I don't know how many times I've heard the ole, "people say I have a really nice voice, maybe I should get into voice over..." I don't think that there's a single voice actor out there doesn't have a few stories to tell in this regard.
It's part of the game.
Frankly, I'm always more than happy to help most folks out as best I can. For the most part, I think most voice actors would say the same (and some... I'm looking at you, anime VAs, can be veritable saints at times). Sure, the VO community is very tight knit, but we're always willing to welcome folks into the fold. It's one of the many great things about this art, and one of the many reasons it's become such a large part of my life.
That said, I remember (and often echo) the words of one of my voice coaches. During our first session together she browbeat me with the words "it's not about the voice". I needed to hear that a LOT of times before I truly figured out what she meant. Once I did, it became part of my response used whenever anyone asked me about voiceover, or voice acting in general.
Turns out that I'm not quite alone in that regard. In a recent blog post I found on Blogging Innovation, Mike Brown talks of a similar approach where "it's not about the voiceover". In his situation, Brown talks about a Marketing Lead who directed that there would be no voice over in a particular piece. Members of his creative team pleaded that a voice over was essential to what they were doing (something I'm sure every voice actor loves to hear), but the Lead was adamant.
What they discovered was that they'd been relying on voice actors to fix their mistakes with the copy. What the Marketing Lead had done was to force a stronger, better performance out of the staff by not having them rely on someone else (i.e., someone outside of their general control) to fix their problems for them.
It's somewhat brilliant if you think about it.
Now for voice actors, we need to take a similar approach. All too often, we begin to rely on something external to help us elevate our work. In a lot of cases, we do the same thing that these marketing people were doing... we're counting on the "voice" to get us through the copy. Well, it's not about the voice. Never has been. Never should be. It's about our creativity, our ability to make a choice related to the copy ,our commitment to the choices we made, etc. In short, it's about all the creative aspects of what we do.
Too often, in my opinion, I hear people talk about "the voice". Brown's posting, and his example, should serve as a good reminder to all of us that it's not about the voice, but what we bring to it, what we bring to the copy, and how we do so, that makes a voiceover worth listening to.
If you've been paying attention to the news lately (and even if you haven't), then you know that the U.S. government want to get involved with health care. President Obama and his supporters want to reform health care as we know it in this country. In an address to a joint session of Congress, President Obama explained how health insurance reform will provide more security and stability to those who have health insurance, coverage for those who don’t, and will lower the cost of health care for our families, our businesses, and our government.
From the perspective of a voice actor, this is a really great opportunity for those who have the time and resources to use their craft to better help those who want to understand what the health care bill actually is, but either can't or don't want to read through the entire bill in order to do so (and I can't say that I blame them). Within the voice over community, there have been loads of postings in the various VO boards, and I can't even get into my FaceBook account anymore without half a dozen invites from people who are either putting the bill into spoken word on their own, or are looking for people to help lend their talents and voices for an audio production regarding the health care bill. Regardless of your politics, this is a very cool event within the voice over community.
Best part, is that it's catching on. The Nashua Telegraph recently published an article regarding this movement within the voice over community, and Politico just put up their own article regarding this as well.
These articles, if nothing else, should serve as a reminder for the rest of us within the voice over community that what we do with our talents is much more than bringing words to life. The potential is there to really provide a conduit of information and education through the work we do, and when the opportunity comes our way, it's one which we ought to be very proud of.
I'm not going to get into the politics of this issue (frankly it's a loaded gun of discussion at the dinner table and has been added to the rather eclectic list of things my family doesn't discuss at the dinner table, including the Muppets, carnivals, horses, and John Tesh... you know, the really controversial stuff).
-G
Edit: and now a third article on the subject from the New York Times. A link to the article can be found here.
So what does Goldman-Sachs have in common with voice over? High fees for high stakes.
There's an article written by Megan McArdle that I recently read in the Atlantic, which likened investment bankers with wedding planners, funeral directors, and movie trailer voice over actors. Regardless of the current economic climate, that's an interesting comparison to make, but it's actually pretty accurate.
The big message that McArdle tries to get across is that if you buy cheap, you usually get cheap. While her message has to do with the finance industry, she is able to relate it to the career of Don LaFonatine, and how many people (who aren't in voice over) might be shocked to learn what he salary was during the peak of Don's career. This is true, as the man made the kind of money that most people can only dream of. However, when you've only got one shot to make the deal, the fees associated with that one shot were negligible with the potential return on investment a client might see.
In the author's own words, "a moment of reckoning will come when the deal either goes well, or does not; that moment is very hard to anticipate; and if things go wrong, they can be very hard to fix."
How often do we as voice artists have to deal with clients who simply do not want to pay our fees? I know that I've lost count, and I've lost more than a few bookings because I wasn't willing to sell my services as short as a client might want them (we've all got stories about the $1500 dollar project that the client was only willing to pay $100 for). That doesn't matter so much as the message that a professional talent must represent to their clientele and potential clients alike, and that message is that when one shot is all you get, one shot is all you (as a voice talent) need...
Put another way, when a client is concerned that they can't afford your services, your job is to remind them that they can't afford not to have your services.
PS: I got a chuckle out of the author's comment that "...no guy asks a date if she’d like to go see the new Don LaFontaine trailer."
I actually got my significant other to listen to countless movie trailers with me... before we were dating (so it's a valid pickup strategy in my opinion).
Disney Featurette from "The Princess and the Frog" - Conjuring the Villan
First off, I shamelessly stole this from Bob Souer's blog. This is worth spreading, but I wanted to make sure that credit is given where it is due.
This is the second featurette from Disney's upcoming animation, "The Princess and the Frog" (I'll admit that I have been eagerly anticipating this production since I first heard of it from a friend working on the production... that the team working on this is so fiercely loyal to Walt's original ideas of animation is very heartening to me).
Here's the thing that I want any readers of this blog to note. If you take a ride in the "Way, Wayback Machine", I spoke about how Keith David used a form of SWOT analysis in how he performed. Pay attention to the clips of his character. Mr. David doesn't do anything that we don't already know him for doing... he just lets those parts of his personality which fit the character come out more so than normal. The result is a very believable and enjoyable Villan.
Regardless of the copy in front of you, you have to have some part of YOU that's performing the read. If you don't, then it just doesn't work. This is a pretty fascinating topic to me, and one which I'll visit again in the future.
PS: when I first saw the clip a day or two ago, I was asked to identify the microphone used (some things never change, lol). Based on the clip, it looks like a Brauner to me. Which one is a bit unknown at this time, but based on the shockmount and popfilter, I'd venture to say that it's a VM1 or VM1-KHE if I had to put money down on it.
A lot of new, and even experienced talent fall into this trap... myself included. A lot of voice actors far more talented than I have mentioned it in passing. I just want to offer my take on it.
When something goes wrong, when we make a mistake, we beat ourselves up over it or we simply view it as a negative. It's a common practice, and definitely one which is not unique to voiceover. I've lost count of the number of times I've heard people grumbling about the quality of their auditions while going over copy before heading into the booth at any number of casting sessions in Philadelphia or New York City. One professional talent called them "the mistake mumbles" because we all knew what they were complaining about, but it was done in such a way that all you can hear is mumbling as they walk past you grab their stuff and head out to the car.
I'm not so subtle, but I leave my complaints about my performance to the car ride home. Driving on the Schuylkill Expressway and dealing with the traffic gives me plenty of time to vent my frustrations. I'm sure that my fellow motorists stuck in traffic think that I've lost my mind (probably even more so when I'm taking NJ Transit on the way home, lol).
It's natural, it's human, and it's really self-defeating. Don't get me wrong, we need to get out the negativity. To bottle it up is really bad for your long-term mental health. However, when we get to the point of being negative, we've basically just lessened ourselves. That's a bad thing, but we do it anyway because so much of society and our own nature as people is to look at mistakes as a negative action, as a weakness. We then equate that negative action, not with the action itself, but with the person who committed that act. Sometimes it's an appropriate response (without getting political, I can point to examples in Darfur, the Middle East, acts of terrorism, etc.), but in a lot of cases it's overblown (a teenager working the register for the first time at my local supermarket). In voice acting, or nearly any kind of creative art, it's almost always an overblown thing. After all, you can't have people who are doing emotional work, using their inner feelings, hopes, and fears to draw out the emotion from a piece of paper, and then act surprised that they get emotional about their performance.
I'm telling you that all of this is normal, and much of it is part of how we deal with things in society. I'm also telling you that when it comes to voiceover it's wrong, it's bad, and it's self defeating. As a species, we've become so trained to avoid mistakes that we run away from them, we look down upon ourselves for making them, and normally, we will do anything but the one thing that's necessary when we make a mistake... admit it, own it, and move on!
It sounds easier than it is, but if you watch a professional actor, a true genius of the craft, you'll see that even when a mistake is made, it's owned. To be certain, some of this is based on ego (the irony of ego in acting is an amusing thing to me - if you get into acting for your ego, you'll be disappointed, yet you need your ego to have the confidence to be an actor... it's a twisted circle), but mostly I think it's based on experience. I don't know of anyone who has done anything and become proficient without making a mistake. Even those who are proficient make mistakes, they've just learned to own them in order to better their craft, and so should you. You need to accept the fact that practice, and the experience which we learn from our mistakes that is going to make us better at pretty much whatever we do.
If you have to, think of it like this - the only job you're ever going to have where you start at the top, is when you dig a hole.
Instead of digging a hole for yourself by ignoring your mistakes, I say that you own them and use them to learn how to do things better.
Now if the idea of owning your mistakes makes sense to you, and you want to see how one particular voice actor was able to use a post mortem analysis to do exactly what I'm talking about, then you're going to want to check out Jeff Kafer's blog to see how a good example of this.
Since it's 3:30AM out here, I'm going to make this one short (I hope).
Let me ask you a question. Regardless of your chosen vocation, how do you measure success? For most of us, and especially those of us who work (full-time or otherwise) in a creative profession then answer is to have a lot of bookings, which we hope will result in more than a bit of influx of income. For others, it's the idea of working more, being busy and getting a step ahead of where we currently are in our chosen profession.
There's nothing wrong with that, but are you actually suceeding? If you look up the definition of the word, you might be surprised to find that "being busy" is not part of the definition for being successful. Yet, how often do we equate the two?
If you talk with an accountant, their traditional definition for success is "to add value". This is something which was drilled into my head at grad school. Words like talent, busy, etc. had very little to do with it (though obviously, situational requirements bring these characteristics into play). When it came time to put pen to paper, the determination of success on the balance sheet was how much value you and your efforts added to the balance sheet.
Since we're not merely figures and accounts on a page, the question to ask is this: is what I'm doing adding value to the things I want to do? It's a qualitative question, and for each person the answer will be a little different. But it's worth asking:
Did taking that low paying VO booking add value to what I want to do?
Did spending $3,000 for that U87 add value to what I want to do?
Did that conference add value to what I want to do?
Noticing a theme? I'm not talking about justifying your efforts, but honestly asking if they're getting your closer to your goals. For each person, those goals are going to be different, and many of them will change over time. However, if we take a look at what we want to do and comparing that goal to what we're doing to achieve it, I think you'll find that there are a few things which we do in order to "stay busy" that simply aren't adding any value to our personal bottom line.
It's worth thinking about... are you just keeping busy, or are you adding value?
