Biography

We did the auditions for months and we had maybe 150 actors for the voice of Batman and we kind of had a Clint Eastwood thing going with a kind of raspier, quieter sound and then Kevin Conroy walked in the room and did one of those wonderful things that happens once in a lifetime. He just nailed it and we all just said, "We're done!"

[on Steven Spielberg] For those fans who don't know this already, he was very hands-on. He was not just a figurehead. He looked at storyboards, he looked at story ideas, he read every script, he had input. Matter of fact my one real massive claim to fame is although many have been directed by Steven Spielberg I am one of the very few who has directed Steven Spielberg. I have the outtake reel in case I'm ever broke.

[talking about a typical voice session for Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005)] Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005) has its own specific challenges regarding recording. The actor who voiced "Aang" (Zach Tyler Eisen) lives on the east coast. The rest of the actors in the main cast reside in the Los Angeles area. It's a major part of my job to make sure it sounds as if these actors were all in the room at the same time...so that it sounds like the characters are all in the same scene. It would be disconcerting if Toph and Katara and Sokka were all talking at a conversational level (volume) and Aang sounded like he was shouting his lines!

It's the voice director's job to make sure the writer's and producer's requests are incorporated into the recording session...after all, when it comes right down to it, it's the producer's show. It's my job to be sure to get them the vocal tracks they need to make the cartoon they desire.

It was a different time. There were only a handful of people doing this work. It was a simpler time in many ways and yet, it was more complex when we think about our technology now and how easy it is...we go to an ADR cue that's at time code 10 minutes thirteen seconds 15 frames-- we go right to it. Back then we would have to roll through the reel all the way to get to that so there are certain things that are easier now because of technology, but there is a simpler mentality about cartoons. There were really no mean-spirited cartoons then and with the exception of the cartoons like the classic Warner Bros., Looney Tunes and Jay Ward cartoons they were mostly made for kids. There was not really much concern about broadcast standards because of trying to push the envelope. We were making children's shows -- Smurfs, you know. So I was at Hanna-Barbera for 5 ½ years when Disney approached me and said we're going to create a division of Disney called Disney TV Animation and we are going to do a series called DuckTales (1987). We are going to audition five different directors (at this time I was just a casting director) and they asked if I would come in and audition by directing an episode. They were doing 65 episodes and that was a huge number -- usually things were ordered in 13 episodes. It was also the time of merchandising when some of the cartoons were simply 22-minute commercials to sell the toys. So they were going to take the first five episodes and had five different directors before making a decision as to who was going to make the rest of the 60 episodes. I was apparently the 2nd director that came in to audition and after I finished they said they weren't even going to see the other three people. They wanted me.