Add "voice talent" to my resume...

I've been in Advertising for more than a decade. Not only do I create and teach advertising, the recent years saw me fast becoming PART of advertising.

While listening to "Holding back the years" in the background, I'm trying to create an MTV-ish flashback to recall and pinpoint my first ad appearance...

There was the Promil print ad where I appeared as a person with Above Average IQ. (That was a demotion, i'm a GENIUS! Mwahahaha!)

My hand had a load of commercial appearances: Dermalin, Palmolive Soap, Sony Ericsson.

There was that memorable top shot of me for the Philip Morris poster. I was supposed to be an acoustic artist, but I didn't know how to hold a guitar. Ariel had to coach me and after that shoot, I knew how to make a D chord.

My back was featured in a brochure for Synergymed. This project will forever hold a special place in the hearts and minds of Erwin, Ria and myself. Who can forget Kabashima-san.

There was the first TV ad for Texas Chicken where you can actually see me! (That is if you pause the television set and try to single out one person in the crowd. Harharhar!)

Summary of talent accomplisments:

TVC talent - check
Hand talent - check
Back talent - check
Full body talent - check

Today, I add "voice talent" to this list of accomplishments.

Being the only person who can speak tagalog in this agency, whenever a tagalog TVC or tagalog edit needs to be done, they zero in on me and send me to the nearest recording studio to do my "thang." Initially, this didn't sit well with me since I think my voice is totally dorky. The more I listen to myself, the more i'm convinced that I sound like my brother Biboy. (Which isn't so bad. But over the phone, Biboy sounds much better than me.)

Ergo, during my debut as a voice talent, I was very reluctant. But then again, they just want me for timing purposes, and not for my golden voice.

So there I was, at Touches for the audio recording. It was weird to be on the other end of the court. For years, I've been watching voice talents do their thing while I was comfortably seated inside the audio engineer's booth. Now, the voice talent is yours truly, and my officemate is on the other end.

Good news: it only took 4 takes, then I nailed the lines. The only challenge was when this was the direction given: "Can you sound more like a little girl?" My mental response was: "I'm a 32 year old man. How can I sound like a little girl."

After listening to the playbacks, I suddenly realized that my voice wasn't as awful as I thought it was. Yes, I still sound a bit like Biboy, but it was a very good kind of Biboy sound.

Hmmm... I think I'll get a hang of this.