How's this for a voice over story?
Yesterday I was out in the hills of Rocky Peak with my Search & Rescue team. We had spotty cell coverage, so occasionally I would get a text or email. One came through marked "VIP"–it was my Atlas agent Nate Zeitz with a last-minute Saturday audition for a cool ESPN opening tease for the Men's Final of the Australian Open. I was bummed–here I was in the middle of nowhere and far from my studio, and a very cool audition required submissions within a couple of hours. No way would training be close to done by then. So I emailed Nate saying "you know I'd be all over this but I'm out in the field and won't be back in the studio till this evening." A few minutes later he dings me back: "If you plan to be home this evening for the record if they select you, you can submit the audition from your phone." Audition on the phone? In the wind, with my team yelling in the background? Well, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take, so I figured why not. I moved off to the side of the mountain we were working on, crouching behind a boulder to mitigate wind noise, and laid down one take in my Voice Memo app. I then sent it off to Nate (while standing on a ledge holding my phone up to get enough coverage), along with a request that he convert the file and rename it properly. Now, no agent has to do this, so I said I totally get it if he doesn't have time etc. But he did, and he got the file sent off on time, and I got back to training. A half hour later, I looked at my phone: I had booked it.
Listening back to my audition this morning, I think I may have discovered a cheat code. The wind gave the read atmosphere, and even the grunts and yells of my teammates in the background add another layer of feel. The next time I overthink a read, or worry unnecessarily about a stray sound in the audition file, or think I'm being super clever about frankensteining a read together, I hope I remember this.