Bill Ratner Interview With Bill Ratner coming to Dragon's Keep Saturday February 11, we thought it would be good to treat you to an interview with Bill; enjoy!
Dragon's Keep: Bill, we are excited for your visit to Provo and of course to Dragon's Keep, how did your visit to Utah come about?
Bill Ratner: I’ve been trawling the storytelling festival circuit for a while and applied to Timpanogos Mid-Winter Storytelling Conference at BYU to tell a story and teach a voiceover workshop for storytellers. Happily they hired me. So this coming Friday afternoon at 3:30PM, Feb. 10th I’ll be teaching a workshop called Voiceovers for Storytellers, and then Saturday night at 7:30p.m., I’ll be telling my story, “I Love Lucy Bit Part Player,” about my uncle Bobby who played Bobby the Bellboy in I Love Lucy, at The Midwinter Finale Concert at the BYU Conference Center Auditorium - 770 E University Parkway / Provo, Utah - Tickets $5/each.DK: Bill you have been part of some great projects, G.I. Joe, Mass Effect, Grand Theft Auto IV, Robot Chicken and Family Guy. However, I have to ask first what motivated you to become a voice actor/creator?
BR: My dad was an advertising guy – worked for Better Homes & Gardens Magazine and ad agencies. And on “Take Your Kid to Work Day,” I always saw musicians, artists, announcers – all the people who worked in commercials. And I loved early rock’n’roll boss-jock Am radio and listened to those guys and imitated them all the time. Then when I was twelve a bunch of us in my neighborhood learned from a local radio-TV repairman how to hook up a microphone to a radio and defeat the RF and use the radio as a PA system. After that it was a youth spent in audio narcissism.DK: What was your first break into the industry?
BR: I had been a dj at a suburban San Francisco radio station and was moving to L.A., so I made myself a voiceover demo from commercials I’d done at the station. A friend in L.A., asked if I had a v/o demo, I handed it off, and got a call to do the bumpers and billboards on an ABC-TV special called Heroes of Rock’n’Roll hosted by Jeff Bridges. That was my first big gig. I got an agent out of it.DK: Who are the actors/creators/individuals that initially inspired you and who continues to inspire you today?
BR: I was always a huge DC Comics and Marvel fan as a kid – even had G.I. Joe comix in the ‘50s (when Joe was the size of a Chihuahua instead of the tiny action figures Sunbow & Mattel made.) I was inspired by the early TV cartoon voices. I was inspired by Orson Welles who did voiceovers at the end of his life, old radio announcers on recordings from the 1940’s, Burl Ives. I was not inspired by Casey Kasem.DK: What have been some of highlights for you as a result of being a voice actor and working in the industry?
BR: My commute in the morning is to walk down 16 steps to my basement where my v/o booth is, and to sit all day deeply enmeshed in my fantasies, doing weird voices.DK: What preparation do you take to help you prepare for your projects?
BR: I actually do a vocal warm-up, probably like Madonna did before the Superbowl....(...eeeewww) and I search youtube a lot for voices to base characters on.DK: What would you say is one of the challenges of the trade to being a successful voice actor?
BR: American politicians seem to hate unions these days, although most of their dads paid for college in the ‘50s with money made as a union autoworker or whatever. So the challenge is non-union low-balling. Where someone should get paid decent union money for voicing something since the studios are making a ton off the project, there’s always an employer offering $50 and usually someone to take it.DK: Is there a charcter or project out there you would like to work on, you know a dream project?
BR: I always like auditioning for the old, wizened, usually defeated tribal alien leader. I haven’t gotten one of those guys yet.DK: You have a lot going on. What is your work ethic?
BR: I’m basically a lazy dick. But oddly I enjoy editing audio on ProTools, and I like flapping my lips and making noise with my mouth, so the job of getting in the voiceover booth is actually quite fun for me.DK: Anything happening with G.I. Joe?
BR: The Joe movies weren’t interested in Flint at all – live action is different. I thought it was great that T-fans freaked out when they found out Paramount wasn’t going to use Peter Cullen as the voice of Optimus Prime, and then the studio reconsidered when thousands of T-fans said, ‘We aren’t gonna go see your lousy movie if you don’t use the original voice.’ I got a call from Seth McFarlane who was a Joe fan, and he wrote a Family Guy episode for Flint a few years back, then Seth Green did the same thing on Robot Chicken.DK: What can fans look forward to from you in the future, what other projects are in play?
BR: Mass Effect III is coming out. Plus I seem to be getting a lot of disaster shows to narrate for Discovery. New episodes of I Almost Got Away with It, Crazy Land, Air Disasters, and Behind Mansion Walls are coming out. It’s fun doing those shows. It’s like reading old detective fiction.DK: For those who would like to be a voice actor one day, what advice could share with them, you know words of wisdom.
BR: Go on voicebank.net, click on “voiceover demos & clients,” and you can access every working voice actor in the country, celebs & otherwise. Listen to their demos, and make a demo yourself on Garage Band, and send it out to potential employers. I listen to friends and colleagues & celebs on that site every day.DK: Just want to say thanks Bill for taking time out from your schedule to chat with us. Before we go, is there anything we didn't touch base on that you'd like to share? Final shout out?
BR: Check out the Timpanogos Storytelling Mid-Winter Conference this weekend – Feb. 9 – 11 at BYU – gonna be some great stuff: http://www.timpfest.org/midwinter-event/schedule-of-events