Voice-over artist and actor
Kenny Blyth is an award-winning voice-over artist and actor.
He graduated from Queen Margaret University College in 2000 with a BA Acting.
Kenny was the first student from QMU to win the BBC Radio Carleton Hobbs Award.
What are your most memorable experiences of being a QMU student?
I remember my first day very vividly. I was not from an acting background and had come to it later in my mid-twenties.
I remember sitting in a circle playing name remembering games with my new classmates, many of those friendships have endured.
Another strong memory is our second year voice assessments (which I failed!) with everyone crying at Matt Baker singing 'Santa Fe' in his assessment on his last day, before he left to join Blue Peter as a presenter.
Tell us more about your career path since leaving QMU.
I was the first student from QM to win the BBC Radio Carleton Hobbs Award. Even to compete was a real privilege and being at the BBC on that day, seeing the radio studios and the photographs of casts and famous actors on the walls was incredible. I spent my first year as an actor working there, it gave me a great grounding in voice acting and character generation, having to play five or six characters in a single play taught me to find all kinds of different voices, ages and weights.
After that, I very quickly got a voice-over agent and started working in corporate and commercial voiceover, animation and eventually computer games and ADR (voicing on TV shows post-production), which I now also coordinate and cast. I have worked in TV, film, theatre and radio but it is voice-over that has kept me busiest.
On a daily basis, I will work on all kinds of commercials for local and national brands, animations, corporate jobs, e-learning, IVR (telephone messaging), the occasional game and cartoon and of course, radio drama when I can. And, I love when the opportunities to act on TV and film come along.
Apart from winning Carleton Hobbs itself, my proudest moment of my career was at the end of my first three months at the BBC, working in the Radio Theatre in Broadcasting house, recording 'Absolute Power', a comedy about spin doctors with John Bird and Stephen Fry, and my Dad being able to fly down from Scotland and see what I did. You don't often get a live audience in radio and that was very special.
What advice would you give to students and new graduates starting out?
Work hard. No one will knock on your door and hand it to you.
Agents are important but don't forget you are always your BEST representative.
Be nice to everyone but be especially nice to those who work hard to get you up there, and make you look and sound good once you are there.
And, ALWAYS be good to the people who feed you.
