Oscar Cheda finds his voice as casting director
Oscar Cheda, of Plantation, has joined The Kitchen, a Miami dubbing studio, as casting director. It’s a perfect outlet for Cheda, who says he managed to build his career on his love of cartoons as a child, and mimicking the voices. Once he discovered dubbing and voice acting, he realized his professional calling. Voice talent can be found in the most unexpected places, he says, from hearing a person talk in the elevator to chatting with the members of a restaurant wait staff. The conversations, he says, can lead to auditions in the studio.
About: The Kitchen provides language dubbing services for studios, networks and producers worldwide, including for cartoons, telenovelas, movies, and dramatic series, into English, Neutral/Latin Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, and Parisian French.
Resume
Experience: Professional stage and TV actor since 1993; dubbing artist; artistic director for my own company, OC Production Services.
Education: Music major at Miami Dade College and University of Miami; associate of arts degree,/communications, Broward College
On the job, strategies
What I do: I make sure we are casting the most appropriate voices for each role; I coordinate with staff and directors for each language we dub into; and then schedule actors for
the adequate amount of studio time needed.
Communicate: I help voice actors to understand that to be a successful dubbing artist, you must be able to let go of your instinct to want to interpret the dialogue your own way.
Develop: At the beginning, I had other jobs to supplement my income: as a waiter, or temp jobs through various agencies. In 1999, however, I showed up at an audition at a dubbing studio, and my life changed forever. I began working regularly as a voice talent at several studios, including The Kitchen, and within a year, I no longer waited tables. I won the 2009 Carbonell Award for Best Actor in a Musical, for “Adding Machine — The Musical,” at GablesStage.
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