Top Ten Voice Over Blogs – 2 More Makes 4/10 It’s the second instalment of my list of the Top Ten voice over blogs to follow. For insight and advice into the voice over industry there are a few bloggers who dominate. Yesterday we revealed the first (as in alphabetically first) two awesome bloggers. Today we have two more out of the ten. Following great voice over bloggers, people who’ve been around the industry for years (this top ten list has a collective 200+ years of experie...
Tag Archive for: voiceover
Best Voice Over: Spotlight on Health Care Ads Health care ads are a mainstay in advertising and the best voice over chosen to present medical messages is a critical part of creative choice. Healthcare commercials achieve their goals through a few specific avenues in terms of vocal tone and direction: sentimental – those that tug at heart strings, inspirational – through sharing success stories or great track records, and solution – matter of fact – as in, you’ve got a problem? ...
Voiceover Read Rate, and How Improving It Increases Your Bottom Line What 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...
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...
7 Hot Tips on How to Get Better as a Voice Actor Listening to Drake with my daughter Lisa as we drive on the 401 through north Toronto ticking off To Do and Don’t Forget Lists before I dive full on into family vacation mode…I’m struck by this thought: I get at least one call or email a day from people who seek advice on how to become better voice actors. And there’s quite a lot of advice I pass out that is similar. So, before I chill out on the beach, dominate in family games of dominoes...
Unless you’ve come to voiceover from an online learning background, understanding how an eLearning project is put together is a mystery to most voice over narrators. I sat down with a good friend of mine who’s risen through the ranks in the industry and is now a department manager at an international e-learning content creation company, and asked him to help me to demystify the process. To better help we ‘talent’ see where we come in. Here is the result: Analyze and Brainstorm A project ...
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...
To the average Jane or Joe, voice overs are ubiquitous. We hear them on the radio, on TV and in movies. We hear them in ads on YouTube or Spotify. Yet, how many of us stop to think about whether the voice artist is a man or a woman and whether it matters to us as consumers. A lot that can be said based on what type of voice you choose in your voice over and that includes whether you choose to go with a male or female voice. Sometimes gender matters a lot and sometimes it doesn’t. It all depend...
What’s the first question I’m asked along with how fast can you get this back to me? “What are the prices?” I, like most voiceover artists will answer with a clear as mud, “It depends.” So, let’s demystify this. Professional voice over actors base their rates on three major parameters: use, population and time. Geography also sometimes enters the picture. But other factors also weigh in heavily in on how we cost out the licensing of our work and d...
Happily, most of my voiceover acting life has been supported by a steady stream of commercial work. In discussions with a student, I realized there were reasons for that beyond being able to deliver a great read. Yes, you have to know what the market wants, give your director what s/he wants and “bring it” (whatever it may be) on time and on target. But more than that it also takes a deft ability to read the room. The commercial sound studio is never the place to display any toxic or taboo b...
