Tom Clifford is Scaring up some Shocking Results this Halloween Season.

It all started about 15 years ago with an outfit called Elswarro Films. They reached-out and asked if I could create a creepy-guy voice and as time went on, could I adjust it to go all out high energy and then sell the crap outta the incidentals of most Haunts around the country.

That being accomplished and with a client list that kept building on top of polished production content... all was right in The Haunt World. Then, the bottom fell out with Jason Swarr leaving the Haunt Industry to pursue a career in film making. Jason was great with forwarding all of his client contacts and even schooled me on some of their finer details. Made some new acquaintances and over the years cultivated some mutual relationships.

Fast forward ten years into the future and I've had some very good luck (not that I didn't work for it). Been able to maintain a presence on the eastern seaboard doing all sorts of voice characterizations as far up as New Hampshire & Massachusetts and as far south as New Orleans, LA. Year after year working regularly as the Creepy-Guy. The CG voice was fashioned in many ways after Tobin Bell's character: Jizzsaw from the Saw movie franchise. Here's how it all started: Kentucky Scream Park

Take a look what we're doing this year for Canobie Lake Park ScreeemFest: 

 Play TV spot

They have a regular theme park going throughout the year and do it up B-I-G for the Halloween Season. Last year we shifted from a buffer agent (Yeah, Sen. I used a buffer) direct to the actual ad agency. We're adjusting nicely this year. Of course it's always about the Grants.

 
The Kidz Zone below is where younger kids have fun at the Scout Island Halloween festival in NOLA. We're featured as the spaced-out voice of the Host character in the 'Boogie Spooktakular' an
animated cartoon musical adventure! Check it out at: Boogie Spooktakular

What Scout Island liked on the audition mp3 was the playfulness of the host character. Kids are introduced to a silly bunch of characters like: Mumzy, Wolfi and Helga in a tone of wide-eyed amazement...and served up with a side of Pee Wee. These characters spook up that Halloween spirit and teach addictive dance moves to boogie down to. It also gives kids a chance to express themselves with other kids while having fun...safely.


The Mortuary Haunted Mansion Presents - The Cult Of 13 (below). It's a complete shift from wide-eyed la-de-dah to the Creepy-Guy voice. Turned up full throttle 'high energy' to scare-up some shocking results for 'Friday The 13th' believers & shakers!
The Mortuary took full advantage of this September's early calendar of Friday the 13th, with their Cult Of 13 attraction and began the Halloween Season early this year. 
Stretching this year's season to almost 7 weeks!

Here’s the opening line from this year’s video promo of the new
The Cult of 13 attraction at NOLA’s The Mortuary Haunted Mansion.

One of the greatest phobias known to man is the fear of Friday the 13th. You believe that something terrible is going to happen. You become paralyzed with fear and feel powerless to overcome FEAR, TERROR, PANIC. 

Dare to face your wildest nightmares! Experience Friday the 13th at The Mortuary Haunted Mansion.

Sorta gets you all creeped-out…or laughin your ass off. Check out the promo trailer for lots of
chills & thrills from — The VoiceOverGuy. 
This is probably not advisable viewing by younger audiences:  Play Spot

by:+Tom Clifford, VoiceOver & Creative Services   

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TC & Company Accents-the-Positive for Jordan Travel & Tourism

We left off here in October's BLOG with a promise from Phenomena Advertising to be considered as voice-over for their new Voyage/Voyage campaign... to promote travel and tourism in the Mid-East regions like Abu Dhabi, the UAE, Lebanon and Jordan.

Sure enough PA came calling. They, like so many others these days are trying to gather as many young ears-&-eyeballs for consideration of Mid-East travel as possible. The most recent campaign was for Jordan... a land steeped in history. To some, a trip to Jordan could be a pilgrimage. After all Jordan's famous for its archeological wonderment. Case-in-Point, the Hollywood blockbuster Indiana Jones and the last Crusade features Jordan's, Treasury at Petra. Carved into the side of a sandstone hill, Petra appears in several scenes of the picture.

 The movie's fictional Canyon of the Crescent Moon was modeled on the eastern entrance to Petra, a 250-foot-high sandstone slot canyon known as the Siq that leads directly to Al Khazneh (the Treasury).

The above photo depicts Petra on the left with Indy's rendering on the right.

Phenomena Advertising, located in Lebanon have themselves a ton of archaeological wonderment. Working with them is still a bit daunting with 5,600 miles between us. Being seven hours ahead of us here on the east coast you have to get used to early morning starts and early quitting times. Ten O'clock in the morning is five in the afternoon over there. Everyone's flexible. We used a good amount of Skype for direction, pronunciation and tone of voice. For file transfers over 50 & 100 MB's, we used WeTransfer for temp cloud uploads. Here's a Travel Resource link:  Voyage Voyage Dot World


BTW, as a final reference to the film's climactic final scenes, actors Harrison Ford and Sean Connery burst forth from the Siq and walk deep into the labyrinths of the Treasury in their quest to find the Holy Grail.
But, as usual, archaeological fact bowed to Hollywood fiction when Indy came to Petra.
In reality, the Treasury is nothing more than a facade with a relatively small hall once used as a royal tomb. In 1985, the Petra Archaeological Park was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site, and in 2007 it was named one of the new seven wonders of the world.

So fasten your seat-belts, click the 'Play' button below and get ready to take off to adventure!! 

Click Play above

by:+Tom Clifford, VoiceOver & Creative Services   

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Scout Island Scream Park begins the season with Tom Clifford as Host

The Kidz Zone is where family's younger kids have fun at the Scout Island Halloween festival in NOLA. We're particularly grateful to be featured as the voice of the Host character in the 'Boogie Spooktakular' - an animated musical cartoon adventure...

Scooby-Doo style!

The Boogie Spooktakular is a spectacle of fun for the whole family with a cast of characters that inspire kids to have sing-a-longs, featured dancing and generally let kids create their own fun amidst a safe scare-free environment. So, the voice had to be engaging to kids and keep things moving along. Think daffy MC with a dash of Pee Wee, a pinch of surfer-dude wonderment and Voila!

 

Check to play Promo

by:+Tom Clifford, VoiceOver & Creative Services   

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Water Mill Bldg. Supply casts TC & Company to voice its Radio Summer Splash

One of the perks of voicing company VoIP's is that you sometimes get to be cast in their radio & tv advertising...as is the case with Water Mill Building Supply. Offering customers in the Hampton's, the Quogue's and in Montauk quality hardware with all the finest trimmings.

WMBS, as they are known in their condensed form for online and smartphone presence, wanted a young trusting read for a co-op radio campaign with Royal Building Products. But wait, after hearing I could put 200 words together and still make it under :60 seconds they decided to stretch the envelope ever further and throw in a few additional words for their Connecticut subsidiary; Country Lumber. Ah, a Challenge! 160 or so words is the usual amount for a Sixty.

Whoa, it's not as easy as you think to fit 1:10 seconds into :58/:59. For those who are strictly digital, it's important to point out that speeding things up can only get you so far until it's stretched to the point of sounding robotic. The initial vo track was recorded at 44,100 kHz. We sped it up to 45,300 kHz. Most sounded OK but there were pockets that weren't sounding natural. Those areas were replaced with the original track. Just a sentence or two was all that was needed. Ahhh, but we were still long by about 3 seconds. Wait a minute - how 'bout we take advantage of a well known trick used by the car industry...The 'fine print' disclaimer! You know the deal; rat-a-tat-tat the fine-print at a hundred miles per hour and EQ'd to sound like one's inner-most thoughts or an airline Capt.'s debriefing via overhead speaker. Worked perfect for the last lines.

And just when we had it...the client called and said we gotta use the entire client name for the smartphone app. So, instead of wmbs we now had to say Water Mill Building Supply.  

Luckily, before we all had heart attacks, the client gave us their blessing of taking out some not-so-essential words to help with the effort. That kept the integrity of the spot intact regardless of its bulging 223 word count. Here's the abbreviated version of the Water Mill Building Supply radio spot.

 

Click to Play

by:+Tom Clifford, VoiceOver & Creative Services   

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Major Southeast Auto Dealer casts Tom Clifford as the voice of their TV Story Book Character

Fantastic Plastic Video & Film Production for a major Auto Group in the Southeast has chosen Tom Clifford as their character voice for their new TV ad campaign. Much like that of Winnie-the-Pooh, Tom conveys the warm & fuzzy sound of a mythic story-teller. He walks us through in rhythmic rhyme as the story unfolds with the turning of pages. This was a great vehicle for our character talents to shine.

Did our homework on the voice to the degree that I know Sterling Holloway's interpretation of 'Pooh' is somewhat different than today's - Christopher Robin's 'Pooh' which sounds a bit British. I auditioned using copy from Dr. Seuss' "Sam-I-am" . They wanted that same cadence. Came out where we split some hairs and developed a unique voice for the client's new character. Fantastic Plastic relayed the client's reaction to the finished spot:
"The client is ecstatic at the results, already talking sequel." 

There's nothing more satisfying for an actor to learn that their homework paid off with an "extremely happy client".  Equally important is knowing that as part of a collaborative effort of art and scripting, I was able to bring their vision to life. Hopefully, there will be 'life' after this initial concept.

click to play spot

Here's an excerpt from Fantastic Plastic's 'profile' page regarding the overall concept to final production of the Story-Book approach:

We're pretty happy that we were able to turn this around from concept to delivery in about three or four days. First, Honda ad guru Ben Boles (who we think pretty darn highly of), floated the Seuss idea as something his Big Boss wanted to try. At that point it was pretty much just "One car, two car," and not much more.  We jumped on it and the creative director wrote the script, and made arrangements with the artist to create all the illustrations. Before the drawings were even started, the editor began creating the book animation just with blank pages. While the artist was at work, we hit up voice actor Tom Clifford (who can impersonate darn near anyone) to see if he could do a voice reminiscent of the late great Sterling Holloway. Surely enough, he could. Then  spent a day coloring the drawings like a madman, and putting it all together. Fairly frantic days, extremely happy client. That's a good combo.

 

by:+Tom Clifford, VoiceOver & Creative Services   

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Tom Clifford celebrates another 25 years voicing Oxford & Simpson's imaging

It leaves a body all warm & fuzzy to be re-cast as the voice of Oxford and Simpson for another 25 years. They're upgrading their VoIP on which we've been a regular fixture for 25 years. When it came time to load the voice imaging they didn't want any other voice but TC's !

Celebrating long term work anniversaries seem to be happening a lot lately. O & S and TC & Co's. association started in1994. Back then the technology was altogether different and in some ways, very much the same...go figure. Back then all the VoIP voicing was done onsite via a telephone hand-piece and physically coding and assigning the prompts to record and playback. When we went back this month to re-voice the new system, we still had to do it On-Site.

However the Day, Evening and Special greetings, menus and sub-menus were able to be done via prerecorded wave files from a  professional studio. There was a bit of a learning curve on this one regarding the sample rate with these newer "advanced" systems. We had a similar case in Atlanta we kept referencing. We were told verbatim that these advanced systems require very small wave files Kilobytes not Megabytes. (8k X 8 bit) to be precise. We were also steered towards this new app software to record the files. And guess what? Really crappy sound. But wait - didn't we see somewhere within the support pages that 16 bit was also acceptable. Let's try one and see if the Phone Co. accepts it. Yep! It worked and sounded 100 % more fidelious...and no one complained.

O & S has now moved into the hotel suite and hotel specialty design area. So, it's not just about 'Relocating Corp. America' but broader aspects of commercial aesthetics. Basically, 'curbside appeal' to optimize value for the corporate landlord.

We're happy and honored to be a part of Oxford & Simpson's next 25 years. We know all too well that a good deal has gone into getting folks to call a company. That first impression has to continue supporting the entire company image far into the future. We're grateful to be included...I'll tell ya, we're grateful to be anywhere...ya know what I mean! For-a-listen -

516.935.2000

by:+Tom Clifford, VoiceOver & Creative Services   

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Tucker Carlson takes a beatin as Tom Clifford takes the Fall

Based on the early Sunday morning political discussion panels ala "Crossfire", I had auditioned for and booked an on-camera TV spot that featured that exact set-up for a UPN parody promo. I was cast as the Tucker Carlson element..right down to the bygone bow tie.




Our four panel set resembled that Sunday political discussion look...except for a misplaced hulking figure known affectionately throughout the wrestling world as: Kane-the-Destroyer! Guess who's about to get a dose of good 'ole whupass. This could get ugly. They gave me a stunt double. But I still got grabbed, hoisted and shook like a rag-doll a full day till we made the switch.

I had asked my stunt double, (spoiler alert) the guy being thrown thru the glass table, if he knew Jery Hewitt. Did he ever - with glowing reverence. Jery is a world renowned stunt-man and stunt coordinator. Knowing Jery, who I've mentioned in earlier blog posts as a friend of George Willig's, paved the way for me to be treated as One-of-the-Guys for the entire shoot. At the time a stunt coord. was required on set. Kane was this imposing mammoth 7' bear who wore a mask. But, a cool dude out of character.

 

Dig that appearance by fellow panelist who is none other than New York's WPIX' Magee Hickey. We actually auditioned together and maybe my being a fan played a part with the chemistry between us. Magee was a total delight and helped keep me centered with the ever changing sides. Just saw her on Showtime in the Pelican Brief doing her thing.

Below is the UPN promo link where we're featured as the Tuck-ster getting pummeled by WWE's 'Kane' for being well, Tucker Carlson.

Play UPN Promo Spot

by:+Tom Clifford, VoiceOver & Creative Services   

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