VOICE OVER REVIEWS

Review: I Know That Voice

Spoiler alert: I Know That Voice is great. No documentary’s ever inspired me to be a better man while making me uncomfortable with my feelings as EG Daily does her Tommy Pickles. It’s well worth a watch whether you’re into voice acting, crazy people, or watching pros be the best at what they do.

World-Class Voice Over Actors

We get to see the best in the biz shoot the shit, share Christopher Walken impressions (including a great walkthrough of the construction of a Walken from Jesse Harnell), and read Shakespeare. The latter highlights the moral of the story: Voice acting is acting; the voices are just nice clothes. This is the first thing I tell anyone who says they want to seriously give VO a shot. Now, instead of saying anything, I’ll simply reach over, click play on my already-queued up iTunes playlist, and show them I Know That Voice.

There’s a playful smash-cut fight between Mark Hamill and Kevin Michael Richardson over who the best Joker was (no Troy Baker? Shame shame). Mel Blanc’s career is reconstructed from the memories of everyone it touched; read, everyone in the film. Glimpses of how things get made, especially in the Cartoon Network era of DIY cartoon making, bring this world a little closer to home. It’s all so entertaining, and luckily for guys like me, educational.

Learn VO From The Best of the Best

It’s awesome to watch Futurama characters broken down into their core components and reconstructed, each piece with its own backstory. Not only because it shows a mastery of craft and showmanship, but damned if I didn’t learn how to sharpen my Dr. Zoidberg impression. I took over three hours to watch the whole film because I was stopping, replaying a scene, trying to imitate what was going on, and playing it again so much. They perfectly capture what’s appealing about this job without making it seem at all laborious or mechanical. (Practice makes perfect, and practice ain’t always fun, kids. Also, you know, marketing and advertising suck. Thanks for breaking the illusion, Richard Steven Horvitz.)

Without ruining more of what you get to see in this documentary, I’ll just leave off here. Get this documentary. Get it right now. And show it to everybody you know. Bud Bundy’s in it, you guys. It’s important.

Beautiful Women and Horrendous Monsters

Two more things, in case you aren’t sold yet – it turns out that the voiceover world is inhabited by some of the most beautiful and talented women in the whole damn world. And if your brain isn’t painting your living room wall after Dee Bradley Baker gets going about a half hour in, this world may not make sense to you.

-Rex

Review: Voices.com One Month Subscription

PAY TO PLAYS, VOICE OVER REVIEWS

I did a fair amount of research into to Pay-to-play type sites available out there and VDC consistently came out atop its competitors. There is quite a lot of trepidation about the P2P model in general, and I can totally understand why. The idea of paying for leads, basically for the privilege of contacting clients, can feel a little unfair at first glance. However, I’ve come around on my thinking of the model and decided that it is worth the cost of admission.

Speed Up The Auditioning Process

Over the last three weeks, I’ve adjusted my approach significantly. When my account first activated, I spent hours auditioning, cutting each one together and sending them off one at a time. About ten hours later, I had auditioned for about fifteen different jobs. A couple days in I decided to filter by deadlines, take the ones that were ending that day, and record/edit all the auditions in one go and then send out the auditions. At this point I’d already drafted a cover letter template that I have barely altered since. This cut down the amount of time I spent auditioning dramatically.

Try, Learn, Repeat

After doing some more research, I changed my approach. I turned email alerts back on and auditioned for jobs as soon as they came out. This has definitely improved my ‘listen’ and ‘like’ rate. I’m now sitting at 93 jobs answered, 91 demo listens, 10 likes, and four jobs complete with a fifth one in process. While the money is still firmly in part-time territory, this means I’d earned enough in one month to pay for a yearlong subscription, which includes increased visibility on the site. I also have enough fodder to start cutting together demos specifically geared toward different types of jobs (internet, video games, business, etc). Once I have all of those in place, that should improve to book gigs without having to produce a custom demo for each job.

What is Your Voice Over Strategy?

Worth the price of admission? Well, that’s up to you.

While I was pessimistic about the chances of Voices.com working out originally, it has proven itself to be a great tool for finding VO gigs. I’ve been fortunate enough to garner the attention of a few clients within my wheelhouse, which, turns out, is video games. I’ve already had repeat clients, which is pretty mind-blowing considering I’ve been at this a little longer than three weeks. If you’re able to put the time in and quickly produce quality demos, Voices can absolutely work for you. Just know that it takes a flexible schedule (it is essential that you respond to jobs as quickly as possible, because they fill up fast) and a fair amount of work making auditions. The good news is, after making all those auditions, you can turn around and improve your hard marketing system whether they get you the job or not.

I never thought I could start my VO career with this much momentum. While VDC hasn’t been my only source for work (aiming for 35 different, consistent sources by next winter), it’s certainly been the biggest. It certainly seems like there’s room for growth with this model and I am looking forward to a fruitful year with them.

Rex

Is Voices.com Worth It?

PAY TO PLAYS, VOICE OVER REVIEWS

On Monday, I finally took Voices’ inaugural ten dollar offer for their premium lite membership, which affords me the opportunity to bid on gigs and send custom demos to clients. I’ve done a lot of talking to myself in my padded room since then.

Was it worth it?

Hustling for VO Work

In the last three and a half days, I’ve created 40 custom demos for different types of projects. Some of them are characters for video games, some from motivational or promotional online videos, a ton from commercials that want that somewhat raspy, vocal fry heavy sullenness that’s so popular in car commercials and Apple ads these days. I probably won’t get any work from these. Now, since I’ve literally just started building my career as a voiceover artist, I’m trying not to take issue with how much time I’m putting into these custom demos. The way I figure, I need the experience, and it gives me ample opportunity to nail down what I’m really good at and what I need to improve on (i.e. everything).

The Pay-to-Play Model Needs Work

I take issue with the pay to play model. While it strives to operate as an open market forum where talent and client have equal opportunity to meet and find mutual benefit in one another, it assumes that I, the talent, am willing to extend not only my time to produce a unique demo for every single client, but am also unsure of whether I’m even dealing with a real person. Voices seems to be the most widely respected company in this type of business, but I’ve still heard horror stories of clients taking demos wholesale and using them in their commercials without paying for them, or phishing scams designed only to bilk email addresses from talent.

There’s also an oddly translucent quality to the process. Voices.com wants you to know how many people have submitted a proposal (which can include a custom demo, stock demo, or nothing, but these statistics are not displayed), and where you are in line, as it were. There’s a ranking system based on your profile that will place in line depending on what percentage you “fit” the project. So if you’re a teenage girl submitting for a Tom Waits impersonator, you aren’t likely to be high up on the list.

However, it’s been my experience so far that there are so many people using Voices that even though I’m a 95% match, I’m still in the bottom 5% of the line, because the other 105 people are also 95% matches. This may have to do with the ranking system dependence on a small handful of qualities to discern this percentage. This system could definitely use a little more sophistication before it becomes truly useful.

Does the Rubber Meet the VO Road?

Or is it VO rubber on the…road? Anyway, next, you get an icon next to your proposal if a client has listened to your demo (uh, yes, please do that; I took the time to record a demo just for you, the least you could do is listen to it), and if they ‘like’ it. I’m assuming the like function acts as a sort of bookmarking system for the client, and a nice little pat on the head for me. I’ve gotten three likes out of my 40 demos so far (out of 14 listens), so….yeah. I don’t know what I’m supposed to take away from that.

If nothing else, I will have spent ten dollars to practice a good deal on unique scripts that I didn’t have to bother writing, I’ll have tons of fodder for new demos for my website, and I’ll learn not to check this damned board every ten minutes to validate my sense of self worth. I promised myself that if I didn’t book enough work to cover a year’s subscription then I wouldn’t bother renewing the subscription, as I feel my time would be better spent chasing down more tangible leads that, insanely enough, don’t require me to pay for the privilege to maybe talk to an actual human being. I’ll keep this blog updated with how things turn out.

443.692.7260

voice@rexanderson.com

REX ANDERSON