What/Who inspired you to be a Va?

[David Garvin]

Crispin Freeman's role as Holland in Eureka 7, which was my first real anime.

Yeah, I watched Speed Racer and Pokemon when I was younger, but I never knew what anime was. They were just cartoons to me.

Then I came across Eureka Seven and kept thinking "Man, that one guy's voice acting is awesome! And he sounds familiar." One google search later and I found that he had done Regal in Tales of Symphonia for the Gamecube, my favorite character from that game almost purely for the voice alone!

Since then every time I've come across his voice I recognize it immediately. What a guy!

In fact, I had hoped to grow up to have a deep voice like his. Years later, I'm 21 and my niche is young voices. *sigh* Oh, well. Work with what you're given.

[Brooke Lynn]

The little girl, Boo, in Monsters, Inc. I watched it when it first came out in like 2001? Boo was so cute and I attempted saying kitty in a little girl voice. To my surprise, I was actually good at sounding like a little child. It made me interested in manipulating my voice to say more words like a child. From there on I started looking at cartoons in a different way. I wanted to try voicing different characters other than little girls, but that wasn't actually attempted until 2008. I know, it's kind of silly that this inspired me.

[Fangirl Lisa]

My inspiration comes from Veronica Taylor.

Ever since I was little, I've been a huge fan of the Pokemon anime. And I absolutely love Veronica's work on the show. I also find her Ash voice to be incredibly unique. Her young-boy voice sounds very natural. I mean, it actually sounds real, and that is amazing to me.

I hope that I can follow in Veronica's footsteps and become a great voice actor myself some day.

[POLE7645]

Strangely, the voice actor that really started it all for me was Andy Serkis. After I saw the movie in English for the first time, I had such fun imitating his Gollum voice (and scaring a classmate. Good times).

After that, I tried to imitate other characters and now, I imitate Liam O'Brien when Red XII is on screen, Stephan Weyte (though I'm not really good at this one) when I'm playing an FPS and Mark Hamill when Kefka appears on screen.

[BOWIEtheHERO]

I'm an actor by trade. And I thought:

I love acting, I love anime, I love games, I love books.
Why not combine my biggest loves into something beautiful!

And boom. Here

[ConVito]

Oddly enough, Charles Martinet's work as Mario (and every other Nintendo character ever created, plus I think he could play Samus if he felt like it. Badass.) was what sparked my interest. But what really inspired me to go for it was James Arnold Taylor as Tidus. It was the first voice I'd heard that just... worked. And now here I am, somehow fooling people into thinking I can act.

[ScottStoked]

He's already been mentioned, but Mel Blanc. When I was a kid, I found out one guy did all these voices my friends and I were mimicing from the cartoons. And he got paid to do them! I just thought that had to be the BEST job ever. So he inspired me decades ago, but it wasn't until the past year I actually tried it out as a hobby.

[Atamagahen]

Well, since I have found my anime clone, and there was no offical english dub that I knew of, I decided to do a dub on him, and it just became a hobby for me.

[Jigen's pink puppet]

Oh, wow, I just realized that you can change the font color. oO

Recently in 2009, I attended a miniature version of the AIVA workshop at Otakon. Listening to Tony Oliver filled me with an unquenchable fire that spurred me on to pursue acting with a furious tenacity.

Ayumi-chan introduced me to the VAA, enabling me to audition my ass off and get some badly-needed experience. It's been a wild ride and still it's just the beginning.

[xApplicationRainbow]

HikaYagami-