What started as a hobby has turned into a fulltime gig for Ontario actress Felicia Valenti.

After her partner gifted her a voiceover one day workshop style session, Valenti said she fell in love with it right away.

“I did it as a hobby and then I was like, ‘Oh wait, I can make a bit of money here,’ if you’re good at it then people will pay you for it which is always nice when you’re doing a hobby, right?”

A trained opera singer, Valenti also teaches voice lessons and said she has been performing her whole life.

When it came to breaking into the voice acting world, the 32-year-old Guelph resident said that she began slowly working towards full-time gigs until the pandemic hit which kicked her into fulltime voiceover.

“I’m still in a way breaking into the industry because I joined the non-union stuff and now, I just became union … union is a whole other level, it’s a whole different playing field,” said Valenti.

The plus side to joining the union, ACTRA, is the opportunity for higher profile jobs and that you’re protected as an actor, she explained, speaking in terms of video game voiceover work.

“Non-union, there’s a lot more work out there but it doesn’t pay as well sometimes … and you’re not really protected if someone decides to use your voice for something you didn’t agree too,” she said. “Or, if you want to have a really long session – with union stuff, you can only have a four-hour session for video games and if it’s vocally stressful it’s two hours at most, so you’re protected.”

Valenti has lent her vocal talents to big-name games such as Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and super rad’ galactic strategy game Stellaris as well as worked with indie game devs on a lot of titles.

“I love video games. Coming from opera is a pretty good fit because we have to be really loud and like sustained yelling for essentially for a long period of time which is what a video game session is  – it’s very sustained, very realistic gritty-like acting but also very exaggerated in a way because you’re always yelling,” she said, adding that being picked to be in the Valhalla game felt like the holy grail.

“At that point, I was a non-union worker buying permits – because that’s how you have to work when you’re non-union – so for me, that was such a big thing to reach because it’s really hard,” said Valenti.

“There’s so many amazing actors that are in the union that they can draw from then to go outside of that they have to go outside for someone who is either really good or has a special skill and then to be picked from that just felt like the holy grail.”

Aside from Valhalla, Valenti said that one of her favorite roles in video game is a character named Luna in the indie game Samuari Zero by Neo Interactive Studios.

“I really like Luna because she’s kind of similar to me in a way – she’s just really perky, upbeat and has the weight of the world on her shoulders,” she said.

When it comes to what she wishes people knew about the voice acting industry, Valenti said that it’s a lot of fun but when it comes to voiceover there’s a lot of tools and tricks one must learn to work the mic.

“It’s still acting, the only thing that changes is your technique and if you want to come over and do it as an actor, it’s a great gig,” she said.

For those interested in voiceover work, Valenti recommended taking acting, improv or voice classes if it’s financially feasible but mentioned that a lot of those types of resources can be found online.

“… It is a vocal skill, and you need to have stamina especially if you want to do video games, you need to learn stamina,” she said. “But I would say just do it – just do the thing.”

“It’s a physical skill and you can’t think about it. The reason I say that is because I’m a thinker and I took so long to come to it but at the end of the day, you have to just do it.”

And practice, practice, practice – watch the cutscenes in video games on YouTube, practice the craft of acting within the medium so within the video game or voiceover medium but also acting outside of video games, anime and that type of stuff, she said, because it is at the end-of-the-day acting and you need to be able to inhabit a character even if it’s really quick.

“You’re not going to be perfect – I was so bad when I started,” she said. “You never get better unless you keep trying. Don’t give up. There’s a space for you if you really want it.”