Late June update: Murder, Travel and Vanity…
With June at an end here’s a quick update on what I’ve been up to, in additional to my usual commitments…
The other day I provided the voiceover narration for two documentary programmes coming soon to the Crime & Investigation Network. They’re UK versions of two Dateline NBC programmes on the phenomenon of “Murder for Hire”, where a disgruntled spouse pays a hitman to “take out” their other half (and I’m not talking about wine and roses, either). The sting in the tail for the people in these programmes is that the people they thought were contract killers actually turned out to be undercover police using secret filming techniques to trap them. The shows feature some amazing footage and are currently slotted for first transmission on Wednesday 29th July and Wednesday 5th August at 9pm (but you’ll find up-to-date billings in my TV schedule here).
This week sees me doing my first voiceover session for London-based Travel Channel International, which I’m very much looking forward to. The Travel Channel have recently expanded their channel line-up, and I’m thrilled to be joining their pool of voice talent as they go from strength to strength.
Meanwhile online networking site, Facebook, recently announced that users would be able to claim “vanity URLs” for their profile pages, and in the last couple of days this has been extended to include what they call (rather confusing, in my opinion) “Facebook Pages” for businesses. They also moved the goalposts and insisted that only Pages with 100 or more “fans” would be able to do this. A big push from my Facebook friends, their friends, and anyone I could find to help on twitter meant I reached the milestone today and can now be found at www.facebook.com/MikeCooperVoiceover in addition to here on my own site. Thanks to everyone that made that possible!
Finally, as we head into July, I hope to have news before too long of new agency representation outside the UK, through which I hope to reach clients in other markets around the world. Watch this space, and if it’s as nice where you are as it is here in London – enjoy the hot weather while it lasts!
“The Black Widow” Clips Now Online
“The Black Widow: A Web of Suspicion” is the first of two programmes I revoiced recently for the UK’s Crime & Investigation Network. It premiered last night.
A look at the bizarre life of Sandra Bridewell, a beautiful Southern belle and wealthy socialite who became known as the “Black Widow” when three of her husbands ended up dead and Sandra pocketed big life insurance payouts. The programme follows detectives and newspaper reporter Glenna Whitley as they investigate Bridewell’s trail of death and deceit and prepare to spring a trap for her.
The programme will air again today at 3pm on Sky channel 553 (or 4pm on the “+1″ service on Sky 554). Here are two short clips: one from the start of the programme, and one from midway through.
An English voice for “twitwoop”
Mike Cooper is now the official English language voice of “twitwoop“, a service which allows twitter users to post audio by phone to their timeline.
“Let your followers hear what you are doing. At the ocean? What about some ocean breeze? Stuck in traffic? Let us hear some New York horns. Sing a song, tell us a joke or simply say something with a meaning. twitwoops can be 140 seconds long – that’s twitter style.”
The idea is that you register up to two phone numbers (typically your mobile and a landline) and give them access to your twitter account. When you dial in, the system recognises your number automatically and allows you to post audio. At this point there are numbers in London, New York and LA, as well as in Germany. You can choose to post to your own twitter timeline, or to twitwoop’s own public timeline.
Check it out at twitwoop.com, select your country from the drop-down list, then dial in and have a listen!
As a result of this deal, Mike Cooper is now also listed voice on woopla’s international directory for clients seeking a British voice for their audio applications.
Mike’s Mid-June update
The year is whizzing by faster than I seem to be able to keep track. This weekend it’s the longest day of the year already, which means it’ll soon be Christmas, no doubt. I’ve been keeping busy the last few weeks with some interesting new projects.
A couple of weeks ago I voiced a documentary for an independent film-maker based in Sydney, who’s producing a programme on the preparations for next year’s football World Cup in South Africa. The programme is still in the editing stages, but when it’s finished the idea is that it will be shown at various festivals and sold to interested broadcasters. I’ll post an update on this in due course.
An interesting meeting at Pinewood studios at the start of the month revealed some great new programmes coming to Film24, for whom I work as a continuity announcer. These include “Sordid Lives: The Series”, which will be airing on Film24 from the start of August. Think “Desperate Housewives”, but set on a trailer park, and with Olivia Newton John and Golden Girl Rue McLanahan, and you start to get the idea. Andrew Burns, CEO of the channel, has some other new programming ideas up his sleeve for the next few months too, all of which should bring exciting improvements to the schedule.
Also this month I’ve voiced a science documentary which will soon start showing in museums in the United States. Called Planet You 3D, it’s been produced by Chedd-Angier-Lewis, in Watertown, MA, and will shortly get its premiere at the Health Museum in Houston and the Museum of Science in Boston, before hopefully rolling out to science centres across the United States. You can read the production blog (including the very nice things they said about me) here.
Aside from these projects it’s been the regular round of corporates, including jobs for Capgemini and British Gas, commercials for radio stations in the UK, and my ongoing work for the BBC World Service and the History Channel. And outside work I’ve been trying to get to see as much of the ICC World Twenty20 cricket as I can – after all, I only live ten minutes from Kennington Oval!
“Jesus – The Man from Nazareth”
I voiced an Easter special this year for the National Geographic Channel. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get hold of a copy, and some scaffolding was in the way of my satellite dish at the time, so it’s taken me until now to see it!
I’ve uploaded a short clip, which you can view here. (Quicktime movie)
STOP PRESS… TV Schedule page now live!
A little more tweaking with Google Calendar and a few lines of code later, and I’m proud to announce my TV Schedule page, right here on the site.
Click “TV Schedule” on the right to view it!
Mike’s TV (and Radio) Times
I’ve just set up a Google calendar, which details when programmes I’ve voiced are showing on various channels here in the UK. I’ve done this mostly for my own benefit, though I realised midway through that it might prove to be an interesting website addition, at some point. If there’s a way of extracting the data to Twitter then that would be even better still!
Google, by default, provides hideously long URLs, so it’s TinyURL to the rescue, and you’ll find my personalised TV guide at http://tinyurl.com/mikeonair
I’ve included channel numbers for Sky and Virgin in the “location” field (crafty, eh?) and also flagged up days where I can be heard as a station continuity voiceover for History and Film24. The next step might be to add links to clips from the programmes.
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Hear a quick demo now!
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