Coming from a career in radio, I always appreciated the collaborative environment of a station or network, where you create a program or show together. I learned a lot from sitting next to seasoned presenters, which is experience you cannot pick up from a book. Like learning to drive a car, being good at voice overs is a practical skill and not some theoretical study.
Observing and learning from men and women who are where you want to be in your career, is a shortcut to success. The key is “immersion,” and in voice overs there’s not enough of it these days.
When I got my start in the Philadelphia area in the early two thousands, I traveled to studios where I was greeted by a team of collaborators: copywriters, directors, audio engineers… quite often clients also came to the recording. There was immediate feedback, and a sense of being in it together that brought the best out of me and the team. We truly elevated each other.
Doing good work often leads to more work thanks to word of mouth from the people in the session.
HOME STUDIO DISADVANTAGE
Those days are long gone. We live in the era of home studios where we self-direct , self-engineer, and self-promote. Name me one person who can listen to him- or herself in an objective way. It’s impossible. We don’t know what we don’t know, so we’re stuck at whatever level we are.
We analyze the script and read the copy based on ambiguous and often minimal directions. This means we have to guess what the client wants to hear. The text we receive is often written to be read and not to be spoken.
They want us to fit too many words into not enough time, and get upset when we’re sounding rushed. I’m often given poor machine translations that don’t make any sense and when I point that out to the ignorant client, they tell me “Read the text as written. That’s what we’re paying you for.”
And then they finally find out about the mistakes, and the client asks “Why didn’t you tell me? We could have fixed it. Now we have to record it again,” and they don’t want to pay an additional fee because they say it’s part of the same project. Or: “Your colleague would have done it for free.”
Well, why don’t you hire my colleague then?
ABSENCE OF TOGETHERNESS
I will not miss these moments. But I will miss the old camaraderie and collegiality, the social aspect of the business. Today’s voice overs are lonely souls reading into a microphone. It’s perfect for the introverts of this world, but if you are a social butterfly and you feed off of other people’s energy, don’t become a voice over. Become a stage or screen actor if you must. They end up being the best paid voice actors anyway, hired by Pixar and DreamWorks Animation.
What most beginning voice overs fail to understand is that they have ONE job: to run a sustainable, for-profit business. All beginners want, is to sit in their walk-in closet of a studio and read scripts for which they’re being paid……. eventually. But they forget to answer this crucial question:
How on earth do I GET WORK? Where do I find it since it does not grow on trees.
DOING the work is easy (well, relatively speaking). GETTING the work is not. Many voice over coaches can teach you how to use your voice and how to analyze a script, but very few will teach you how to run a profitable, one-person business. It requires a different set of skills.
Even with my network and decades of experience, I found it increasingly hard to fill up the pipeline with new projects. There’s one big threat I will talk about next, that is already changing the entire game and is taking away jobs every single day.
I think you already know what I’m talking about.
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