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los angeles rams have no style

los angeles rams logo

Look at that.

The NFL’s St. Louis Rams are being hauled back to Los Angeles. The 2,000 or so old Los Angeles Rams fans from the original are very excited.

The millions of other Los Angelinos couldn’t give a ram’s ass. The reason?

It’s GOT to be the logo.

I only noticed it tonight after the NFL draft started (probably like thousands of others). Really, Los Angeles? Really?!

Bad enough the team got stuck with a crappy name like the Rams (only one worse would be The Bills). But to get a second chance at life in LA, having been stuck with questionable team colors (once yellow and blue now pukish gold and dark blue) you would think some great LA designer would have at the new logo and give it LA style.

No.

They are staying with the Rams name for heritage sake (again, WHAT heritage?!) and they took the old word mark and just slapped “Los Angeles” on it.

WTH?!

los angeles rams iconAnd who the heck is going to be scared of this Ram? Look at it! Oooo, I’m shaking.

This should be the logo of a Single A baseball team with a color-blind graphic designer, not an NFL franchise.

CFL maybe but not NFL.

Who wants to wear that stupid looking ram on a baseball cap or sweatshirt?

No the Rams will NOT be leading the NFL Merchandise sales in 2016.

They had a great branding opportunity and they blew it. New (kinda) city, new (kinda) team with a new (not really) logo.

If they win the Super Bowl, no one will care about the logo I guess. But nobody cares about the logo now either.

audio’connell in charleston, wv (again)

Voice Talents Peter K. O'Connell_Amie Breedlove_Charlie Cooper

The Cold Spot is a fun tavern in Charleston, West Virginia that my friend Charlie Cooper picked as the dinner site for our voice-over meet-up with he, me and and Amie Breedlove.

It was a nice place but the company was even nicer.

So often when I travel to cities, my trips are simply more enjoyable because I get to spend a little time with my voice-over friends. There’s a ton to talk about with people who get “the life”.

Very glad I got to see these folks again and I GREATLY appreciate them joining me for dinner.

bbc greatness with mike cooper

Voice Talent Mike Cooper_BBC Radio

There were many great moments I enjoyed at VO Atlanta but one of the more unexpected moments involved a previously unknown (to me anyway) past life of one of my voice-over friends.

I knew Mike Cooper was from the UK (the accent was a clue) and I knew he worked in voice-over there before immigrating to the states a few years ago and making a home with his family in Asheville, North Carolina.

But up until he and I were speaking at VO Atlanta, I had NOT known that Mike Cooper – voice-over talent HAD BEEN Mike Cooper – news voice for BBC News. What?!!

There will be some reading this who think ‘what’s the big deal?’

bbc newsThose are folks who probably never listened to a short wave radio and listened to BBC News, long before the internet or before NPR started playing BBC World Service broadcasts on the overnight.

Listening to BBC News at that time made the other side of the Atlantic come alive to this young and future broadcaster.

Nothing in the US on TV or radio sounded anything like BBC News – not the stories (always more focused on the world than we are here) not the cadence and certainly not the enunciation. Oy, these people were (are) good.

Listening to the BBC sounded like you were listening to your well-bred cousin who went to the right schools and knew all the right people.

So at VO Atlanta, at one of the after parties, I was speaking with Marci Polzin of Artistic Talent and Mike Cooper when Mike shared this news.

I radio-geeked out a little bit. Kind like Brad Venable at any Comic-Con.

So I immediately made him announce some news, right there in the middle of the party in front of me and Marci. Mike looked at me like I had 6 heads but I said he had to do it. And he did. It was like I was in the booth at Broadcast House. Totally awesome!

So as an added treat, I few weeks later Mike was kind enough to send me a copy of his final BBC News broadcast, a portion of which I will gladly play for you here.

LISTEN TO A SAMPLE HERE

When I grow up, I want to sound that cool.

batman joins the voice-over workshop

audioconnell_Batman_voiceover

There are somethings on the internet so perfect that you think they are written just for you.

Were that I was so special but I am not. Many voice-over talents endure my similar predicament of receiving phone calls and emails every week from people who have no voice-over experience wanting to get into the industry.

Their sole qualification: their friends or family members say they have a nice voice and they should look into getting started in voice-over.

An artist’s equivalent to that logic would be if someone walked into a freshly painted, single color room and said to the painter “You paint nicely. You should paint something on canvas and sell it to an international renown art gallery.”

When we are together, we chuckle because these callers and emailers don’t understand that a nice voice will not help you launch a career in voice-over. It’s a business…a difficult business that requires a great deal of work. Much of that work doesn’t even involve a microphone.

To be fair of course, one doesn’t know what one doesn’t know…we all experience that throughout our lives when we begin new tasks of all kinds. But the concept of just having a nice voice as the ticket to begin a career in something many of us have spend decades working at and studying for is a bit frustrating for those in the trenches.

The Voice Over Entrance Exam by Peter K. O'Connell Copyright 2009It’s one of the reasons I wrote “The Voice-Over Entrance Exam”. It’s a little bit more direct and honest than many voice-over books out there that encourage people to chance the dream of voice-over. My opinion has been and remains that it’s OK to chance the dream but you’d better have a solid business foundation as your ship’s anchor or you will be forever lost at sea.

So the Batman graphic, used so often in memes across the internet, struck me as so perfect that I added it to my web page for the The Voice-Over Workshop. 

To the creator of this meme, I salute you.

some happy news for a friend

Darren Altman Britains Got Talent 2016

Whether one acts on a stage, in front of a camera or behind a microphone, a performer is still a performer.

Yet for as many years as I have been a voice-over performer, I can still be surprised by some of the talents of my peers. It reflects poorly on me that I guess I subconsciously pigeon-hole them in my mind as only a certain kind of performer. I need to stop doing that.

Voice Talents Peter K. O'Connell & Darren AltmanCase in point, I woke up this weekend to see on social media that my friend and fellow voice-over talent Darren Altman had gone and got himself on Britain’s Got Talent. As an impressionist. How terrific is that!!! What I found especially interesting was the fact that the impressions were based on a variety of UK voices, with whom I had little familiarity. But when you watch the audience and the judges, they were enthralled!!!!

The other part I enjoyed was that Darren was FEATURED on the show. They didn’t just show the audition, they did behind the scenes, they taped him at home with his family and really gave him the star treatment.

Not that I am intimately familiar with the details on such shows but I believe they make performers sign a non-disclosure agreement of sorts, which means Darren and his family couldn’t talk about him being on the show or how it turned out. That must have been a crazy secret to keep. But well worth the wait.

As he states in the package below, he’d never done anything like this before. So a great congratulations to Darren on this very brave and very successful TV appearance.