Brian Funshine

Here’s the article written by Dan Bloom. It’s a great feature about
my recent voice over for Dominos Pizza, here in Taiwan.

Photo by Anton Potgeiter.
Take a look!
Link to Taipei Times Article – Edited article
Link to Dan Bloom’s blog – Full article

Monday, February 9, 2009

Brian Funshine is ”voice’ of new pizza ad on TV in Taiwan

American expat Brian Funshine is ”voice’ of new pizza ad >(as reported in the Taipei Times on February 10, 2009)

by Dan Bloom
Contributing Reporter
Taipei Times

TAIPEI — Remember those TV commercials for Domino’s Pizza that had a cute
tagline that went “Da Mei Le, Da Le Mei”, which was a kind of a play on
words with the name of the company and another phrase in Chinese meaning
“Domino’s! Have you called?”

Well the man who “acted” in those earlier commercials was not acting.
He was Scott Oelkers, the then boss of Domino’s — a middle-aged former Mormon
missionary in Taiwan who stayed on to lead the company to
islandwide success before selling the firm and moving on.

Now the torch has been passed, and another foreigner, a 36-year-old musician
and voice-over actor with the stage name of Brian Funshine, is the new
voice behind
Domino’s latest TV ads. Funshine was asked in a recent email interview
how he got the gig and
what it was like doing it the voice-over parts in Chinese.

Funshine, who also goes by the name of Brian Alexander and is
well-known for his children’s music shows, hails from Florida and has
been in Taiwan for about nine years. A former English teacher who
married a Taiwanese, he said he got the pizza job from a
referral by a
studio where he had done earlier voice-over projects, including ones
for ads for Volvo, Harley Davidson and Via Technologies.

“The
pizza commercial just dropped in my lap by a lucky chance, and from
earlier work I had down with an agency in Taipei,” he said.

When asked how a foreigner prepares for
a voice-over gig assignement like that, Funshine, who speaks fluent
Chinese, said:
“Well, of course, my Taiwanese wife helped me make sure
that my pronunciation was correct, and also, I practiced and rehearsed
a lot, and I was also able to use a few voice-over acting techniques
that I’ve learned from earlier work.”

“Interacting with clients for me involves speaking Chinese, and I need
to speak Chinese since
clients don’t speak English,” he
said. “It’s a very competitive and difficult market in the advertising
business.”

When asked what his voice-over lines consisted for the new advert, he said:
“I introduce the Number Six and
Number Eight pizza specials for the winter season. I say, in Chinese,
how delicious the pizza
tastes, of course, and what ingredients are on the new specials.”

Public reaction to Funshine’s pizza gig have been positive and
gratifying, he says, especially from friends in Taiwan and from people in the
advertising field. But he says that most people probably don’t know he is the
“voice” behind those commercials since he does not appear on-screen at all.

“I feel excited to have done something on air, on TV, that many
people recognize, even if they cannot see my face and don’t even know
it is me doing the voice-over,” he said. “This is the third commercial
I’ve done in Taiwan, speaking in Chinese.”

Although he can speak Chinese well and knows his tones, Funshine said
that some of his Taiwanese clients want him to speak
Chinese with a bad accent. On purpose.

When asked why, he said: “It’s funny, but some clients actually want
me to use a ‘bad
pronunciation’, I guess because it adds humor to the commercial for
Taiwanese viewers. For example, in the pizza commercial, in
the phrase ‘Da Mei Le’, which is how Domino’s is pronounced in
Chinese, the first character, ‘Da’, should
be said with a rising second tone, but I was told to do it using the first tone.
The company wanted me to intentionally sound more foreign. They told
me that my Chinese was ‘tai biao juen’, by which they meant, in a
polite way, that my pronunciation was too accurate.”

“They always say this here in Taiwan when I do commercials in
Chinese,” he added.
“Many clients want what I call ‘funny foreigner Chinese’. So, I just do
it many different ways with my tones intentionally incorrect and let
them pick what they like best!”

Funshine said that Oelkers, the original voice for the pizza
chain’s earlier commercials, studied Chinese in Beijing.

“Scott had a
higher voice than I do, so my style in the voice-over is different
than his style. But you know, the funny thing, an interesting thing,
is that most Taiwanese don’t even notice it’s a new voice doing the
ad. They probably think it’s still Scott doing the voice. And
I am sure they have no idea it’s me, because as a voice-over artist,
you are always behind the scenes, invisible, off-camera.”

When asked if he might be doing more commercials for the pizza chain,
Funshine said: “From what I’ve been told by the agency, this
commercial is just the first of many that they have planned for me. So
I’m looking forward to doing more of this kind of work in the future.”

Funshine’s website, where some of his voice-overs can be heard online,
is at brianfunshine.com.