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Voiceover Read Rate, and How Improving It Increases Your Bottom Line

Voiceover Business

pile of scripts improve your reading rateWhat the heck is a read rate? As a voiceover artist, your read rate is the difference between the length of your raw voiceover file and the length of your finished, edited one. And if you do any long form narration, it’s something to strive to ever improve. For example, if it takes you three hours to read one hour of finished text, your read rate is 3:1. Chatting with several colleagues recently – professional VO’s who’ve been in it for 5 or 6 years, I discovered that for the majority of them (all of them making a decent living), this is their read rate. But there are a few of us, present company included, who read at a rate of 1.2:1 or better. A tight read rate means your narration business is much more profitable.  Your costs per hour and your opportunity to increase your bottom line is greatly enhanced. want to make more money? Have more time? Let’s break this down.

Voiceover Read Rate Case Study

Let’s examine an imaginary case for read rate. Say you just booked a job at the eLearning narration rate of$1200 for a finished hour. If your read rate is 3:1, it will take you 3 hours to narrate and  6-7 hours to edit those 3 hours. So that means you spend 10 hours to produce that one hour of finished product, and you will be working at a rate of $120 an hour. Not bad. But it can be better. For the same job, with a read rate of 1.2 hours of raw to 1 hour finished, not only does it takes you less time to read, but it also takes you less time to edit. 1.2 hours plus 2 to 2.8 (to keep my math simple) to edit and it now took you 4 hours to produce an hour instead of 10 hours. You are now working at $300 an hour. Nice! Those extra 6 hours can be filled with more time to audition and narrate, or time to market or improve your craft or hit the gym. Sub out your editing to a good sound editor and your time/money profit increases further.

Getting Paid to Improve Your Read Rate

$100 bills, make more money voice over businessUnlike a lot of things in the current voiceover market, a tight read rate is one area where having a few years of experience reading the news live on TV or radio really helps. As well as several years as a DJ and a newsreader, I worked the six o’clock supper hour news shows at two major market networks, and a third national cable station doing weather. They had different approaches to presentation but the CBC gig was the one that really improved my read rate. For CTV and the Weather Network, our weather presentations were totally improvised. You fed the numbers and maps to the control room, stayed up to date with any changes to the forecast, and built your 5 minute presentation around the boards and maps unscripted. The CBC format demanded that I type up my forecast ahead of time to feed it to the teleprompter. Working with a prompter doing weather, helped in so many ways. While anchors and reporters have a more stylized sound, weather people don’t. Ad-libbing, right? You have to make it sound like you’re not reading. In that way, weather people are kind of the equivalent of TV DJ’s (minus the cool factor). So even though I was reading, I had to make it sound like I wasn’t. The biggest giveaway? Flubbing a line as I read. We just don’t do that in real life. One thing that greatly added to making sure I didn’t muff my lines was the pressure I put on myself to sound flawless. What helped create that pressure cooker? Heightened concentration.

Taking Your Read Rate to the Next Level

 roman road. improve your narration, solidifySince leaving TV and radio (over 20 years ago) I’ve been a full-time pretty-much-constantly-working VO artist. Before technology disruption made it affordable for us to create our own home studios, my motivation for improving my read rate was saving my clients studio time, aka money. This made me a popular client choice and fostered a lot of repeat business. The texts given were always read cold (without having seen them before). A visual artist friend of mine talks about the years it takes to build the eye-hand coordination to be able to faithfully (re)produce images (in her case paintings). There’s a brain connection that has to be exercised regularly to make it happen. It takes time and concentrated effort to forge it, but then once that connection has been created, it’s pretty much like a Roman built road. It’s permanent. In breaking down my own process to do the same with voiceover, I’ve gathered a small, but effective compendium of techniques to be able to improve eye-mouth co-ordination which I’ll be sharing at my X session Narration 2.0 at VO Atlanta 2019.

If you’ve already signed up, looking forward to working with you. And if you haven’t, there are only a couple spots left. See you there!

Filed Under: Voiceover Business Tagged With: audition, DJ, eLearning, home studio, narrate, narration rate, newsreader, radio, read rate, sound editor, TV, VO Atlanta 2019, voice over, voice over artist, voice over narration, voice over techniques, voiceover, voiceover market, voiceover narration, weather presentation

How to Shoot Your Voiceover Career in the Foot – VO’s Worst Practices

Voiceover Business

If you ever get a chance to help out in any casting project, take it. Whether you sign up as a reader for a day, get an summer internship at a casting house or even volunteer to answer phones, being on the other side of the proverbial casting couch gives you an unparalleled vantage point and insight into what separates the bookable from the floundering.

As a voice over artist with a long, successful career, I’ve tracked my slow season. January and July are my quietest months. So when a panicked long-term client reached out to me this summer with an unorthodox project, I had time, resources and expertise to help them out. What transpired over the next month was an insightful case study in how other (about 150 other) voice over artists behave in the context of a job. I have cast multiple voice over projects in the past, but they were generally small – one or two mostly, occasionally up to a dozen. But this huge job put me in a unique position on the hiring side of the voiceover proposition. Snuggle up, buttercup, I’m going to share the good, the bad and the fugly in this week’s bloggy wog.

The 4 Second Audition Rule

Multiple esteemed sources in our industry say casting directors only listen to the first few seconds of my audition. Guys? It is so true. I fought against it. I gave the first three or four, ten seconds before clicking to the next. The truth is when faced with over 50 auditions to listen to, unless your engager has no idea what they want or perhaps, they want to hear you come in tight on a :15 or :30, they make their casting decision in the first 4 seconds. If you can’t nail it and grab their attention off the top, you won’t do it for their audience either. Those who delivered in the first 4 seconds, made it to my short list.

Talent is key

There is no replacement for talent. Natural talent is rare. There’s only one Jennifer Lawrence. For the rest of us, there is talent enhancement! If you’re not booking the way you want to, it’s probably because you need to work on your craft. Even the best of us continue to get coaching, do improv, stand-up, scene study, work with dialect coaches, etc. Your lack of care to your craft is obvious when compared to the 50 others in an audition.  Find someone more successful than you and ask where they trained, who they coached with, for how long and for how much.

Do Adhere to and Deliver on Instructions

Take the time to read the instructions. Don’t jump into a read too quickly at the expense of not fulfilling a requirement. If they’ve asked for inspirational and you’ve given them conversational, you’ve missed the mark. Unless you do conversational as a Take 2 and give them that for variety to display your range.

Get Your Sound Quality Right

sound waves Kim Handysides voice over professional
Source: Avid Blogs

Shortcuts in your sound quality are glaring in a string of others who’ve spent the time and money to get it right. Listen back to your sound and compare it to the sound of others in the field who book regularly. If you can’t identify what’s wrong, enlist help. Befriend sound engineers and booth gurus. Listen to podcasts. Ask sound equipment suppliers. Play with your room. One piece of equipment I stumbled upon that I heartily endorse is the VOMO portable sound booth. A lightweight construction of sound absorbing material, it gives you an effective room in a pinch.

Client Communication

Keep your introduction brief. In my huge casting project, faced with so many voice over talents from which to choose (over 100), my eyes flashed over the accompanying letter that came with audition submission like lightning. My primary interest was being able to communicate with them off site (yes, I went through a couple of pay to play for some talents) to be able to go back and forth easier, quicker.

After being hired, despite my request to communicate via email, (and the fact that this particular site had no qualms about leaving it once initial contact was made) many talents kept communicating through the site. This left me wasting time sifting through endless threads (with other people attached to the same thread. I found that frustrating and made me not want to hire those people again. Follow instructions.

Be polite. On this particular job, the budget was low. I knew that going in. I mentioned it in the specs. It was an unusual job – not for broadcast – with a better rate than audiobook, but not much else. So, I found it annoying when people told me what I already knew. Don’t waste my time arguing.

A Related Voice Demo

Although it was for pretty much always only about 4-6 seconds, I did listen to related voice demos that talents sent me, as well as the audition. I wanted to hear what else they could do. And I noticed two incidents where I would have done it differently. Some people sent a second take as their related generic demo. That was a waste of time. Unless otherwise specified, second takes go on the submitted demo.

Invoicing/Payment Issues

Source: Sharon McCutcheon, Unsplash

Invoice me right away if you like. Then it’s off your list and on to mine. But understand if your client needs to clear some other things off their desk before they get to you. Two talents in this great big job asked for payment up front – as in, before they sent the files. That’s your prerogative – I do this with clients from certain countries – I’ve only never been paid twice in 30 years. One was some guy in the Ukraine. One was a Union gig, and my stewards gave up after 3 years with no luck. But know that for people in North America asking to be paid before you do the work risks you not getting hired again. Many clients (including me in the mega-project) are only getting paid after the job has been produced/integrated/approved/and the client’s check has cleared/at the end of the job. So if you ask to be paid up front, I have to bank roll you out of pocket. It’s all about cash flow.

Voiceover Company Name Problems

Want to make it difficult for me to find you again or to pay you for the job? Name your company something other than your own name. Your face is your brand. Your name is your brand. Period. End. It makes it so difficult for your client if your company name is Fairy Dust Voice Talent and your name is Joe Guy. Especially if you don’t indicate the connection in your communications somehow. Be found. Use your name. Keep it simple, sweetheart.

 

My biggest lesson learned? I will not go seeking work as a casting agent. That shizzle is tough! Casting pro’s, production co-ordinators, agents…they work hard for their percentage. Thank heavens we’re not all the same. I’ll stick to performance, thank you very much.

Filed Under: Voiceover Business Tagged With: audition, casting, sound quality, talent, voice actor, voice over artist, voice work, voiceover narration, voiceover talent, work on your craft

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