Hello, Students
I am so very pleased to announce Jhovany Vazquez as the voice actor for the four member of the Chimp Gang, Chimp Lee McCormick!
Casting Lee was a bit of a different experience for me, it was the first time I held a casting call through Twitter. Traditionally when it comes time to cast a character I have either posted them on the casting page or reach out to a VA I know to see if they'd be interested. Though it is worth noting that also a chunk of characters I've casted so far have been the result of VAs directly messaging me and asking about a specific character; in most of those cases the character wasn't even ready for casting, but I let the person audition anyways and most times they got the role. Anyways back to Lee, as I was saying it was the first time I put out a call, due to having to recast Dev and giving the role to Lee's original VA. I wanted to recast Lee because I wanted each chimp to be a different VA I felt that was important as they all interact with one another and while Josh definitely could have played both; for me it was important to only do that as a last resort. While I'm not opposed to casting VAs in multiple roles (clearly) I do still want to work with as many people as possible. Once again I digress. So I put out the call expecting maybe I'd get a couple auditions like around ten optimistically, I got thirty! And it wasn't an easy choice, I kept going back and forth changing up my top three for a while, but the longer it went on the more sure I was that Jhovany was the right choice.
He never left my top choices from the day I got his audition. Hearing his portrayal was just like, "well this is definitely the tone I was imaging." And hey I'll be honest even when I finally called it and said, "he's it we're going with Jhovany." Part of me was like, "I don't know... I think this is the right move?"
But when I got his recordings back after like a minute in I said to myself, "I was right, there really was never even a contest here, this is 100% Lee, this guy gets it." It's kind of hard to explain, but Jhovany was just so natural in his performance. Sometimes I get to writing these things and I come to find I can't even really explain why someone did such a great job outside a technical level. That's kind of the case here. I guess how I can explain it is when a VA fits the role perfectly I cease to be a writer, or a dev scrutinizing their work and I'm just a fan getting to experience their performance. I'm laughing at my own dialogue, I'm feeling smitten by the character, I wince when they're mad. And that's how it was with Jhovany's performance I was just there in the moment with Lee playing out the scenes in my head. He completes the picture, he really solidifies who Lee is with his delivery of lines.
I feel so incredibly blessed to have gotten to work with him and so lucky I went with my gut and took a leap of faith. I don't think any of the top actors would have done a bad job. But that being said I think it's just so apparent in hindsight that Jhovany was the right person for it.
And I'm grateful to everyone who did take the time to audition don't get me wrong. But I'm here to celebrate the actor I did work with and that was Jhovany and I am so excited for you all to get to experience this character like I did in the future, just- wow. Wow. Wow. Wow.
Jhovany Vazquez, welcome to Pleasant Sparkle Academy.
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