#ellyn stern

[2ndblackswordsman]

Anime Boston is the best!

[toonamisquad]

Lupin The 3rd Fan Q&A By Discotek Media with Richard Epcar and Ellyn Stern Last night after Lupin the 3rd aired on Toonami Discotek Media(Jose Argumedo) did a live Fan Q&A on their Twitter page with Richard Epcar and Ellyn Stern.

[mechacon]

We are excited to welcome Ellyn Stern back to MechaCon!

We are excited to welcome @ellynstern back to #MechaCon! #MechaCon2017 #MechaGuests

Ellyn began her acting career at the age of 12. She is a classically trained actress, voice actress, director and writer, whose career spans film, television and stage.   She has voiced hundreds of characters in Games, Animation and Anime. Ellyn began with Robotech. She is Agatha of the Elite 4 in the Pokémon Generations.  She plays Elena Gotti in the new Lupin III Blue Jacket Series and other…

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[joyfulpocketninja]

Ending the year at Ichibancon was a wonderful experience! Glad I was able to meet and talk to a lot of amazing, kind people.

[animeboston]

How to Succeed as a Voice Actor, According to Anime Boston’s VA Guests

On Sunday, five of Anime Boston’s voice actor guests—Cherami Leigh, Christine Marie Cabanos, Lauren Landa, Ellyn Stern, and Richard Epcar—opened up the floor to attendees to ask them anything. Here’s some of the advice they doled out to Anime Boston attendees who are interested in skills in voice acting themselves.

What skills do you need to be a VA? How do you learn those skills?

Ellyn: Take classes in acting before you do anything. To say you do voices is not enough. You’ve got to learn to be an actor first because you’ve got to learn what being a character is about. You can’t just do a funny voice.

Cherami: You need to have an open mind. Your job is to go in to a recording session and be clay from which the director can mold the character. They may not want you to play the character the way you have in your head.

When did you first get your start in voice acting?

Richard: My wife (Ellyn Stern) got me into this. I went to LA to be on camera. I did a lot of soaps and television. Ellyn was working on a film and the directors had another film where they wanted to replace the voices. They asked me if I’ve done it before and I said of course, though I’d never done it before in my life. I took to it like a duck to water.

More after the cut: 

How do I create a voice acting demo reel if I’ve never had VA work before?

Cherami: You don’t have to fill your demo reel with strictly professional work. You can use voice acting examples from school projects.

Christine: For my first demo reel, I wrote a script myself and added sound effects so it sounded like it was produced.

Lauren: Demos can help, but directors want to hire an actor who can get into character in about five minutes, since they’re crunched for time. You need to show you can do that.

Do you guys have any funny stories from previous VA sessions?

Christine: I’ve been so thrilled that my chest has seized in the booth. Mako (Kill La Kill)  is really energetic so I had to keep breathing hard, and I pulled something in my chest. I thought I was having a heart attack and I feel to the floor! The director said, “Oh my God!” and we stopped recording and I had to stop and rest a bit.

Ellyn: I was directing Samurai X, and there was one other director on it. It was a particularly warm day in the studio and the air conditioning wasn’t working. I went in to the studio and this other director wasn’t wearing any clothes!

Richard: I was doing some background noises for a movie with a group, and one of the other guys had some bad gas and would let one rip every few minutes. I thought, “I’m in hell.”

If you could be any fictional character, who would it be?

Richard: I would be James Bond. [James Bond voice] Yes, of course.

Christine: Mal, from Firefly. He’s the captain of the ship.

Ellyn: [To Christine] It’s interesting you say that. There aren’t very many great female fictional characters. The roles for women are not great. Go to your colleges. Write your scripts. Create your anime. Get developers to produce it. And then come to us. But write good, strong, female characters. Ones that are grounded and authentic. We as women are having a problem finding good female characters to identify with.

Lauren: It’s very true. When you asked that question, only male characters came to mind. I think mine would be Atticus Finch, because he reminds me of my dad.

Were your families supportive when you decided to pursue voice acting?

Christine: My mom at first was not. She came from the Philippines and built her own business from scratch. She wanted me to either be a doctor or take over the family business. I wanted to do this instead and it broke her heart at first. But when she discovered I could be successful this way, she started supporting me 100%. She even has some of my characters as the background image on her phone and iPad now.

Cherami: My parents did not want me to do it because they were actors and knew what a difficult career it could be. They took me to an audition to show me how hard it was to succeed, and I made it to the top ten. Today, my mom comes with me to conventions and is here with me at Anime Boston this weekend.

Ellyn: My mother was absolutely opposed to me doing it. She had an accountant’s kind of mine and wanted me to be a teacher. But that wasn’t going to be my journey. When you want something badly, you don’t allow anything to deter you, and it didn’t. There’s a lot of competition in this business, so you have to want it that badly to succeed. Go for it with all the gusto you have, and don’t do any less. 

Richard: The reality is, you should do what you love. There’s no guarantee in life for anything, so you might as well do something you enjoy, regardless of what people think.

—Lauren, AB Staff Blogger

[myshowzip]

Spirit of the Sword

Spirit of the Sword

Spirit of the Sword: High school student Yonosuke Hikura is the latest in his family to protect the harmony between Heaven and Earth. With the help of the magical sword Chitentai, and Tsukinojo Inbe, a Protector sent to him by the High Priests of Earth, he courageously battles the demons.

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[thatrandomnat]

Overall, Jaycon this year was pretty awesome.

I liked the way they organized things and the panels better last year, but I got to meet many awesome people (including sassmassacre, thebitchnugget and neongenesisad), as well as see my SU friends for the first time in a long time.

What definitely made the con for me, though, was meeting Richard Epcar and Ellyn Stern.  I was a nervous wreck and didn't know what to say, but they were totally cool about it.  They took a picture with me and signed my Jaycon schedule, and I pretty much swooned when Ellyn called me cute, bubbly and energetic.  Hopefully I didn't embarrass myself in front of them too much.

I also really liked the Night Vale panel, which was fun even though I don't know anything about the series and pretty much came to it because sassmassacre was in it (who was awesome, by the way <3).  Everyone in it was great, and I might check out the series, if I'm not too lazy.

Tl;dr, this was a great weekend.

[heroine-problem-blog]

Otakon Vegas 2014: Women in Anime

Ellyn Stern Epcar has, in recent years, become a staple of anime convention guest lists.  For the past few years, has been hosting a panel on Women in Anime, which I was able to attend for the first time today.

She led in by saying that she knows very little about anime she herself hasn't performed in. This, in and of itself, isn't surprising - most professional voice actors rarely watch series they aren't involved in as far as I know - but it was clear she was expecting the audience to provide examples to fill in the blanks, rather than doing the research herself.

The panel, overall, was anime-flavored Feminism 101.  Stern made a number of points, some of which I agreed with but others that I very firmly did not.  She started the panel by talking about how, historically, manga was written for men, and that has shaped the way women are drawn and represented.  Male characters are often more complex and active than the women, and the women who ARE interesting tend to be "gender bending" (cringe) or have a strongly masculine energy, such as Major Kusanagi.  To be feminine in anime usually means to be passive and a male-constructed fantasy, although she presented Sailor Moon as a counter-example to that. She encouraged the audience to go out and produce creative content featuring realistic, complex women, and to vote with their dollars by going through legal avenues to consume media featuring good female characters.

Another thing she touched upon, one that I particularly disagreed with, was the idea that the typical style of anime comes from Western beauty ideals.  There is some relation, no doubt, as the initial influence came from American cartoons, particularly Fleischer, but when she argued that the style, which Americans tend to read as white-looking, came from a place of shame.  While I absolutely agree that manga and anime need more diversity in body types and people of color, blaming it on shame is flat-out wrong and claiming that it's because Japanese people want to "look white" is very ethnocentric.

She also said she doesn't like to use the term feminism because "we're all human" which is welp

At least as interesting as Stern's talk itself was the audience reaction.  Otakon Vegas is a very small affair this year, and there were probably only a dozen people in the audience.  When asked for favorite characters, some answers provided were, "Monkey D Luffy" and "Gene Starwind".  The responses to her question about what traits we valued in our heroes were mostly associated with traditionally masculine heroes: "strength", "leadership", "strong willed". I ended up responding with "vulnerability" and "compassion", just to balance it out.

Stern was far too quick to dismiss American animation as well.  She talked about how when she grew up, the best girls could hope for was Cinderella, and she seems to be running on the belief that very little has changed.  While, yes, many American cartoons are problematic when it comes to female representation,there are some really wonderful shows out these days: Adventure Time, Steven Universe, even My Little Pony when you ignore the toxic brony culture.  At the same time, she praised Legend of Korra as anime and spoke positively about American adaptations of anime such as Transformers, which has just as many problematic elements as your average anime.

For all its problems, I did enjoy the panel, even if it wasn't anything new for me. There were attendees for whom this was clearly a relatively new concept.  One young man talked about how he had never been able to get his girlfriend to watch anime with him, and he recently realized it was because they were watching exclusively male-centric anime.  He asked for recommendations for anime about women, and while one bonehead recommended Girls und Panzer, I wrote down a quick list for him and gave it to him at the end of the panel, which he seemed really grateful for. I also gave him the url of this blog! If you're reading this, hi dude! Sorry I forgot your name.

Ellyn Stern is a lovely woman. I'm so lucky to have made her acquaintance (my sister attended high school with her daughter, and our moms would talk and get coffee sometimes when they dropped them off) and I'm glad she's decided this is an important cause and trying to get people talking. Nonetheless, I feel like a bit of research, both into anime and the philosophy of feminism, would improve things immensely.