MCM Voices Voiceover Blog

Why No Business Should Be Involved In Online Social Networking

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:35:00 +0000

Provocative eh? See what marketing consultant Marc Goldman has to say about it at Biznik.

Pay Attention, Work Hard

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 14:29:00 +0000

My Sensei, Daniel Gobillot of Pine Forest Karate Dojo, wrote the Thought for the Week that just arrived in my inbox. So much of what we learn in any discipline has parallels in our other efforts, and this is a great example. There are no shortcuts to success. The best way to achieve our goals is to pay attention and work hard.

Sensei Gobillot's TFTW:

Life as a Kata

Kata, literally "form" is a Japanese word describing prearranged choreographed patterns of movements practiced either solo or in pairs. Kata is the single most important aspect in karate,(page 24, Red Book). While our individual techniques are all important to our art they can be viewed as limited and somewhat empty without kata to give them definition and purpose. Poorly executed technique can easily translate to poorly performed kata. A weak or misunderstood neko-ashi-dashi stance for instance can affect our entire karate world from yonkyu rank and up. We must always review all of our body movements and adjust to our current understanding and of course skill level.

Everyday life is also filled with moments and movements that we perform solo or with others. We wake up in the morning and maybe brush our teeth. This can be done with attention and purpose or without thought. When we relegate too much of what we do while we live to automatic action our lives, like kata with bad technique, become empty and bland.

Tomorrow our challenge is to select one (at least one) technique from our vast repertoire of movement then examine, define and expand it for use in our kata. For that hour and a half of class exploit and exhaust that one technique. Try this at least once. Then carry it to your personal life off the deck and use it for one of the many activities that you perform in your daily life. Answering the phone, getting dressed or just making eye contact.

.............

So pick something in your work or personal life that needs attention. Give it what it needs. I guarantee it will flourish.

Do you know how your clients feel?

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:07:00 +0000

A fascinating article touching on how humans make decisions came across my desk this morning. Research by Princeton psychology professor Danny Oppenheimer shows that decisions can be based on the ease of processing information – for example stock prices are higher shortly after the initial public offering when the ticker symbol is pronounceable (RAD for Rite-Aid compared with RDA for Reader’s Digest). In other work, Oppenheimer found that charitable giving rates varied according to what information was available about the charity’s efficiency rate (the percentage of donations that go to the actual cause versus what percentage goes to overhead). When people have a choice of giving to a charity with a lower efficiency rate, a higher efficiency rate, or no published rate, they will give to the charity with no published rate! Another of Oppenheimer’s studies shows that writing that uses a lot of big words detracts from the message. People will rate such writing as intelligent, but writing that uses simpler language is rated as more intelligent. You can read the article about Oppenheimer here.

These studies show that the decisions people make are based not simply on what they think, but also on how they feel while they’re thinking. It’s an important message for those of us who must market our business and we obviously need to design our marketing materials with this in mind. In fact with every appearance of our name/brand we should be thinking about how it might make our clients or potential clients feel. We want them to feel a certain way when they see us or hear us or think of us. How well are we succeeding in this? Can you examine your own materials and business practices and make an objective evaluation? Did you design your website with this in mind or did it just grow as your business grew? Did you hire someone to create a marketing campaign for you or did it just happen? In voice-over, probably most of us start out thinking we’re going to offer everything: audiobooks, e-learning, corporate narration, medical narration, message on hold, character voices, promo, radio imaging, the works. After a few years we find both that we excel in a certain genre and that specialisation is a key to success (at least in the U.S.). At that point we need to re-examine the way we’re presenting ourselves. Has this happened for you?

In today’s Actor’s Voice, Bonnie Gillespie writes about networking, and in conclusion she quotes from one of her own articles: People don’t remember you. They remember how they feel when they're around you. Think about it.

New TV Promo Demo for Mary McKitrick

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 19:02:00 +0000

My new promo demo is finished! Listen to it here.

The new website is here!

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 19:26:00 +0000

My new website, marymckitrick.com, has launched!

Marcia Yudkin gets it right – again!

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:56:00 +0000

When someone contacts me about my voiceover services and immediately focusses on price, I've learned to take a step back. It has been my experience that there’s an inverse correlation between the price they want to pay and the degree to which they will turn out to be a pain in the neck. So when I received Marcia Yudkin’s weekly Marketing Minute this morning that addressed this very issue, I was amazed at how well she nailed the problem and was very interested to read that there are actually statistics available about it. If you’re a voice actor or a business person of any kind, you owe it to yourself to walk away from this kind of client. With permission, I’m reprinting Marcia’s words verbatim – and I will be checking out Holden & Burton’s book!

If you'd like to sign up for Marcia's free newsletter, Marketing Minute, go here.

According to Reed Holden and Mark Burton, authors of Pricing With Confidence, 79% of business-to-business companies serve any customer they can get.

What's wrong with that? Typically, they explain, 20 percent of the customers account for 225 percent of the profit, with 80 percent causing the firm to lose money. And that statistic doesn't take into account the extent to which the unprofitable customers increase your worry wrinkles and gray hairs.

Being choosy about customers benefits both the bottom line and your sanity. Consider sending away those who:

* Always press you for discounts

* Need or demand an exorbitant amount of handholding

* Previously requested refunds

* Are unpleasant to deal with, nitpicky, abusive, frenzied, uncooperative or irrational

* Threaten to go to the competition

* Never pay on time

* Represent where your company used to be rather than where it is going

"It's simply better for you that unprofitable customers are served by your competition," say Holden and Burton.

After shedding the undesirables, develop a clear picture of who you want as clients and pursue those. You'll then have the positive energy needed to land them!

From The Marketing Minute, 18 February 2009, by Marcia Yudkin. Reprinted with permission.

Snark: It’s Mean, it’s Personal, and it’s Ruining Our Conversation

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:04:00 +0000

This is the title of a new book by David Denby, New York Times film critic. I became aware of it when an interview with Denby was aired on Morning Edition on NPR this week. Although the book doesn’t get stellar reader reviews on Amazon, his point got my attention – that there is a lot of mean-spirited, anonymous prose on the internet these days, posing as meaningful journalism. His thesis is well summarised in a [more favorable] review in the Los Angeles Times.

The interview got my attention because I was recently the target of a somewhat oblique snark attack myself. I received an email from an anonymous person asking if I had done any voice-over work for a certain radio station. I wrote back that I hadn’t yet, and I asked the identity of the emailer. He/she wrote back with only a link to a blog post he or she had written (anonymously). I read the post, which was about the person who reads the sponsors’ ads on this public radio station, and how robotic she sounds and how much the blogger hates this voice and wishes he/she knew who it was. A lot of commenters piled on to agree. Then one of them piped up, “I watched Forgotten Ellis Island this week and there was a voice in it that sounded just like that woman. Mary McKitrick’s name was in the credits – maybe it’s her voice on that radio station.” The blogger agreed that it might be, and then came back later with “No, I spoke to Mary McKitrick, it’s not her”.

By “spoke to”, this blogger meant that he or she had emailed me under cover of anonymity and then went back to his/her audience to report.

Of course, it isn’t worth a minute of my time to lament having my work on Forgotten Ellis Island compared to the voice of an announcerbot, but I admit it took my breath away. I mentioned the incident to some of my voice-over colleagues and was gratified that a number of them raced to the schoolyard and confronted the bullies – rather relentlessly actually – to the point that the blogger finally pulled the plug and ceased accepting comments. I thought it was amusing that they allowed so many mean comments but couldn’t handle the ones that sang my praises (admittedly, my colleagues were kind of rough on the anonymous blogger :).

In an earlier life, I was a biologist, and writing reviews of other people’s work was a constant part of my life. Book reviews, reviews of articles that had been submitted for publication, reviews of grant proposals. In the case of grant proposals and some of the reviews for journals, anonymity was required. In those cases, I always wrote as if I were going to sign my name, and in cases where a signature was allowed, I always added mine. I have never allowed the cloak of anonymity to affect my writing, never wrote anything in those reviews that I wouldn’t have said to the person’s face, and I don’t understand people who hide behind that cloak. I think David Denby is right – it ruins conversations and it’s spoiling the internet.

At the risk of sounding curmudgeonly – what in the world has happened to people’s manners?

Note: if you'd like to hear one of the passages I read for the documentary, Forgotten Ellis Island, go to the shockwave Flash part of the FEI website, click on Patient Stories, and click on the right arrow twice to get to the story about Ormond McDermott.

Be Great

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 15:55:00 +0000

This video of a Thai coffee vendor was displayed at the Serious Eats blog today. It reminded me that, no matter what you do for a living, you can be great if you put in your time to become so.

MCM on PBS tonight!!

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:43:00 +0000

A last minute reminder: check your local listings for the more-or-less national broadcast premiere of Forgotten Ellis Island, airing tonight in most markets at 10 pm on PBS. The film was directed by Lorie Conway, narrated by Elliott Gould, and has historical voices by Mary McKitrick (that's me!) as well as Bruce Miles, Fred Keeler and Drew Hadwal.

Whether or not your family has a history at Ellis Island, I think you'll be fascinated by this beautiful and moving film.

MCM Voices' Guide to Voice-over Postcard Marketing

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 22:42:00 +0000

This post has a grand title, doesn’t it? There are many people who know much more about voice-over postcard mailing than I do – Anthony Mendez is one of them and he has been of tremendous help to me over the years - thank-you my friend!! But this here is my guide, because I’ve just concluded a process that took me a good 6 weeks, which tells you that I can take any simple project and turn it into an all-absorbing, life-sucking event. Maybe I can save you some time by relating how I approached this.

Part I: The reason. The purpose of this postcard mailing extravaganza is to announce to clients, would-be clients and agents the national broadcast premiere of a documentary that features my voice. The broadcast is February 2nd, and although the point of the mailing is not so much to get people to watch it as it is to make them aware of it, I still wanted this card to arrive in time to give them the option. So Part I is to have something worth announcing. If you have such an annoucement to make, a postcard is a great way to do it. It is eye-catching but not disturbing to a busy person, and the busier a person is, the more likely it is that you want to work with them. Plus they can keep it propped on their desk indefinitely to remind them of your existence, which a phone call or an email might be less likely to achieve for the long term.

Part II. Postcard design. I chose VistaPrint for this mailing extravaganza, and their templates steered the mechanical process. See my earlier post about this, and Anthony’s before it. Knowing the format the mailing list itself needed to take affected my choices in editing my database, so I do recommend choosing the vendor early in the process. I was lucky to have a graphic already available for the front of the card. The back was simple: Announce the event, making it sound as important and MCM-centric as possible, and add a list of recent impressive clients along with my contact information. Simple, but requiring considerable thought and care in choosing words. Make every word count!

Part III. The mailing list. I’m not talking mechanics, like what format does the list take and what do you do with it. Rather, who are the recipients? I have a database of 3500 but not all of those are active contacts and of the active ones, not all will get a card for various reasons. I need to maximise my postcard mailing dollars because a huge mailing can run into big money. So how do I narrow down the list?

My database represents 4 years of painstaking marketing. Every one of the names on the list was researched with considerable care, but especially at the beginning of my voice-over career this research was not necessarily done with the optimal criteria for identifying ideal clients. And of course, the definition of ideal is going to be different for a beginning voice talent and for an experienced one, and for every individual voice actor, and one’s goals naturally evolve with experience. My complete database includes companies that looked promising according to their websites, but actually don’t do a lot of work that requires voice-over, all the way through high-end production companies that use voice-over every day. It includes companies that produce ads for a few small local businesses and companies that write and produce national commercials. The process of going through this list has taught me a lot about the kind of company I want to be doing business with in the future and will greatly affect the kind of companies I contact from now on. Simply by focussing on return-on-investment for a postcard mailing, I was compelled to narrow the list to a select number of names, and to refine my criteria for choosing potential clients in the future. This has had a significant impact on my business plan! I set a goal of 600 for the mailing, and ended up with 636, including agents. Not too bad.

In the process of culling, I was also visiting each company’s website at least once in order to review the business and consider the likelihood that we would ever work together. This was also the time to check the contact information and identify or re-identify the best person to receive a postcard and to make sure the mailing address was current. LinkedIn was a huge help here. Many was the time I searched a name in LinkedIn to confirm that the person was still with the company and to see if their title was the same. This entire review process took about a month and a half of intensive work but future postcard mailings should be incomparably easier thanks to this investment of time (and the ease of retrieving data and notes from my beloved Time & Chaos).

Part IV. The mailing. Once the mailing list was complete, the rest of this process rushed to its denouement with dizzying velocity. I double-checked my postcard design (who am I kidding? It was more like the 20th time I had checked the design as uploaded to VistaPrint!), and I uploaded my mailing list. That upload was swift; then VistaPrint mercilessly and unfeelingly announced that about 30 of my entries had invalid addresses and the US Postal Service would not deliver to them, beg them as I might. I checked each one, and in all but 8 cases I found that indeed, there was something wrong and I was able to make the correction. The other 8 I saved to their own spreadsheet for further examination and then deleted them from the uploaded master list. I got all the way to checkout, looked at the grand total dollar figure, and then had a clever idea. I thought, I will just Google “VistaPrint discount codes”and within a few minutes I had reduced my grand total dollar figure by $127! Hooray!! I proceeded to check-out, clicked Submit and the deed was done. I then immediately was shown an offer to have an order of 50 postcards sent to me for a reduced price with no charge for shipping, which I immediately accepted because I knew I was going to think of friends and relatives and maybe a few more potential clients to whom I simply had to mail a card.

There you have it. Perhaps in a few months I will report on the results of this campaign, or maybe I will be under my bed, wailing, refusing nutrition and inconsolable at the lack of results, but for now I'm elated to have finished this enlightening process and full of hope for the future. Comments and stories of your own experiences welcomed!

Note: Help & advice from Marice Tobias, Anthony Mendez and Elaine Singer is gratefully acknowledged.

Changing Business Model for Hiring Voice-over?

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:14:00 +0000

I’ve just come from the “Meet and Eat” breakfast hosted by my Chamber of Commerce, held each December in the ballroom at the beautiful Delaney House. The program this morning was a round-table discussion about the economy and how it has affected our businesses. At my table were a business consultant, a bank executive, a photographer, two insurance company employees and an online advertising exec. As I listened to each speak about their respective situations, I heard less about negative impact and more about creativity – how their businesses are adjusting and rolling with the punches. It has always struck me how resilient humans are, and how the capacity for hope and optimism seems boundless, even in troubled times.

Something of great interest to me emerged before the discussion got started – the gentleman on my right was marketing director for an insurance company and he told me that they used to hire production companies exclusively when they needed broadcast advertising. Now, to save money, they are doing their own copywriting and hiring vendors themselves, at least for some of their productions.

When I first started in voice-over 4 years ago I targeted ad agencies and production companies in my initial marketing efforts, but also reached out directly to businesses. It became apparent quite quickly that the latter was not a good use of my time because businesses usually hired production companies or ad agencies. I still find this to be true, but my breakfast companion made me sit up and think about the possibility of a changing model. If this became a trend, it would certainly change the way voice-over artists market their services. My guess is that it would not be an overwhelming trend without some decline in quality of the work and that it would probably be limited to larger companies that might have more breadth of talent than a smaller business with a smaller number of employees. I can imagine it being a textbook example of being "penny wise and pound foolish" - you pay less for the work and suffer the consequences. If larger businesses are considering these kinds of changes, however, this could create more opportunity for voice artists who offer copywriting and other production services along with voice-over.

Are other voice-over artists seeing any of this happening? Are you being contacted directly by businesses? Comments welcome!

Voice-over Postcard Mailing Hack

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 18:22:00 +0000

I want to send a postcard to all my clients and other business contacts to alert them to a special broadcast for which I provided voice-over. On February 2nd, 2009 at 10 pm, PBS will broadcast Forgotten Ellis Island, a beautiful documentary about the Immigrant Hospital at Ellis Island. The documentary is narrated by Elliott Gould, and I provided historical voices as did 3 male colleagues. Naturally, I want to make sure that my clients have the opportunity to see this – the film has very broad appeal but of course, more importantly, I want them to hear how great I sound!

So, what’s the most efficient way to make this mailing happen? I have mailed postcards to clients before. I had them printed at a local shop, and then addressed them by hand because I thought a personal touch was important. A few hundred postcards. This is not happening again. As soon as I found out the air date for Forgotten Ellis Island, I knew it was a job for VistaPrint, where you can design your postcard, upload a mailing list and have your cards sent out for you.. I thought it was still going to be quite an ordeal, because I have a contact database of 3,489 companies. Not all of these will get a postcard – some of these companies have gone out of business, some stopped using voice-over, some never did. I still keep them in my database so I can maintain a history of my communications with them. I use Time & Chaos software to manage all this information.

It turns out to be incredibly simple. I finally took a few minutes to look into the process of turning my Time & Chaos database into a mailing list in VistaPrint-ready format, and it actually took mere seconds to get the list. T&C will almost instantly generate a report containing any data fields desired, and you can export the report into an Excel spreadsheet that can be then be uploaded to VistaPrint. What I thought was going to take weeks to accomplish will get done in less than a day.

The design process was not quite so straightforward for me. For the front of the card I uploaded a graphic sent to me by Lorie Conway, the filmmaker for Forgotten Ellis Island, after getting her permission to use it for this purpose. For the back, I took advantage of LazyMan Anthony Mendez’ offer of a design template (thanks Anthony!). It came to me as a psd file and opened automatically in Macromedia Fireworks (it will open in whatever appropriate editing program you use for such things). I designed the card and uploaded my front and back designs to the VistaPrint website and that’s when my troubles began. The front design is vertical, and my back design is horizontal. VistaPrint put the front design into vertical format, and then it wanted the back to be vertical as well. Somehow I got the design rotated but it didn’t look right. Finally I downloaded a template for Oversized Vertical Postcards and redesigned the back of my postcard and got it uploaded. I then called Customer Support to make sure the recipients’ names were going to print in the right place, and was told that VistaPrint’s mailing service doesn’t support the vertical format. Crikey! So now the front design has been rotated so that I have a design that VistaPrint classifies as horizontal, and I’m back to my original horizontal design for the back. Note well: if you want VistaPrint to do the mailing for you, your designs must be horizontal. If you find anything on their website that tells you this, let me know!

The postcard is now ready to go. All that remains is to edit that big Excel mailing list of mine and upload it to VistaPrint. It will not exactly be cheap, but there is no way I could send out a mailing of this magnitude on my own and still keep what’s left of my sanity. Nor would I be able to look my friend LazyMan Anthony Mendez in the eye and tell him I addressed and stamped that many postcards myself! :)

If the real guy isn't available....

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 02:56:00 +0000

President-Elect Obama is going to be extremely busy in the next few months - well, years. He might not always be available when you need his voice. Not to worry! Johnathan Grey is available to pitch in.

Jonathan is the winner of the Voice123 Political Impersonation Contest in the Barack Obama category. The likeness is remarkable. Visit his website at Voice123 to hear his demo, and you'll discover that he is a remarkably talented individual who, most of the time, sounds nothing like Mr. Obama. The prize for Jonathan is a one-year membership at the online casting service, Voice123. Congratulations, Jonathan!

My thanks to John Florian at Voice Over Xtra for this news.

Managing Your Freelance Income

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:52:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a free 3-day workshop called The Millionaire Mind Intensive. These workshops are the brainchild of T. Harv Ecker, author of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. Ecker’s basic thesis is that your attitudes about money are formed in childhood and that your financial status as an adult is based on the financial blueprint you acquired from your family. If your parents told you that “money is the root of all evil, money can’t buy happiness, you shouldn’t have more money than you need to live on” and so forth, you’re likely to become very good at not having much money. And your success in business will certainly be affected, whether you’re a voice actor, a web designer, a consultant – in short, anything that involves income! The good news is that you can change.

I had read Ecker’s book and came away from it with a better understanding of my attitudes about money and how they might be holding me back, but I still didn’t have much idea about what to do about them. The workshop offered an avenue to acquire more information, as well as the chance to visit with my brother and sister-in-law who were also attending. The way the workshop was conducted was rather off-putting for me and I bailed after the first (11-hour) day, so I can only pass along a portion of the information offered. What I did glean from that one day, however, was very valuable and has certainly changed my approach to financial management.

One of the points that made a big impression on me was put in the form of a question to business owners: If you need something for your business, do you look at your bank balance, see how much money you have, decide if you can afford the expenditure and then make your purchase? In other words, do you basically have no budget in place to organize your business expenditures? The point was made that you should take that disorganized bank account and pay yourself a salary. That salary goes into your domestic budget (see below). The rest of your business income can then be divided into categories that parallel the organization of your domestic funds.

Recommended domestic budget categories are the following:

Necessities: 55% Rent or mortgage, food, clothing, medical, utilities, taxes are examples.

Investments: 10% Retirement falls into this category. This is also called the Financial Freedom Account – your “Golden Goose”. You never spend this money (i.e., you don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs); rather, your goal is eventually to be able to live off the income the investments generate.

Long-term Savings: 10% Car, home improvements & c.

Education: 10% This is for your own education, to keep skills up to date and learn new ones.

Play: 10% Entertainment, massage, whatever you want. It’s recommended that you spend this regularly – at least quarterly. It keeps you balanced and keeps you from feeling deprived and then going berserk and blowing your budget.

Give: 5% Donations to charity or other favorite causes.

Business owners will have their own ideas that make sense for them as to how they would translate these recommendations into a business budget. My voice-over business budget might look like this after my paycheck comes out of it:

Necessities: Telephone/ISDN, web hosting, newsletter mailing service, postcards & printing, postage, business cards. These might also be called marketing expenses. See my earlier post on setting rates for more ideas about this.

Investments: doesn’t apply, since that’s part of the domestic budget.

Long-term savings: this could be for a major purchase or for studio renovation.

Short-term savings: basic equipment purchases (but if anybody hears me say I need a new microphone – it’s really a cry for help)

Education: voice-over coaching and workshops, acting classes, German and Spanish classes to keep improving

Give: my business can make donations too!

Having a budget of this kind is important on several levels. Obviously, it will help ensure that there are funds to run the business. Once you’ve decided on the dollar figures or percentages that should go into each category, and have decided on what your monthly salary is going to be, you can set financial goals for the business. If you have not been paying yourself a salary up to now, you’ll probably find that starting that practice will really transform your experience of being a business owner. It’s greatly motivating to see that you actually receive a paycheck every month, and you will work even harder to make sure you get it and that it grows.

A few words about the domestic budget, since it’s a part of getting your business finances in order. It can be quite a daunting task to get started on it, because you need to figure out what you’re spending your money on. All of it, down to the coffee and Snickers bars. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of tracking expenses. This includes the regular fixed monthly expenses like housing and music lessons, the utility expenses that vary seasonally, the quarterly expenses like real estate taxes and life insurance, and the not-always predictable expenses like car repairs and trips to the vet. For us it happened to be easy because I was already keeping track of all of it on a spread sheet, aided by a set of 12 envelopes in which I keep receipts for each month so I can make sure I don’t miss anything. However, I was not paying myself a salary, so when our expenses exceeded what was in the basic domestic account, I would have to siphon some from somewhere else and it felt like we were not living within our means, despite not having debt (besides the mortgage). Now, I get a paycheck. Now, our financial goals are clear, and plans that seemed hazy and possibly hopeless actually seem attainable.

I don’t claim to be 100% accurately representing the views of Harv Ecker or the organizers of the workshop I attended, and I'm skipping a lot of the details. I’m just passing along the way I used some of the information to change the way I think about and handle the budget for my voice-over business, and as a consequence, my home. It has made a big difference there AND in the way I feel about my work. I hope others will find some of it helpful.

An Interview with Josh Faure-Brac

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 22:01:00 +0000

Reader Simon Owens was kind enough to alert me to an interview with animator Josh Faure-Brac, conducted by Owens’ colleague at PBS, Mark Glaser. Faure-Brac created the wonderful piece that featured Rowell Gorman as the voice of Uncle Sam. His work can be seen at CurrentTV.

The interview features some of Faure-Brac’s best-known work. Thank-you Simon – I very much appreciate the opportunity to learn more about this very talented animator.

MCM Goes to Hollywood for the Day

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 02:28:00 +0000

I’m a voice actor. I “don’t do” on-camera work and I don’t have a head shot so when I have the opportunity to submit for on-camera stuff I’m not prepared to do it. But I received an email this morning from Boston Casting with the subject: Rush Call Northampton Today. The location was a mile and a half from my house, so it doesn’t get much more convenient than that and I thought, why not? I indicated my availability and got a phone call from BC with the directive to report to Northampton Athletic Club for extra work on Mel Gibson’s Edge of Darkness, directed by Martin Campbell. I fully expected to spend the day sitting around, so I was not disappointed that my posterior was in fact parked for a good long while. Plenty of interesting people there, many of whom have worked on many movies, and it was great fun to get to know some of them – and to absorb as much information as I could about the mysterious and glamorous world of film making. After a few hours an Assistant Director came through to choose people for a scene in a locker room. I looked him in the eye and tried to appear friendly, calm, knowledgeable, competent – any and all traits that he might possibly need, and it seemed to work and he chose me and 5 others to follow him. In another room in a different building he lined us up to be looked over by another crew member, who again pointed at me and I was handed off to a lady who got me outfitted for the scene. Then it was back to “holding” in a building behind the athletic center for another few hours, during which time I fretted periodically about whether I was in the right place – would I miss my scene due to ignorance? But as in the voice-over business, I had to assume that if they needed me, they knew where to find me and I should just relax and resume my life, which in this case meant to meet a few more people, find the people I’d already met, do some more talking about the acting business, and just enjoy the moment as much as I possibly could. Finally around 5 pm those of us who had not shot any scenes yet were called to go over to the athletic center. Our standard of living went up instantly, since there was a big table laden with fresh coffee, tea, and food, and there was much more hustle and bustle as filming was ongoing and there were production assistants dotting the landscape and shouting “rolling”, “cut” and other fascinating directives. Finally our own A.D. appeared to ask the locker room ladies to assemble, and after a short one-hour wait we were called in. Most of the locker room ladies were led one way, I was led another and in very short order I was face-to-face with Mel Gibson himself. In this scene Gibson’s character, Detective Craven, has been shown to the athletic club locker room by the custodian (yours truly) to remove the contents of his deceased daughter’s locker.

Although I didn’t speak in my scene, I enjoyed it tremendously. I loved watching the camera men do their work, and was fascinated by all the details of lighting and scene blocking and the snappy thingy with the take number written on it, and being fussed over by make-up and wardrobe. Voice actors are not accustomed to such treatment. And who would not be thrilled to be directed and addressed by first name by Martin Campbell?

It seems extraordinary to me that so much goes into each little scene. We did at least 7 takes, and only once was a take stopped due to something that wasn't working to Mr. Campbell's liking, and after each take, out would come the measuring tape and the masking tape and the light meters and the crew would speak to each other in Gibberish of the highest caliber. Also, despite the many many hours each crew member had undoubtedly been at work that day, every one seemed calm and professional. I was especially impressed with "my" Assistant Director, Tico, who was dealing with casting all day long and managed to seem bright and interested and above all, relaxed, and to make even lowly people like me feel valued. I would do this again in a minute – although preferably not in the next few minutes because being away from the studio for a day puts one rather behind in one’s work. But I can see why people like the film business. The hours are invariably long and can be very tedious, but the denouement – at least for this happy camper – made it worth the wait.

More local news about this film here, here, here and (with an interview with me) here.

Uncle Sam Speaks.

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:08:00 +0000

My friend and very talented colleague Rowell Gorman provided the voice of Uncle Sam for this extraordinary video, created by Josh Faure-Brac. Please watch it and ask your friends to watch it too.

The M600 Universal Microphone Mount.

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 20:46:00 +0000

I’ve written here about noise problems I had in my voice-over studio in the past and how I solved them. They turned out to be low frequency rumbles that were fixed by weighting my microphone stand (cost: $0). Occasionally I still get a bit of rumble due to external noise creeping in, and I wondered what else I could do to address this. I sent an email to Enhanced Audio last month to inquire about the M600 and the owner, David Browne, called me from Ireland. As soon as I learned that one of his U.S. distributors is my beloved Mercenary Audio, I was on the telephone to my guy at Mercenary to order one. Since they’re in my home state of Massachusetts, I had the M600 in my studio the next day. It took just a few minutes to put it up, for which this impatient gal was grateful.

The verdict: it makes a difference. It’s hard to describe the difference, and if you visit the testimonials page at Enhanced Audio, you’ll find that few people make concrete statements about how their sound changed with the addition of this microphone mount to their studios - or at least, they don't base their impressions on the physics behind the change in the sound. I think a lot of people are mystified by it because the M600 is a solid structure, and audio engineers are used to shock mounts with rubber bands that supposedly allow low frequency noise to be dampened. My impression of the difference the M600 makes was certainly not based in science either. The way it struck me when I first used it was that it made the voice go from sounding two-dimensional to three-dimensional – and the silence between sentences is much more silent. I am very happy with it indeed. If Enhanced Audio also offered a mic stand to go with the mount I’d get one in a second.

U.S. consumers can get the M600 at Las Vegas Pro Audio as well as Mercenary. ElDorado Recording Services in Los Angeles may soon become a dealer as well.

My voice-over team.

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:17:00 +0000

Most of us free-lancers start out in business alone. As voice-over artists maybe we get advice (good or bad) about what equipment to choose and how to set up the studio and where to get good deals on art work and business cards and how to approach marketing. There are as many ways to start as there are individual voice artists, and it’s possible that the best advice in the world isn’t going to make much difference at the beginning – we do what we can afford to do, with the resources available. That’s what I did. As a result, I went through numerous microphones and several pre-amps before settling on what I now have and love, upgrading as my business grew. I don’t think I lost much money there, as the audio equipment held its value and I was able to sell what I no longer wanted. I suppose I gained valuable knowledge about microphones, and really, one’s voice and use of a microphone evolve with experience, so I don’t think I have anything to regret there.

The kind of voice-over coaching one needs also evolves. I had excellent coaching at the outset, and have taken advantage of many opportunities to attend workshops with great teachers. My current coach is superb, and she doesn’t take on beginners, so I don’t have any regrets about the way I’ve approached my training, either.

What I do regret, though, is not having expert advice in dealing with the noise problems I had the first few years in business. I lost a few potential customers because of it, and I think a seriously good audio engineer could have helped me get to the root of the problems much sooner. As my friend Pat Fraley says, “experience is the slowest teacher”. Experience has taught me much about the many ways noise can be introduced into an audio chain, but it has been costly experience. An expert could have been invaluable early in my career.

One of the smartest things I’ve done as a voice artist is finally finding and hiring that expert. My particular expert is George Whittam of ElDorado Recording Services – whom I contacted at the suggestion of my friend and mentor, Kevin Genus. George worked with me to find good ways to process my audio when I wanted to “dress it up” a bit for auditions. He installed Source Connect for me, saving me a lot of time. He has been available for any questions I have about my audio and about equipment choices. He also let me know that if I had any problems with my mobile studio while I was away on vacation last week, he would be available to help, using LogMeIn to look at my computer desktop. It wasn’t necessary, as it turns out, but the peace of mind it gave me to know he was just a phone call away was priceless.

My voice-over team also includes lots of dear friends in the business who are generous with their advice – e.g., about setting rates. But here is an area where again, it can be a wise choice to get an expert on your team, such as a trusted agent. The difference between what you might be able to get on your own and what a really good agent could negotiate for you could over time be well worth the commissions. This is something I’m currently working on for myself.

For a story about how a fellow voice artist used the “outsourcing” concept to increase her business, I recommend this article by Moneen Daly Harte at Voice Over Xtra. That bit about hiring a house cleaning service has tremendous appeal - the question of how to keep your home life from unnecessarily encroaching on your work time is material for another post. And of course, keeping your work time from eroding time with family is probably material for a book - or lots of books!

Mobile recording studio.

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:21:00 +0000

I don’t take very many trips, partly because I like my voice-over work and don’t want to miss any. But I couldn’t avoid it last week, nor could I avoid working, because I have a client who needs narration work from me almost every day. So, I finally allowed myself to be dragged into modernity, and assembled a little mobile studio consisting of the following:

MacBook (can you believe I didn’t have a laptop until now?) - 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 160GB hard drive

MicPortPro

Studio microphone (I took my Neumann TLM 103, because it has a nice carrying case, and my permanent studio was sounding so good I didn’t want to touch a thing in it)

Vanderwall Collapsible Cube – I couldn’t find the right size locally but my friend Connie Terwilliger had an extra one that she sent me. Bless you Connie!

Sonex foam to line the cube (I had some leftovers that I took with me)

Mini mic stand (I removed the boom)

To state the obvious: the signal went from me, to the mic which was sitting in the Sonex-lined cube, to the MicPortPro to the Macbook. And no printing of scripts, I just read them off the client’s emails.

I recorded using a trial version of Twisted Wave, and edited in Audacity. I don’t like either of those as well as Adobe Audition, but since all of this was new to me, I really haven’t given them a fair trial yet. I’m not a gear head – I like this stuff and think it’s cool, but it’s a means to an end and I don’t have time to get all ga-ga over it. I just wanted it to work so I could get the audio to my client in a timely manner and get back to vacationing. And everything did work (it wasn’t the equipment’s fault that I had to stay up way late to record, in order to avoid the sound of lawn mowers and traffic).

For more about this kind of set up see Harlan Hogan’s website – he came up with the idea of using the collapsible cube for a "portabooth". The Vanderwall variety may be extinct (it was a special purchase last month at Aldi’s, which is where Connie picked up her extras), but there are other possibilities. Search on collapsible cube at Amazon. It just has to be 14”.

The MicPortPro is used by lots of voice-over people and was discussed in detail here and here. It’s simple and wonderful, measuring about 5 inches in length and with a user manual of about 2 paragraphs. For several days prior to this trip I had been trying out various other mobile studio configurations: a usb mic connected directly to the laptop, or a Zoom H4 recorder as an audio interface. Neither solution was satisfactory. I ordered the MicPort Pro at the last minute and had it sent to my destination. I love the Zoom recorder and even figured out all its buttons and menus (that is one complicated device), but I think I will get more use out of it as a stand-alone unit for recording bird song and human dialects in the field. I don’t think anything can beat the MicPort Pro for ease of use. You just plug it in, push the little button for 48 V phantom power and you’re in business.

I must say it is fun to travel with a laptop, especially one with an Extreme Airport card so I can get email and play on teh intarwebz and upload files and not bother with cables. And nice that it can do other stuff, like play DVDs in the car. Heh. Who knows - I may take another trip someday! My one regret is that we did not have time to stop and visit anyone along the way.

Listen to that inner voice.

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:07:00 +0000

You know what your voice-over services are worth, and you know there is a minimum fee below which you are not comfortable. Sometimes you do a job for less because you just feel like it, and sometimes you accept an assignment against your better judgement. Last week I went part way down that path, and got off before things went too far, but it left an unpleasant taste.

I responded to a notice for a low budget job. I have no idea what possessed me – maybe I thought it would be a quick bolus of cash to pay for a few tanks full of gas for our vacation trip. The first sign that it was a mistake was when the client (she turned out to be a talent agent of some kind, and the fact that she was posting online for voice talent indicates that she doesn’t deal with voice-over very often) wrote me to request an audition of a few paragraphs of the script and said that, if chosen, I would be paid after the audio was delivered along with any changes the client requested. I usually require a 50% deposit. I went ahead and auditioned anyway. Just before our trip I got another email from the agent, stating that her client was trying to choose between me and one other talent, and could I please audition the whole script. It was a short script, and probably my ego got in the way, telling me I had made the cut and wasn’t that nice. As it happens, I had removed a piece of Sonex from my booth since I needed it for my mobile recording studio, and that little change livened up my room a bit and the audio sounded particularly nice. I sent the audio off with confidence that the client would be impressed. I was so taken with the sound that I sent the file to my friend George Whittam, since we had been talking about such things recently and I wanted him to hear the change. He was impressed too.

While away I received an email from the agent, forwarding comments from her client:

“We need Mary to read the script straight through, it sounds a little choppy and edited. Have her send you 3 different read throughs un-edited, with different inflections. Have Mary include two more lines at the end of the read [the additional lines were included in the email].”

We are still talking about an audition here! I finally came to my full senses and wrote back:

“I'm very sorry, but I'm not going to be able to help you. For a low budget project like this, it simply is not possible for me to do 4 different complete reads for an audition. And if your client is this demanding in the audition phase it's only going to get worse.

Best wishes &c”

The agent wrote me back an incoherent email, the gist of which was, “don’t ever darken my door again”.

I felt rather bad about it, because I don’t like conflict. If it had gone the way I initially envisioned, it would have been nice to get gasoline money out of it. But it went the way many low budget projects go – the way of completely unreasonable expectations. It just isn’t worth it, unless it’s for a client you already know and like and they need a favor and you trust them not to go overboard. Otherwise, you are in effect saying, "my time and talent are not worth much - go ahead and abuse me."

I make a lot of mistakes. That was one of them. I hope I have finally learned to resist the temptation to respond to such requests in the future. They always seem to bring me into contact with unpleasant people.

Ugh. You know?

Fortunately I got some nice new clients right after that who paid for my vacation. A reward for being sensible, undoubtedly.

Encourage your friends, discourage your enemies. In memory of Randy Pausch.

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 03:02:00 +0000

That is the martial way – to hold your head higher as conditions worsen, so that one’s enemies see that you cannot be vanquished and your friends’ flagging spirits can be lifted by your energy. After seven years of karate training, this concept is still primarily an intellectual one for me, one that I try to apply during class when the weather is oppressively hot and the workout is challenging. The workout is only an hour and a half, or on special occasions, several hours long. Any average warrior can hold out for that amount of time. In real life, the challenge is obviously much, much greater; to keep one’s head high no matter what is happening to you. For most of us, our “enemies” are not people, they are obstacles of all kinds that slow our progress through life.

No one exemplified this warrior spirit better than Randy Pausch, who died this morning after a nearly 2-year battle with pancreatic cancer. He fought this battle publicly as he chose to continue to give generously of himself. His spirit was so big and so exuberant that I actually had hope that he would beat the odds – even as I checked his web page weekly and saw the measure of tumor markers climbing steadily higher. Even when referring to those numbers, Randy continued to offer words of hope and encouragement. He continued to fight so he could have as much time as possible with his wife and children and a life that he loved dearly – a life in which he achieved his dreams. His message of hope is one that we all desperately need in order to overcome the obstacles we encounter (or create) in our personal and professional lives. He said:

"The brick walls are not there to keep us out, the brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don't want it badly enough. They're there to stop the OTHER people."

Remember the martial spirit of Randy Pausch when you face that next brick wall, and try to rise to the challenge to use your own spirit to encourage those around you and banish your enemies, whoever or whatever they might be. I can think of no better tribute to this great man.

Landmark Conservation Legislation in Canada

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:31:00 +0000

Canada has set an extraordinary example to the world. Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty recently set aside 55 million acres of land – half the size of the province – as permanent conservation land.

I did not read about this in the U.S. media and, shockingly, could find nothing about it in the usual news sources. I first heard of it on the Massbird listserv on which a member quoted Scott Weidensaul’s report of it, which she saw on the carolinabirds listserv.

You can hear about it straight from the source by watching this video:

Scott Weidensaul kindly provided me with a link to his original account of the landmark legislation at his blog. It is a beautiful story. And if you haven't read any of Scott's books, check them out!

Meanwhile, U.S. President George Bush lifts the ban on offshore oil drilling, and the U.S. Department of the Interior opened up 2.6 million acres in Alaska for oil exploration. Although there is no hope for significant conservation measures under this current administration, one can dream that improvements will occur in the next.

For a treasure trove of wonderful information on birds of the boreal regions, with suggestions on how you can help, visit the Boreal Songbird Initiative website. The site also provides a link for writing a thank-you letter to Premier McGuinty. I wrote to him and hope you will too. Thanks to his vision, millions of avian voices will continue to ring out from the far North for years and years to come.

Do You Ever Act in Real Life?

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 20:18:00 +0000

When I was younger I liked to add humor to my life with dramatisation. Some people appreciated it, but some just didn’t get it and thought I was odd. If I had hung out with actors I would have fit right in. After encountering enough people with no sense of humor, I learned to be cautious.

But this morning it happened without warning.

I have a problem with library books. My library lets me renew them once online, but only once. If it’s a novel, I’m done with it in a few days. A biography usually takes me a lot longer to read. Currently I’m reading Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal, and it’s taking me quite a while. I renewed it once, but I still have about 50 pages to go and as of this morning, the book was about 2 weeks overdue. So, I tend to accumulate library fines regularly. It bothers me. This morning after going to the bank I figured I couldn’t avoid the situation any longer, especially since there was an inter-library loan book waiting for me (the German translation of the same book: Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen). So I went to the library, went to the desk and started to explain my dilemma to the new librarian. I started stammering, and suddenly I put my face in my hands and blurted out “Will this confession be confidential?” The librarian assured me it would. After I finished telling her my story, she wordlessly turned to her computer and started clicking away. When she finished she said, “I’m renewing this for you, but only because I think you’re going to win an Academy Award someday.”

I’m pretty sure I abandoned caution because the librarian looked like she could have been Pat Fraley’s sister, with her Puck-ish grin and laugh lines that suggested a lifetime of humor. When I told this story to my sister, she laughed out loud and then told me a story of her own:

She was at Zabar’s Delicatessen waiting to get strudel, back in the days when the strudel counter was at the back of the store, off the beaten path. An elderly gentleman was in line behind her, and there was nobody at the counter to wait on them. They were commiserating about the long wait, and finally my sister said to him, “Maybe they’ll come if we get into a fight.” And she yelled “I was here first!” The gentleman obligingly yelled back “No, I was here first!!!” A Zabar’s employee rushed over to the strudel counter, my sister and her co-conspirator winked at each other, and before long they both had their strudel.

Life is a lot more fun when you take risks – even little ones.

Celebrity Voice-overs - Again....

noreply@blogger.com (MCM Voices) — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:38:00 +0000

My thanks to Tony Quinn for bringing this Washington Post article to my attention. It's interesting that the mainstream media is starting to comment on the lack of a tight correspondence between stars' fame and their talent in the voice-over booth - something voice actors have been musing about for some time. The writer, John Anderson, traces the hunger for celebs in animation back to the extraordinary work of Robin Williams in Aladdin and the success of Lion King, with its star-studded cast.

I came across another article recently that makes the same point, although it's nearly 4 years old already. It refers to laments by even high-profile TV voice actors like Tom Kenny that ''the guys who are top-of-the-line TV animation guys are Fish No. 47 in Finding Nemo.''

I've said it before - if directors want on-camera stars doing the voices in their animated features, they're going to have them. If they specifically want great acting in the voice-over booth - if that doesn't intersect with celebrity - I'm sure they know where to find that too. My not-very profound advice to voice actors who find the current state of animation casting disturbing (and I'm not referring to people like Tom Kenny, who does not need my advice ;): there is nothing to be gained by complaining. Stay in shape and keep working on your craft and be ready when opportunity comes. If the opportunities don't come soon enough, then make your own!