Anna Braxton, a senior theatre performance major, recently earned her first professional voiceover credit for the Museum of Political Corruption’s 6th Annual Nellie Bly Award Ceremony segment honoring investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell.
Students in Assistant Professor of Practice Ann Marie Pollard’s THEA 403: Advanced Voice-Voiceover class all recorded the script this fall during the class, and the museum chose Braxton’s version. She recorded it for their online awards presentation.
“Anna’s work on the script for the Nellie Bly award within class proved her to be ready for a professional opportunity,” Pollard said. “She is a quick study, takes the tools of the trade seriously—like having a personalized system for marking her materials and utilizing grounding techniques in front of the microphone to deliver consistently strong voice work during recording sessions. And she has the self-efficacy that it takes to pursue a career as a voiceover artist.”
Braxton hadn’t really considered voiceover work until Pollard encouraged her to take the voiceover class this fall.
“When you’re an acting major, you kind of have this sense of where everything is going to go,” Braxton said. “You do a lot of theatre work in high school and college, and then you might get more access to film and television work if you go to Los Angeles. That’s kind of where my mind was centered. I never had considered voiceover as a possibility until Ann Marie approached me when I was signing up for classes in the spring. She encouraged me to participate in that. I was always like I could see myself doing voiceover—I want to be a Disney princess someday. Other than that, that was kind of it.”
But now, she sees the potential of it being part of her career.
“This course has just been really gratifying and a gift,” she said. “Ann Marie is really good at teaching us the practicals of the voiceover industry like how to make a home studio, how to record your stuff, how to edit. So that’s been really helpful, and it’s really encouraging as a student to be getting that kind of education because you just feel better equipped. I can actually do this.”
The more she has studied it, the more she likes it.
“I was looking into what I want, like the spectrum of what might life might look like, and I want to settle down some day and have a family, but I love performing, and I love acting,” she said. “I always thought that would be something I’d have to set aside, but voiceover work, it’s such a niche market, there’s so much you can do. Most people immediately think when they hear voiceover character work or animation, all that stuff. But there’s medical narration, there are those voices that you hear when you have to do training at work. It’s really exciting because it just gives you more opportunities to work.”
In the class, students began by studying audiobook narration.
“It’s probably the most exhaustive because you’re recording eight hours where you are talking the entire time,” Braxton said. “But I’m a nerd. I love reading. I love books, and there’s always books that need to be narrated so that was super exciting just to learn about how that works.
They also studied medical narration, TV commercials and promos, as well as character work. Pollard also has included collaborations in the coursework.
“We recorded some of Alina Nguyen’s poems and a whole slew of stories about Nebraska from a first-year creative writing course,” Pollard said.
Braxton likes the foundation she received from her Carson School acting classes.
“It’s important to also appreciate and recognize that you need that actor’s foundation first. And sometimes those aren’t the most attractive courses, like basic acting,” she said. “But they’re important, and you need them. I wouldn’t be able to be nearly as successful in the specialized courses that I’m taking if I didn’t have that foundation first.”
A self-described “military brat,” Braxton is originally from Lompoc, California, near Vandenberg Air Force Base.
“I lived there for the first 10 years of my life, and then we moved to Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha,” she said. “So as a 20-year-old, half of my life has been in California, and half of my life has been here.”
She’s always had an interest in theatre and performing.
“Anybody who has known me from when I was small would just say that it was a given, and I never really thought about it until it came down to making a decision of what I want to do with my life,” she said.
She sang all the time and wrote plays she performed with her brothers.
“I remember being on the playground in like 2nd grade, and I got my friends together and wrote my adaptation of High School Musical 2 for us to do, and I never thought of it as like an actual career opportunity until my senior year of high school.”
She was set on becoming a dentist and was even accepted to Creighton University to do just that.
“Two months before I graduated, I decided I was coming to UNL to be a theatre major,” she said. “Anytime I’m performing, that’s the thing that gives me life. It’s not even like this balance of attention of, oh my gosh, everyone’s eyes are on me. It’s just the energy exchange that happens between the audience just sharing some of the most vulnerable parts of my heart is the thing that just makes me feel fully alive. I kept hearing all these things senior year about do what makes you happy. And I’m like, oh crap, that’s it. That’s what makes me happy.”
At first she thought she wanted to return to California and even auditioned at UCLA, but ultimately wasn’t accepted. She took another look at her backup school—UNL, which offered her better financial aid.
“I had gotten notification that I was getting all these scholarships from UNL, and I talked to David Long, and he said Johnny Carson School,” she said. “And I was like, Johnny Carson? You mean that guy that was on TV? And he said yeah. And I said, why? And he said Johnny Carson’s from Nebraska. And I looked at the program, and I looked at the alumni and just all of those different things. I am a woman of faith, and this was the door God was opening for me. It’s where I’m meant to be. So I got rejected from UCLA, and then 24 hours later, I was excited to go to UNL.”
She dove into participating in the Carson School, serving on the student advisory boards of both the college and the school, as well as committees and performances.
“In her time at the Carson School, Anna’s strong work with text made her an excellent choice to play Peter Quince in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ and her ability to bring text to life served her as the narrator in ‘The Way to the Way.’ These roles, her experience as a singer and her continued voice training make for a natural segue toward the pursuit of a voiceover career,” Pollard said.
Braxton said the best things she has learned at the Carson School are to do your best work and to be a good person.
“Being an artist is a very vulnerable thing, no matter what area of art you occupy,” she said. “Being kind and encouraging and empowering others, we only have each other as artists. You need to do what makes you happy and brings you joy. Work hard and just be a good person.”
A link to the Museum of Political Corruption ceremony is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2blfj_wif4.