I really thought I was just going to be doing the casting thing for about three months while she was gone. And then I realized what the sound and the fury actually entailed and how much work it was and how much, you know, how there was room for all of us. And so that was six years ago. And I've been going at it nonstop ever since.

Paul:

Six years now at Sound and Fury. I know you're coaching. I know you're casting. Are you still acting?

Tina:

Yeah, I mean, yes. As a matter of fact, accidentally, like maybe a year ago, my managers randomly sent me an audition. I was like, I didn't even know you were still representing me. And they were like, yeah. And I randomly booked it. It's on a new FX series. That's going to be released, it's a limited series, it's called The Sterling Affairs, and it's about, Ed O 'Neill is playing Donald Sterling, it's about the Clippers, it's about when Donald Sterling owned the Clippers and had that giant scandal. So I have a very small role in that, but I went back a couple of times, so I kept flying back and forth from New York Tell Aida to shoot some stuff, so that should be airing soon.

I still do the narration for Love it or List it on HGTV. But for the most part, my days are really focused on coaching and then casting. So it's actors in the early morning and then my casting day starts at, I'm on the East Coast now, so it starts at one o 'clock for me, but 10 Pacific and then goes until the wee hours of the morning.

Paul:

Let's stay with the casting hat and maybe also put the coaching hat on top of that for a minute. Explain this, you've explained it to me and it makes complete sense to me. I get a spec in as an actor and we'll talk about, well some coaches say screw the spec straight off the cuff, which you do not.

Tina:

Run, run away from them. Exactly.

Paul:

So you get the spec and the spec is maybe something that might not certainly be your first instinct as an actor, but you do the audition according to spec. You don't book the gig and then three months later you're watching YouTube and you see that same spot and it's not even close to the spec. Right. And oftentimes it might be closer to what your instincts were. Why does that happen and why does it happen so often? Why is the final spot often entirely different from the spec?

Tina:

Okay. So I, this is something that I'm very, very passionate about.

Paul: I know you are.

Tina:

You have to remember that this entire thing is a process, okay? And the process starts with the creative team creating something that is new and innovative and outside the box. So at the stage of the audition, it's really like beta testing. They're trying to see if like, Hey, can we do something that's totally innovative? That's totally different. That's totally like, you know, not the tried and true and, and, you know, like expected, right? And so,

That's so that's when they bring us on and we are casting directors are essentially matchmakers. We do a creative call with this team and we extract every detail and nuance we can get out of them of what they want to hear in their perfect voiceover match. Right. And so they might say like, listen, this goes completely against what you know, you would expect from the brand, but we want, you know, X, Y, and Z. And so we're like, okay, our job is to find you the best versions of X, Y, and Z.

So then we get off that call and I translate that completely into the specs. So this is why if anybody tells you to ignore the specs, it would be the equivalent of if you were coming in live for a casting, if I called you into the studio to come in and audition and I'm like, Paul, I'm so glad you're here. I just hung up with the creators. This is what they said they wanted. And you went, shh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no

Yeah, like, you would it's laughable, right? Never be so disrespectful. And also, I'm giving you the cheat code. I'm literally giving you the answer key, like, just got off the phone with them. This is exactly what they said they wanted to hear. And as a matchmaker, it is my duty to give them exactly what they said they wanted to hear, whether we agree with it, don't agree with it, or whatever we get paid by them to deliver what they said they want it, right. So,

The specs are literally my criteria. I keep them up on my screen as I'm casting to remind myself constantly, oh no, they want, they want pulled back effortless swagger. So anytime I hear something that's too forward and too pushed at me, I'm like, Nope, that doesn't work. Right. Cause they wanted it like, you know, more self -possessed, more pulled back, more settled in and sunken in. Right. So. The specs are 100 % the criteria I'm using to hand pick the best options of this very wide net that I cast. I'm going to hand pick probably the 60 or so best matches of those specs. Okay. So ignoring the specs is literally like you're just, you might as well just not even audition because like unless you accidentally guess exactly what the specs said, you've got no shot.

So that's number one. So then we try to match up and what I'm really, really always listening for, because we're obviously not gonna give them a link of 60 voices that sound identical. We're gonna interpret those specs and be like, hmm, this person has, you know, like most of the voices if they want authority, depth and gravitas are gonna have.

a deeper timber and a, and a, maybe like a weathered experience to them or whatever. But this person who has like a mid range voice has such a ball or attitude without even trying. That's cool. That work, you know, and then, and on and on and on it goes. Right. So it's like, if your point of view matches the point of view that's back and you're telling that story from such a place of ownership and authenticity, I don't care what your voice sounds like.

If your attitude is matching it spot on, you're in, you know, because that's the way I'm going to give them a very well balanced, you know, link. So, so then we, you know, do our best to curate like the best, most interesting 60 out of maybe a thousand reads that we're listening to about 60 gets sent to the client. And I'll make sure on that 60, like there's a full range of diversity in every way, shape or form, you know, and we deliver that to them.

Paul:

Then I just want to want to jump in here for a minute, Tina, because I want to remind people that up until this point, this is entirely being driven by the creative team.

Tina:

Oh, the whole thing. Yes. The whole thing up until this point. You're absolutely right. Is being driven by the creative team. We do our best to curate what the creative team said they wanted on that kickoff creative call. OK, so then we deliver our top choices to them. Then the creative team listens through and there's usually multiple of them and they all have spreadsheets, right? And they're marking down who they think that that could work.

And then they see like if there's synergy and overlap and whatever, and that's how they generate their shortlist, right? So then sometimes they'll come back to us with a shortlist and they'll say, okay, we like these five people. Can we get them to do a callback read? And then they'll give us more specific direction for the callback based on what the rough cut of the film is.

And notice that I said film, because these aren't commercials anymore. They're not ads, they're not selling us anything, they're making short films, okay? So they'll say, we just had one the other day. And literally the direction was, slower reads will help the gravity of this film. We want the actors to watch what's happening on camera, be connected to it, observe it and just simply respond with intention from their authentic point of view.

So that is that is like absolutely the only game in town right now. Right. So, you know, we'll, we'll do that. We'll send them the callbacks, then it's still in the creatives hands at this point, they'll make their Reco and they'll make their like, you know, their like backup choice. Then they send it to their client for approval.

And this is where things sometimes go sideways because just to clarify their internal client, their, their, whoever the brand is. And usually whoever the person, the pinpoint, the pin person of the brand is usually not a creative. They're usually a marketing executive, you know, like the head or it could be like literally the president of that brand. It could be that like somebody who just doesn't have the same creative sophistication as the team that they hired.

And sometimes they're smart enough to go, I hired this creative team for a reason. I'm going to just trust them. But sometimes they put their two cents in, which has, is usually more of an old school mentality. And they're like, Oh, but they're not smiling on our product name. And they're not, they sound depressed or they don't have enough energy, blah, blah, blah. Who else do you have? And then, or they'll usually, the creative team will get to book who they want they'll get you in the session. They'll direct you exactly how the audition has been. And then they'll make you wait an hour for approval. And that's when they come back and they go, okay. Smile it up. Yeah. They want you to smile. They want you to give it a little bit more brightness and smile on the product name. And that's how it oftentimes ends up different on the air. The other way is that like sometimes it's a grand experiment.

So it's like, Hey, We think the creative that's going to work is like this just happened to us recently with a huge tech client, right? We did a casting. They hired the person. It was like, I think the absolute perfect person for the job creative team loved the person. The session went great. Then they came back to us and they said, Hey, we need to recast. And we were like, why? We thought you love so -and -so. And they were like, we do love so -and -so one person on the client side made one comment and now we have to recast.

And then they were like, and now we have to recast for the other gender. And then they came back and said, and now we realize that when we recast for men, it sounded too trailer -y with how cinematic our visuals are. So now we need to recast with lighter male voices. And then at the end of the day, they were like, just kidding, we're sticking with the first person.

Paul:

Oh my God. You're kidding. Wow.

Tina:

It's a whole big, it's a process.

So you can't listen to the end result and allow that to make you what I call jump the shark, you know, like the happy days term, you can't jump the specs. You can't go, okay, it's for McDonald's Happy Meal, but you're saying you want gritty, rotten, real, but I know when it ends up in the air, it's gonna be like, ba -da -ba -ba -ba, I'm loving it. You can't jump there because at the stage of the game of the audition, you have to get through the gatekeepers who are the matchmakers for the creative team.

So if they say they want gritty, raw and real for McDonald's, we have to give them gritty, raw and real if we give them ba -da -bop. So even if the read that ends up on the final came through as an audition, it would never have made it past us because it wasn't what the creative said they wanted. So you have to honor the part of the process that we are in in every moment and how you do that is you have to put your trust in what information we've provided you and we are painstaking in our like attempt to give you every clue that we have to deliver the read that they're hoping to hear.

Paul:

So when I've heard coaches say well you know you should also research the client and find out what their on -air creative is like and go to iSpot, take a look at what's already airing that way you'll know what they're going for.

Tina:

It's, it's dicey because for all you know, they could have changed add agencies. They could be completely rebranding. I mean, it's not it's not a bad idea. Certainly do it so you know how to pronounce the product name. And you know, you kind of can get a general sense. But what you should do is be smart and go, okay,

These are their previous ads. Does this jive with what I'm reading of what's being asked for? If it does, then you have a great frame of reference to go off of, right? If it doesn't jive at all, then you have to default to what is given to you on that page because for all you know, there's been a complete sea change. You know, there's going to just be like a total shift in. And you couldn't know. Yeah, you can't know. I don't even know most of the time, you know?

Paul:

Right. Exactly.

I have one last question for you and then we'll let you go. The big elephant in the room has been, of course, artificial intelligence. From your vantage point as a casting director of national commercials, are the large agencies, the global and national agencies, are they using AI? Are they experimenting with AI? Are they watching it? What's going on at that level?

Tina:

As far as I can tell, the answer is no. And I think in commercials specifically right now, we are safe from the robots. And here's why. Because commercials have never been more real. They are demanding a level of spontaneity, authenticity, and like true engagement, unlike ever before.

And that is the one thing that you can't program AI to do. Like in this conversation, right? Like you're, you're totally engaged with me. I could say something completely out of left field and you're going to have to kind of be like, wow, we're on air. I got to like, you know, figure out how I'm going to manage what she just said. You don't know you're on, you're literally present with me in this very moment. And whatever I say is going to affect how you respond. You don't have a pre -planned response right now.

That's what we're listening for in commercials like that true off the cuff spontaneity, which cannot be programmed. You can program at AI to do a friendly read, then the entire thing start to finish is going to have that same friendly melody cadence and rhythm. And that's going to sound like a typical commercial. But what you're seeing in all of our specs is like we want absolutely that nothing that sounds like a typical commercial and what AI can do is like, it will give you the, the melody, the rhythm, the cadence without any of the raw connection, no emotion, nothing.

And that's, that's ultimately what is winning. It's like the most deeply connected, engaged reads are winning these jobs right now and changing, like even just what I just did right now, right? Like.

And I'm thinking of the word that I want to find, you know, and you can't manufacture that either. Like, you know, that just has to happen naturally. That's never going to happen in, in AI. So I think unfortunately other genres, right. Where it's like, you know, industrial e -learning lower budget things that they're just like, okay, well, it doesn't really. I mean, I think it ultimately matters in every genre, right?

Like if I was going to choose to learn something through an e -learning course, I would want to feel engaged by another human. I would zone out if I was listening to AI kind of, you know, tell me anything. I'm also completely distracted when I hear the weird inflections of AI that are just bizarre, right? And it's like, it just takes me out of it, right? But you know, for those things that, you know, I guess they could save a tremendous amount of money using AI.

Paul:

And oftentimes they're just looking to check a box, right? They're not worried about quality.

Tina:

Yeah. But I think for commercials, for the time being and with the trend being what they, what it currently is, which is everything as a film, it's all cinematic. And your job as the voiceover is to observe what is happening and respond to it truthfully moment to moment to moment. That is an innately human skill. And I just don't see it, you know, kind of deviating to AI, AI anytime soon.

Paul:

I lied. I have one more question, but it's not for me. It's for our audience. How do they find you online, Tina, and specifically the VoiceOver library?

Tina:

Yes. Oh, thank you for bringing that up. So my website for coaching is tinamorascocoaching.com. And yes, you brought up the library. So the library is my labor of love, it is now up to definitely over three and a half hours of content.

I think there are 18 videos right now broken into like, you know, bite sized little chunks where I really, really break down and address how to access your authentic read in every script, no matter how challenging, no matter how dry the script seems, we can turn it into a scene from a film and you can just, you know, really find your true connection to it. I also have videos about, you know, all of the hot topic questions of what's the difference between take one and take two.

What do you do when there's a breaking of the fourth wall? You know, like all of those things are answered. There's a Q and A video that I just posted that answers all the questions that I get asked constantly as a casting director. So it's basically me using all of my skills. So my agent experience, my acting experience, my casting experience, my coaching experience, all rolled into one.

And it's a way to kind of bring me into the booth with you for every single solitary audition. So, and you know, the, the good thing about the library, it's a lifetime membership. You pay one time and then you get all of the updates for free. So every time I drop a new video, you get an email saying like, Hey, check your, check your library. The shelves have been restocked.

Paul:

Very nice. Tina Morasco. It's God to say it's always a pleasure. Sounds trite, but my God, it always is.

Tina:

It's always a pleasure with you too. And you have, you do so much for the voiceover community, Paul. Like you really, and you're such a, you're such an informed source of like truth and accurate information. And so I really appreciate that you are constantly digging and learning and seeing what resonates as accurate and that's what you're putting out into the world.

Paul:

Oh, you're very kind to say that. I appreciate that deeply. Tina Morasco, we will have you on again and thank you for spending time with us today.

Tina:

I really, really appreciate it, my friend. Always and anytime for you.