How to Shoot Your Voiceover Career in the Foot – Worst Practices 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 ...
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How Copywriters and VoiceOver People Triumph over Disruption Sipping nectar of the bean and browsing my groups this morning, I was inspired by copywriter chieftain Steve Roller and how many similar cliffs of insanity people in the copywriting and voiceover narration fields have to scale to triumph lately. All because of the (anti) buzzword of the decade “disruption.” That concept we all rallied around. Even got excited about. At first. Kind of like the frog, happy in a pot of wate...
Laura sounds like she’s 17, but has teenage twins and a paid mortgage. James is a millennial that sounds like he could be a retiree. One of the reasons I love voice acting is how it shatters the barriers of age. You can be an actress over 40 and still have a profitable career or a 19-year-old male neophyte with a great set of lungs an awesome performance capabilities and make a living. In many ways the microphone is much more merciful than the camera. In other ways it’s more revealing. Our...
My love of my craft of voice over arts (and my family) are my motivating factors to be and stay organized. Thank Heavens for my people and VOICEOVERVIEW. ‘Cause left to my own devices, I would forget to invoice clients, wallow in stacks of empty coffee mugs, trip over piles of discarded clothes and keep missing the garbage truck. I knew I needed a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool and forlornly attempted to adapt to Nimble and Zoho, but my voiceover business needs did not fit ...
Hey, voice actors. Is your website limp, lifeless or barely there? Does it suffer from lengthy load times, apparent invisibility to Google or other seo struggles that could steer precious potential clients away from your online storefront? Well then, I’d like to direct your attention to a team I have come to consider partners in my success: Joe Davis, Karin Barth and Brian Fulsang of voice actor websites. When I came across Joe in May of this year, I was in a quasi-desperate state. I had i...
There are few things I love more in life than story. Nature, maybe. Water, but that’s a subset of nature. People aren’t things…well, not generally anyway. But the point of this big reveal into story at the head of my behind the scenes insights on audiobook narration is that the tales we tell and how we tell them, whether through aural or oral tradition, wrapped in celluloid, tramped across boards or lining the pages or screens of books has been my happy obsession for decades. Prep ...
Apart from the fact that they provide me, a professional narrator, with about 20% of my voiceover income, I must confess. I am obsessed with explainer videos. They’re nifty-swifty cool little bites of “Hello, My name is____” and “this is what I do.” I was surprised at an in-studio commercial voice over session the other day, when neither the brilliant copywriter nor the other (truly gifted) actor with whom I was dialoguing for the spot, knew much about them. So, voila! Animated, or dra...
So, it helps to have talent. Obvi, as my kid would say. (Insert age appropriate eye roll here) And a few technical things too, like training, practice and timing. But more than that, the secret sauce in how to make spectacular commercial voiceovers is a recipe of love, understanding and respect. Let me break this down. Love the ad Since I was a little girl, talking to myself in the mirror, telling myself about Scope or Crest or Johnson’s Baby Shampoo I have loved ads. I started out lovi...
The online world cracked opened immense possibilities for working with industry pros in a non-geographic specific way. It’s also made it difficult to sift through the ocean of dust to find your diamonds. That’s what makes voiceover.biz so special. Looking for a quick, easy way how to find awesome, vetted voiceover talent? You’ll love it. Voiceover.Biz is the directory arm of WoVO. No, not the Volcano people, the non-profit freelance voice over actors’ association, World-Voices...
You’ve been tasked with directing the audio on a commercial, a corporate video or gaming session. You know how you want it to sound, but are you certain you’ll be able to get that from your voice actor? Actors are a touchy-feely, capricious lot. They are trained to observe and catalogue the behavior of others, be open to the moment, sound and appear truthful or believable and simultaneously tap into their rainbowed fount of expressive creativity. The Power of Improv Give your actor li...
