MCM Voices Voiceover Blog

MCM Voices — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 01:06:00 +0000

Bob Bergen Workshop in Hartford, CT

Bob Bergen will be bringing his renowned voice-over workshop to Hartford next month and I will be attending. Bob has provided voices for hundreds of cartoons, games and commercials, but is best known as the voice of Porky Pig and Tweety, having inherited these roles from the legendary Mel Blanc. Of course, it wasn't a simple bequest - Bob had been in training for the job since he was 5 years old and it was well earned.

I've taken 4 different character voices workshops in the last 3 years: two at Edge Studio, one with Pat Fraley, Hillary Huber and Candi Milo, and one with Pat Fraley hosted by DB Cooper. I'm allowing myself this one more and then I am not allowed to take any more until I make a character voices demo - a real one!

If you're a voice actor in the New England area and are looking for an extraordinary educational opportunity, you can join Bob Bergen 17-18 May 2008 by contacting Anthony Piselli.

MCM Voices — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 13:11:00 +0000

Peter O'Connell responds.

Voice talent Peter O'Connell took time from his busy schedule of bagel noshing to respond to my breakfast story with a wonderful & hilarious post about networking and marketing. Peter is a very funny guy, but his post is not purely comedy - it is full of excellent ideas for voice actors (and all business people).

And, I'm very relieved to report, Peter has excused me for the time being from the requirement to leave my grape-nuts, Kefir and berries behind and go out into the world for bagels with potential colleagues. It isn't the time, the venue, or the meal that matters, of course - it's networking early and often. Take karate for example - one of my few long-term rituals. A few weeks ago I read about a medical communications company I had not heard of (it's huge, so I must have been networking with ostriches before this). I entered a few key words into Google to learn more about it and try to find someone whom I might contact about medical narration. To my astonishment, Google Desktop turned up an email in one of my very own folders from a karate colleague in New York. She is the Creative Director at this company! And she put me in touch with the head of the video department there - who as it turns out attended the same small private school I attended in Manhattan years ago.

I assure you that no bagels changed hands in all of this. And no grape-nuts. No food at all. As in karate, I realised (again) that you must always keep your eyes open and be aware of your surroundings.

Which is what Peter O'Connell has been saying all along. So take a marketing and networking lesson from Peter. He knows his stuff. And if you ever have him over to breakfast, give him a cinnamon raisin bagel, not toasted, with butter. Hold the Pepsi. Now, stop reading this post and go read his!!

MCM Voices — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:52:00 +0000

Why I Don’t Conduct Voice-over Business Over Breakfast Like Peter O’Connell Does.

My friend Peter O’Connell is a voice talent, producer and marketing expert, and he is one of my heroes. He’s full of ideas and of energy that he invests in his business and in his family, friends, and colleagues and he’s always coming up with something new. So, when Peter says that over the years he has conducted a lot of lucrative business at the breakfast place he visits every single morning of the work week, I feel I should be listening, but the fact is I cannot bring myself to do what he does. Why is that?

In science one often speaks in terms of proximate and ultimate explanations. The latter are the “real” ones, the former are the superficial ones that sort of masquerade as explanations. Let me first talk about the proximate explanation for why I breakfast at home. This is best represented by the photograph I took of my breakfast this morning: Grape-nuts and Kefir with flax seed meal, topped with fresh and frozen berries, with a side of Celestial Seasonings Honey Lemon Ginseng green tea.

OMG. So yummy. The only place I know that serves this nutritious repast bursting with beneficial phytochemicals is my own place here by the river with the newly arrived Eastern Phoebes (the first insectivorous migratory birds of the season in this region) buzzing their euphonious song from the leafless branches. So there’s that. Then the fact that I seem to spend my first waking hours in service to the other members of my family – getting the kids to school since invariably they miss their ride these days because they are young teenagers and the school system’s start times are designed to give the most sleep to the kids who need it the least (the elementary schoolers) while those who need it most have to be out the door at an inhumane hour (or maybe it’s because they have a lousy mother who lets them stay up too late). And to save on gas my husband takes public transportation to work, but I drive him to the bus. Three days out of five, I then park the car at the college and spend the morning in my Spanish and German classes (you really don't need to point out that we should be riding our bikes. We already know it and are actually going to do it today). The other two days I get to spend the whole day in the studio and am glad not to have to go anywhere.

So the truth is, fitting a business breakfast into my daily routine is not something I have felt strongly motivated to do – the quarterly Chamber of Commerce breakfasts are a different story entirely – I look forward to those tremendously, as well as the monthly Arrive@5’s and the Chamber’s Tourism Committee meetings. But I often think of Peter’s daily ritual and wonder what I am missing out there. I wonder, does it have to be breakfast? Perhaps this fixation on breakfast is a matter of convenience and economy – breakfast is early and cheap. But what about a mid-morning coffee or tea – we could bring back “elevenses”! And, would it have to be every day? I don’t do well with ritual that requires effort. And finally, where would be the best place in my area for this to occur?

I have thoughts of experimenting with breakfast and elevenses and visiting a different local establishment each week to try to determine where the most interesting people are hanging out, and if it is a regular occurrence for them. But I suspect it’s an experiment that’s doomed to fail. This is because you can’t go out a few times and expect something to happen RIGHT NOW. Business relationships are cultivated over the long term - and many of them, as with Peter's breakfast, probably start out as a social thing, not as an overtly business venture. You meet people and get to know them and trust them and vice versa, and maybe some day one of you can do something for the other in business. And I just know that I don’t have the personality for a daily or even weekly ritual that requires what would be required for me to have what Peter O’Connell has developed over many years. I think you have to LIKE doing it in order for it to work. The closest I have come to ritual is going to karate class several times a week, which I’ve been doing for 7 years – but that is a ritual with infrastructure that makes it easier for me to go (I have friends there, my husband also goes, there are health benefits and a sense of accomplishment as well as spiritual peace). As for voice-over and marketing rituals, though, if it’s daily and it requires going somewhere, it just isn’t going to happen, which is a much simpler explanation and among the penultimate reasons why I don't do it (for clues to the ultimate reason, see yesterday's post on brain chemistry).

But I would love to enjoy these rituals vicariously – and I hope Peter will now oblige me by writing a blog post about the famous Fire-Up-the-Toaster-‘Cause-O’Connell-Just Pulled-Up Daily Breakfast Routine. How about it?

If you have a social/marketing ritual, I’d love to hear about it.

MCM Voices — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 14:43:00 +0000

Voice actors and the Edge Effect.

Last week during a vigorous house-cleaning event I unearthed a book I had read so long ago I didn’t even recognise it. Or at least, so much has happened since then that it seemed like a long time ago. The book is The Edge Effect by Eric Braverman, and it is about the influence of brain chemistry on personality, memory, attention and overall health.

Braverman asserts that there are four basic natures among humans, each one dominated by a different neurotransmitter (dopamine, acetylcholine, serotonin or GABA). The extensive Nature Assessment questionnaire in the book allows you to determine your nature, and with this information you can learn how to restore your system to balance (since we all seem to be out of whack in this mentally and physically stressful world).

There are many books on the market that claim to hold the key to restoring us to health, and after a while one becomes rather numb to these claims. But I have long felt that brain chemistry is the “final frontier” of medicine, that it truly does hold the key to so much of what can ail the body as well as the mind. I was interested to review my scores on the Nature Assessment and to remember that according to those scores I have an acetylcholine nature, which includes 17% of the population. This is what Dr. Braverman has to say about me and my kind:

A balanced acetylcholine nature is intuitive and innovative. You take pleasure in anything involving words, ideas, and communication, and are able to share your enthusiasm with others. This nature makes for ideal counselors, mediators, think tank members, yoga and meditation instructors, religious leaders, and members of public service organizations. Brain speed impacts the creative function, so artists, writers, advertising professionals and actors are all likely to be acetylcholine dominant. An educator with an acetylcholine nature would gravitate toward teaching art or literature; an accountant would gravitate toward specializing in forecasting and projects, and a plumber might find himself teaching in a trade school.

Well, I didn’t teach art or literature, I taught biology, although I always had the feeling I should have been in the humanities. That may be what made me good at teaching biology though – it was hard for me to understand it, so after I had finally wrestled the subject to the ground, I was able to explain it in a way that a non-scientist could comprehend.

We are in the very early stages of understanding the brain, and I imagine that the information in Braverman's book is going to seem simplistic in a few years, but I find it very intriguing. Fellow voice talent, if you happen upon a copy of Braverman’s book and take the time to answer the questions on the Nature Assessment test, stop back and let me know how it turned out. I’m curious to know if we’re all in that 17% together!

MCM Voices — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:38:00 +0000

Voice-over Networking: NATURE Edition.

You just never know what cool events are going to pop up in my little town. A few days ago I heard, rather at the last minute, that the local PBS station was hosting an evening with Fred Kaufman, Executive Producer of Nature. I love those shows, and documentaries are of course of great interest to a voice-over artist since they are almost always narrated. So I inquired and there had been a cancellation and I managed to get a ticket. The event was held at my beloved Garden House at Look Park, just a mile and a half from my house, so that made it all the more appealing.

The lovely stone fireplace was once again blazing with a welcoming fire, just as it was the last time I attended an event at the Garden House. On exhibit were the winning photographs from the WGBY Wild About Nature Photography contest, as well as a number of other excellent nature photographs by local artists. I marveled at these wonderful works and had a very pleasant conversation with a WGBY staffer, who kindly requested my business card so he could pass it along to one of his colleagues at the station.

Ample h’ors d’oeuvres prepared by the Blue Heron Restaurant were available, and I helped myself and took a seat next to the small band, Cidade, which was playing Latin music. A guitarrist, violinist, bassist and percussionist made up the group, and whereas I suppose I should have been networking, I couldn’t tear myself away from this wonderful music. I had never before heard a band play tangos as listening music – most bands don’t even seem to know what they are.

Before long it was time for the warm-up act for Mr. Kaufman: Julie Ann Colier, a raptor rehabilitator from Wingmasters, brought along several owls and hawks to show us. Julie grew up in western Massachusetts and she talked about some of the changes in status of these birds since her childhood, such as the drastically reduced numbers of the American Kestrel – our smallest falcon – due to pesticide use. The owls she brought, as well as the Red-tailed Hawk, are doing fine, but numbers of the beautiful Golden Eagle have declined sharply in the northeast in the last 40 years.

Fred Kaufman gave a wonderful talk about some of the highlights of the projects he has worked on over the last 25 years with Nature. He also showed film clips from several of them including the famous footage of a fox hunting mice during winter at Yosemite, and an incredibly touching scene of two female elephants being reunited after two decades apart. One clip he did not show is included in a two-part program currently airing entitled “What females want and what males will do” (6 April and 13 April 2008). Featured in this footage is the courtship dance of a manakin (I believe it’s the red-capped manakin, Pipra mentalis). I found a video of this on Youtube, set to Michael Jackson music (you’ll see why).

I talked with Mr. Kaufman after the program, and learned that they now have one narrator whom they use for all their Nature documentaries – the wonderfully talented F. Murray Abraham. A great choice! Of course, I had hoped that they were adrift and scanning the small towns of western Massachusetts for a voice actor to take over this job, but I cannot deny that Mr. Abraham has more film credits than I. I’m working on that though!

A most enjoyable evening! As always, the WGBY staff did a super job of organising and publicising a wonderful event.

MCM Voices — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 01:00:00 +0000

When a voice actor gets sick - Or, what I learned about misery this week.

Until this week I hadn’t been sick in two years. I attribute this to my generally good nutrition, regular exercise, and a bottle of the black elderberry extract I take when I feel like I might be coming down with something (it’s supposed to have potent anti-viral properties). But this week my usual arsenal was no match for the flu bug that my sons brought home with them and actually, I had run out of elderberry syrup and replaced it with capsules which seemed like a more economical way to achieve the desired result. Either the capsules just don’t work as well or there was nothing that was going to stand in this bug’s way - I’ve had a fever and wicked respiratory symptoms for 5 days. Now that I seem to be on the road to recovery though, and thus cannot be accused of whining, I wanted to make note of a few things that helped me.

There are scads of over-the-counter remedies for cold and flu symptoms, and I must say, there isn’t much of value out there. I’ve never found a commercial product that has any effect on a dry, hacking cough. Yesterday, at the height of my misery and despair, I Googled “dry cough relief” and came up with a most astonishing recipe. It contains cayenne pepper, ginger, cider vinegar and honey. I mixed up this potion, wondering if I was the world’s most gullible person, but I was truly desperate. I tentatively tasted the brew, blinked rapidly numerous times and yelled, “I say!!” It did not taste good, but it was not the nastiest thing I’d ever tasted either. It was extremely potent and extraordinarily effective. Whereas up until that minute I could hardly stop coughing, I was able to take a lovely nap after this, undisturbed by the vicious hacking. And I have scarcely coughed since. I took a few more doses of pepper potion during the afternoon and evening, attempted to drown myself in my Neti pot, and then took a hit of an oxymetazoline hydrochloride 0.05% spray (the generic equivalent of Afrin) at bedtime. My sinuses by this time were pretty worn out from abuse, but I managed to sleep peacefully for about 7 hours, my first good night’s sleep in 5 days. I still woke up with a fever and my throat felt like I’d left it out on a craggy mountain peak at around 12,000 feet elevation with a cold wind blowing, but as the day wore on it became clear that I was out of the woods. Oh, and slippery elm tea is a must for soothing the throat. I use Throat Coat by Traditional Medicinals , purchased at the local supermarket. It's pricey at nearly $5 per box of 16 bags, but it's worth it.

So, what effect did this have on my voice-over work? Needless to say, it wasn’t a good thing, but I managed to get most of my work out of the way early in the week before my voice sounded too terrible. I had some scripts from a regular client yesterday and today and promised them I would re-do them in a few days if they wanted me to, and then had some jobs come in late today that I plan to do tomorrow when I’m pretty sure I will sound normal or close to it. In short, I sort of dodged raindrops all week and managed to get through without having to say I was too sick to work. The universe can be quite obliging that way, and I was pretty darn lucky this week.

You will doubtless want the recipe for the anti-cough potion and here it is:

¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
¼ teaspoon powdered ginger
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
1 tablespoon honey
2 tablespoons water

Dose: maybe 2 teaspoons

I accept no responsibility for what will happen to you if you try it. For me, it was miraculous. My thanks to Bonnie K. McMillen, RN for sharing the recipe.

MCM Voices — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 17:16:00 +0000

Richard Thomas in voice-over session at Tapeworks.

Erin Paul of Tapeworks in nearby Hartford, CT was kind enough to send me the following press release (thank-you Erin! I'm always pleased to hear news of local studios):

Richard Thomas, renowned TV and stage actor, visited Hartford’s Tapeworks recording studios Tuesday to record voiceover tracks for Mercedes-Benz latest radio and TV spots.

The session was recorded using ISDN technology, which allowed Thomas to voice the spots in Hartford while being recorded by a production team in NYC. An in-studio monitor screen provided a video reference for the TV spots, giving Thomas the feel and attitude needed for his delivery.

Television and movie actors are often chosen to voice commercials even though their voices aren’t always recognized by the average viewer when their face isn't shown on-screen.

Mercedes-Benz chose Thomas as the voice of their new campaign, much of which promotes the Certified Pre-Owned sector of their dealerships. Thomas warm and soothing voice credibly amplifies Mercedes’ pride in their cars and engineering skills while affirmatively answering the old chestnut; Would you buy a used car from this man?

Thomas is in Hartford this week performing 12 Angry Men at the Bushnell. The show went on tour in February, and opened Tuesday night in Hartford and will run through Sunday March 30th.

Tapeworks is celebrating its 33rd year as a Hartford mainstay. The studio is regularly the temporary home of TV and movie celebrities when their voices are needed elsewhere.

Richard Thomas (left) wraps Mercedes session with the help of Tapeworks staffer Erin Paul (right)

MCM Voices — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 01:08:00 +0000

Getting things done: Voice-over Edition

This is a follow-up to my previous post on success in voice-over. In order to be successful, we have to get things done. I think many of us become paralysed when a task seems too big and we just can’t find a way to get started on it. How can we overcome the obstacles of our own making that stand in the way of success?

A gazillion books have been written on productivity and we all have our individual approaches to it. I tend to clean my house as a sort of displacement activity and hope that a clean and uncluttered environment will set the stage for a serious look at what I’m trying to accomplish at higher levels. After a big project such as writing a paper and submitting it for publication, I always cleaned and organised my office and lab – lots of tasks of all sizes are neglected while one is working on something big, so that phase of regrouping was important for me and although I used to wish I could just jump right into the next big project, I came to accept this tidying behavior as inevitable and even necessary.

Recently, as I have gotten more and more busy with voice-over work and have been thinking of more and more projects I would like to do – some of which simply are not getting done – I’ve started looking at more systematic ways of organising both the creative and the mundane tasks of life. About a month ago I had a stack of reading material next to my bed that I was trying to get through. Much of this consisted of library books and most of them were overdue. Among them: “Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-free Productivity” by David Allen. Well, color me pink but I never did make it all the way through the book. I did get the gist of it though - Allen’s system requires that you get all your projects and tasks out of your head and onto paper or some other organisational venue (an electronic list). This is the basic premise, so that while you’re tackling one project you aren’t distracted by all the other ones that are still floating around in your mind. Get them all out, and focus on one at a time.

Now, one at a time does not mean, take one project, and do whatever it takes to complete it before moving on to the next. No, grasshopper!! It means, while you are focussed on that one project, you should not be thinking about all the other things you have to do. Getting everything out of your head and on paper (or in electrons) means your mind is free. You know you aren't going to forget all the other stuff, because you have captured it! So while you're working on one thing, you aren't distracted by the rest. More important than that, for me, is his recommendation that you think about each of your projects, and figure out what is needed to move that project forward. Sort of a this-is-the-house-that-Jack-built type of exercise, since the action that is needed to move it forward might well have its own thing that is required to move it forward.

For a whole detailed explanation of this productivity system you’ll have to read the book, and to help you decide if you want to read it, try this excellent summary by Trent at The Simple Dollar. You might also want to look into Kristine Oller’s Feeding Your Focus: How creative people can move forward faster and achieve sustained success – which might turn out to be a better bet for many of us since Allen’s system, however wonderful, is not for all personality types. Bobbin Beam has summarised Oller’s new book at her voice-over blog.

If you’re in the early stages of your voice-over career, one of your obstacles might be that you’re just not sure how to approach the whole thing. In my case, I was teaching molecular biology and doing research and suddenly started to think I needed to try something else. I was browsing books at Amazon and mentally auditioning careers, focussing initially on books about acting. A book about voice-acting popped up and I was transfixed. This was perfect because I was very interested in acting but too shy to be able to consider being on stage. Vocal mimicry was a tremendous interest since childhood, as was reading aloud.

I kept going at my academic job, continued to research voice-acting and discovered a voice-acting school in San Francisco. Well, I was just out of luck, wasn’t I? How could I attend a San Francisco school if I lived in New England? I finally stumbled upon Edge Studios in Connecticut and New York, then discovered The Learning Annex in New York and that led me to Charles Michel, the coach with whom I ultimately did my pivotal training and recorded my first demo. So it was at least a year between the time I first thought of voice acting and the time I officially hung out my shingle. If I had approached this a bit more systematically, asking, what do I need to do to move this project (of becoming a voice actor) forward, I might have proceeded with questions like these:

What is the first thing I need to do to get started?

Answers: read books on voice acting and see what they say about getting started, or, find an actual voice-over actor and ask them.

The books and the voice actor consultants will tell you that the quick answer to this question is: find a coach. You could also read aloud daily, watch TV and listen to all the commercials, record the ones you like, play them over and over, copy the styles you like, write down the script, and if you have a tape recorder or better yet, a Zoom H2 recorder, record it and then play it back and listen to what you’ve done. And although you should do all that anyway, the quickest way to launch your training is to find a good coach.

So, how do you find a good coach?

Again, you can ask other voice actors, if you have access to them – “ask” them indirectly by listening to demos at voicebank and identifying your favorites and finding out who coached that actor. You can visit Harlan Hogan’s wonderful resource and look at the list of coaches in your area and start looking them up and doing background research on them to see what other people have to say about them (because you certainly want to find out if the coach you have in mind can deliver the goods, give you seriously good training and direct you in the recording of your voice demo, and not just grab your money and leave you with dreck or nothing).

Later, after the demo has been recorded and reviewed and tweaked and you finally like it, a new obstacle will arise – how do you physically get it into the ears of those who need to hear it? Do you make CDs? People do still ask for them, especially in the big cities. So how do you make them into CDs? You need art work for the cover. Where do you get art work? You can design it yourself or hire a graphic designer – and so on.

The point here is not to tell you how to proceed each step of the way, but to suggest breaking everything into steps, especially if you find you are not moving forward with something that you really want to do. If you find yourself with a great demo and then months pass and you haven’t done anything with it - what’s the delay? What will it take to move ahead and how do you make that happen? Obstacles are by no means limited to people just getting started – all of us will come up against them as we proceed down the voice-over path, or any other path in life. That’s why it can be so helpful to do a brain dump and get all our goals and projects onto paper and examine what we need to do to make them happen. Maybe we decide we want to make a “niche” demo, one that showcases voice-over work in one sector of the business, such as eLearning - but for some reason, we aren’t doing anything to make that happen. What will it take? Get it on paper or in a Word document or a sticky – it might look like this:

To Make eLearning Demo
list clients for whom I’ve done eLearning jobs
find the audio files for those jobs and put them in one folder
review the files and choose ones that represent a variety of subject matter and styles
identify the scripts I like but for which I might see room for improvement in my delivery
re-record those scripts
select a 10-second segment from each of the chosen files/scripts
order the segments in a way that shows them to their best advantage
produce the demo (do it myself, or barter with a friend who can do it for me – whatever)
seek a critique from someone I trust, or trust my own judgement

Once it’s broken down into actionable steps, it just isn’t as daunting as it might have seemed when it was only floating around as “I should really make a new demo”. And most of the steps are no big deal! Even for bigger projects like, learn Spanish, or, get a role on a TV series, all of this can be broken down into small steps for which there is an action (some steps admittedly more challenging than others, but nevertheless, do-able!). It’s just so important to do this exercise because without it we may just have this vague unrest about the whole thing and become convinced that there is something beyond our control that is preventing us from achieving our goals. In most cases, that ‘something” is completely within our grasp, after all.

Now remember, all of this is part of success in voice-over. If you start doing this and discover you’re getting all kinds of stuff accomplished, just make sure you give some thought to how you’re going to deal with the success when it comes! Are you ready for it?

MCM Voices — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 00:58:00 +0000

Success in Voice-over: What are you afraid of?

This week my friend and colleague Liz Solar and I each drove to the center of the state to meet for lunch (she from eastern Massachusetts and I from the west). I met Liz two years ago at the amazing Women in Animation workshop run by Pat Fraley and Hillary Huber, with guest Candi Milo, and we’ve kept in touch ever since.

Liz and I talked over our lunch about everything under the sun, but heavy on the voice-over of course. She mentioned she had read an article in that day’s Boston Globe about Scott Chapin, who voices promos from his New Mexico studio 10 hours a day. We talked about what kinds of sacrifices a voice talent might have to make in order to sustain that kind of schedule, and it made me wonder, how many of us in this business are ready for that level of success?

Many of us believe we would like to be so successful as voice talent that the jobs are coming in all day, every day. Or that we would like to have a regular role on an animated series, or land roles in feature films. Are you one of those people? If you aren’t there yet, are you actively engaged in bringing your dreams to reality? If not, what is holding you back? Children at home? Caring for a relative? Civic duties? Are you waiting until you “get organised”? Or until you get a killer character demo made or until you save up enough to build a better studio? If you achieve this success, what impact will it have on life as you know it?

Do you know where you want to be? Have you sat down to think seriously about how to get from where you are now, to that place? What will it take?

MCM Voices — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 15:21:00 +0000

Creating Your Own Voice-over Career.

Among the things I love about a career in voice-over: the endless opportunities to create. But I think life offers opportunities to create no matter what you do. In my previous career as a biologist, I wrote a lot of papers based on rather dry data. When I wasn’t generating dry data and writing about them, I wrote papers that weren’t based on data at all. In a paper on homology and the ontological relationship of parts, I compared historical pathways in evolutionary biology to the transformation of the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz from an all-flesh person to an all-tin person, or to the complete turnover of members in a baseball team that nevertheless does not change “the Yankees” into some other, separate historical entity. A paper on phylogenetic constraint was my favorite project ever, because it released me from the bonds of data and let me play with ideas to my heart’s content. Later, as a program director at the National Science Foundation, it was more challenging to find ways to have fun and create, but when I needed to give a presentation to discuss the history of funding in my program and the distribution of dollars across taxonomic groups, I made a huge “tree of life” that filled the conference room, with “apples” on the tree to represent grants awarded (it was quite effective, by the way, and paved the way for a major funding initiative at the foundation).

Tree of Life project, National Science Foundation

And whenever a poster or flyer was needed, I volunteered. So the panelists we invited to help us make the final decisions about funding grant proposals found their way to the conference room with this:

or this:

The point is, you can create your own opportunities for both work and fullfilment no matter what else is going on in your life. Whether your voice-over career is keeping you hopping, or whether you sometimes find yourself with down time, you can be creating something.

Casting director Bonnie Gillespie wrote yet another excellent article this week for The Actor's Voice called Back to Basics, covering the latest thinking on headshots, resumés, and the other tools of the actor’s trade. In it is a section entitled Put Yourself Out There – a call to action if you’re looking for ways to get yourself on the map. How do you get on the map? You put yourself there!! She writes about a talented actor-writer comedy team who produced their own short film, Girl's Night Out, to showcase their skills, which became a featured video on Youtube (thanks to additional legwork on the part of the creators – you don’t have to wait for that to happen either) and has led to some great opportunities for them. Bonnie is so right about the importance of creating your own work.

Ideas and opportunities come when you least expect them. A lot of the auditions and scripts I get are interesting, a lot are, well…. not. Last fall I got an audition script for Ariat boots that I really loved, and although I didn’t expect anything to come of this audition, I wanted to do something with it. I got my friend, voice-over talent & production wizard Ben Wilson to work on it with me and we came up with a piece we’re both very proud of. No, we didn’t get the gig (yes of course they were nuts not to hire us – thanks for mentioning it!) but we got a wonderful showpiece that we thoroughly enjoyed creating, and it has brought us other work. Sometimes I get nutty ideas for commercials. I know nobody is going to produce them, so I do it myself. Or I just stick stuff into projects I’ve been hired to do, just because. A long-standing client wrote me yesterday that he has left AuctionPal, the company he founded three years ago and for which he hired me to create the young and energetic, British-accented Piper as their spokesperson. AuctionPal is doing great, and he's still closely associated with them, but he needs new outlets for his own energy and creativity so he’s starting a new internet marketing company, Double Vision. He’s interested in hiring me to do the telephone answering system and wanted me to try out some voices, so this is what I sent him.

The next time you find work slowing down (not that you would ever admit to anybody that that happens – cuz that would be putting negative energy out there and it gets in your way and trips you), don’t wring your hands over it – do something about it! Send out more postcards, make more calls, write more emails, do more networking – but also, create something. Don’t know how to make Flash animations? Find a friend who does or take a class. Lack production skillz? Collaborate. Get busy. If people aren’t hiring, hire yourself to create a showpiece. It will keep you in tip-top creative shape, you’ll have a blast, and you never know where it might take you.

MCM Voices — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:57:00 +0000

100 + Industry Resources for Voice Over Talent.

Stephanie Ciccarelli at Voices.com maintains a very active blog with tons (tonnes) of useful information for voice talent. Her recent post on industry resources lists voice-over discussion boards, books, VO coaches, podcasts, marketing and rate information, and blogs about voice-over, including blogs by many of my colleagues & friends. And of course, no list of voice-over blogs would be complete without the MCM Voices Voiceover Blog (pssst, in case you've forgotten- that's where you are now)! Thank-you Stephanie, for the link and for your untiring efforts on behalf of the voice-over industry. Your work is truly appreciated.

MCM Voices — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:55:00 +0000

Source Connect at MCM Voices.

As of today I am able to offer Source Connect to my clients. My studio has a Lawson L47 FET microphone running into a John Hardy M-1 preamp, and thence to an Echo MiaMidi soundcard into Adobe Audition – a very clean signal chain.

The story of how I prepared to get Source Connect might be of interest to others who are considering how to get studio quality audio to their clients in real time, without the expense of installing and maintaining ISDN. Source Connect can be used with any recording software that supports VST plugins, not just Pro Tools – the Source Elements Desktop allows you to record audio, transmit it to a client as you’re recording, and store the audio on your own system to be opened up in any recording program you have. You pay only for the Source Connect program, there are no monthly fees, and you can bridge to ISDN if your client has ISDN but not Source Connect, although there is a fee for that service using bridge providers such as Out of Hear or Digifone. The basic SC package costs $395 and you can try it free for 15 days. ElDorado Recording Services sells Source Connect Standard for $395 including 1 hour of setup time by phone.

My first hurdle was to get my computer back on the Internet. I had taken it off nearly two years ago in order to protect my audio recording empire from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and got a second computer to use for everything but audio. All the audio files have thus had to be transferred to the second computer for uploading to clients, which I do with a jump drive – slightly tedious but I got used to it quickly and it’s very fast. Nothing at all has gone wrong with the dedicated audio workstation in all of that time, although the Internet-connected computer has crashed a couple of times – so I was not very keen on exposing that workstation to the world again. Nevertheless, it had to be done if I was going to use Source Connect. So the first thing I needed to buy was a new 25-ft ethernet cable. Once I connected that cable to my computer, I went to the Microsoft website to get all the downloads my cloistered computer had missed out on over the last two years – a couple of screens’ worth. It didn’t take very long for all the upgrades to be installed, and so far nothing bad has happened to my machine. I will continue to use it only for audio - no email or other downloads.

Since I’m not in the habit of using headphones while recording, I needed to buy a pair so that I would be able to hear the client during recording sessions, and I needed a headphone extension cable. I got a pair of Sennheiser HD 280’s from Amazon Marketplace. I do use headphones for editing, plugging them into the computer’s other soundcard (a Soundblaster Audigy 2). Since the Echo soundcard does not have a headphone jack, I bought a Samson C-Control which plugs into the Echo card and the headphones plug into the C-Control (which also has a talkback feature if I ever need to play engineer while somebody else is on the mic). So now I’m monitoring playback via the Echo card instead of the Soundblaster. I needed two patch cables for plugging the C-Control into the Echo card, a headphone splitter so I could plug two sets of headphones into the C-Control’s headphone jack, and a couple of ¼” stereo adapter plugs for the headphones (which have mini-plugs). The one other item I needed was an iLok dongle, which is required for the Source Elements license.

Prior to setting up Source Connect, I needed to check my upload speed to make sure the audio would be transferring from my system to my clients’ at a speed adequate for good sound quality. This is something I actually didn’t check until the Source Elements Desktop was installed, and I was testing Source Connect and discovered my audio was “jittery”. I had to postpone further testing until I could check with my Internet Service Provider (Verizon) and learn that I needed to upgrade my service. Verizon offered this upgrade to me for less than what I had been paying for my DSL (let’s not even go there). My download speed had been around 1500 kilobits per second, which was fine, but my upload speed was only around 125 kbs. It needs to be between 300 and 400 kbs for Source Connect to work properly. With the upgrade, my download speed is now closer to 3000 kbs and upload is over 700 kbs. You can Google “check upload speed” and you’ll have a number of choices to see how fast your data are coming from and going out to the internet. I used speedtest several times to check on the status of my upgrade, and was pleased to discover that it was in place a full 8 hours earlier than promised. By the way, for anyone interested in calling their ISP to inquire about upgrading service – do not go anywhere near tech support, go right to the billing department.

So, once my hardware was all in place, the next step was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done – I got an expert to help me with the rest. George Whittam of ElDorado Recording Services in Los Angeles is an audio engineer and an authorized Source Connect re-seller. George has helped many voice-over artists with audio workstation installations and maintenance and with Source Connect installations - including Don LaFontaine - and I decided to let him handle this. At a time convenient for both of us we talked on the telephone and he used LogMeIn to enable him to see my desktop and control my mouse. I watched and took notes while he downloaded Source Elements Desktop and synchronised it with my iLok. The appearance of the SC control panel wasn’t right and he got Source Connect on the telephone in no time and learned that I needed to have Quicktime installed on my computer for Source Elements Desktop to operate properly. If you're using a Windows computer and have never used Quicktime, you would need to download the Quicktime software from Apple. Mac users are all set as Quicktime comes pre-installed on a Mac. That was soon accomplished and the SC installation was done. We tested it, which is when we discovered the problem with the upload speed, so the completion of the testing was postponed until after that was resolved.

Now all the pieces are in place and Source Connect works great. I’m so glad I had George Whittam to help me – keeping up with all the moving parts of the voice-over business can be quite challlenging and there are times when it just makes sense to get help, especially since George’s help with installation is included when you buy Source Connect from him! The math was pretty easy on that one. George understands the voice-over world and knows what we need; furthermore he’s just a great guy to work with. I had decided last month that my goal was to have this project completed by the time I sent out my March newsletter, and since that was today, I made it! Setting goals is an excellent thing. Now, it remains to be seen whether Source Connect will change the landscape of my client base - I think that part is up to me. So if you will excuse me, I have some marketing to do!

MCM Voices — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:35:00 +0000

Public speaking – be prepared!

My two college language courses are a constant source of amusement, challenge, and beneficial stress for me. Today I was to give a 15-minute presentation in Spanish class (in Spanish, of course!) on a topic of my choice – anything of interest in recent headlines from a Spanish-speaking country. I chose to discuss censorship in Cuba, which has been in the news recently as Raúl Castro, filling in for his ailing brother Fidel, has invited discussion about the societal problems of the country. Despite this new openness, censorship is nevertheless an ongoing occurrence. I planned to give an overview of what has been in the news on this topic during the last month, and then to discuss the lyrics of a recently censored song, Mala Leche, by the group Moneda Dura. I would conclude by showing a video of the band performing this song.

Last semester I started preparing for the required oral Spanish presentation weeks in advance. Now I am much more relaxed and since today’s effort was solo, I didn’t have to worry about coordinating with other students. So, I started preparations this past weekend. Before long a perfectly swell PowerPoint presentation (strongly encouraged by our professora) was taking shape, and by last night all was in order.

The best-laid plans of course went immediately awry this morning, as the computer in the classroom was not allowing us to log on to the college network so I couldn’t access my PowerPoint slides. Several people got up to try to access the file; I gave them about 30 seconds and then walked away from the podium and gave as compelling a presentation as I could without any visual aids, and without notes. As a veteran of many many biology lectures and conference talks, I learned early in my career (and fortunately not the hard way!) to prepare for the worst, and I always make sure that whenever I have to speak publicly I can do it with nothing but my voice if the other equipment isn’t working. It’s excruciating to be a member of an audience where a speaker is having technical difficulties – nobody wants to see it and no speaker should ever stand helplessly by while a technician attempts to save the day. I think one of the benefits of being without slides is that the audience pays closer attention to the spoken words, since they aren’t distracted by pretty pictures or by trying to figure out what the graphs are about. Fortunately, we were able to get onto the internet in time to access the video, and I had already distributed copies of the words to the song. Thus, my hope is that if my fellow students remember this talk at all, they will remember interesting ideas about Cuba, rather than a hapless speaker who wasted 15 minutes of class time trying to get their slides onto the screen. I would admonish anyone preparing to give any kind of talk – technology is wonderful, but don’t depend on it, and you will never have to worry about what you’re going to find when you get to the podium.

MCM Voices — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 16:12:00 +0000

Voice-over Networking in Real Life.

Today was one of my Chamber of Commerce’s quarterly “Meet and Eat” breakfast events, which took place at my very favorite venue: the Garden House at Look Park. It was a frigid morning, so there was no lingering in the garden today, but the crackling blaze in the great stone fireplace offered considerable consolation.

As I recently noted in my earlier post about networking, these events are not the place for sales pitches – in fact, the only time for a sales pitch is when somebody is actually talking about hiring you for a job but they maybe aren’t 100% sure about their choice. My goal in attending these events is to broaden my circle of acquaintances, find something of interest to discuss, and just plant seeds (and what better place for that than a Garden House? Heh). Of course, I always welcome the bonus of meeting somebody who could eventually be a client, such as a producer or an ad agency employee, but when I walk into these events to a sea of unfamiliar faces, I’m usually just relieved to find a vacant seat and get into it. This morning I was seated between the marketing director of a retirement community, and the marketing director for a lumber company. Neither of them knew what voice-over was, and I was happy to enlighten them and then to learn about their jobs before our guest of honor took the podium.

The guest of honor was none other than our city’s mayor. I had never heard her speak before and I tell you, she is quite the comedienne - a seriously funny lady. I just googled her name and found two listings in Wikipedia – one for an English Actress and one for an American Politician (that’s her) who surprisingly has no obvious improv background. I’m now up-to-date on many city issues and feel a little better about what had sounded like an ill-advised plan to expand our landfill - but The Honorable kinda talked me into it.

So, I was thinking, what a pleasant morning, pity that I couldn’t make myself do a bit more glad-handing and meet a few more people, particularly media-type people, but when you go to a sit-down meal you’re primarily limited to the people with whom you’re sitting. At that point, the old glass fishbowl full of business cards was brought up to the podium and our MC read off the winners of the door prizes. I’m starting to think my friend Slav Vaskevich of Vaskevich Studios put some kind of magnetic substance on my business cards, because I was once again a winner. This time: two tickets to a wine-tasting event at the end of this month at….

drumroll please…

WGBY Public Television.

Somebody is definitely watching out for me these days.

MCM Voices — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 22:29:00 +0000

German Voice-over at MCM Voices!

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I love languages and that I’ve been taking Spanish for a while with the goal of being able to offer voice-over in Spanish. The language I’ve studied the longest besides English, however, is actually German. I started taking it in 7th or 8th grade, continued through high school and college, and the last German course I took was when I was a university faculty member back in the not-even-gonna say when-ties! I audited a course at that time, since I was considering spending some time at the University of Vienna working with a colleague in developmental evolutionary biology and wanted to brush up (I ended up working at the National Science Foundation instead). Because I started relatively young, my accent is close to perfect. I could get along just fine if you dropped me off in a Spanish-speaking country, but my German still sounds better than my Spanish right now. Still, I expected to be offering Spanish voice-over in the near future, not German. Last month, a German narration job dropped into my lap.

Okay, I actually moved my lap so that the job would fall in the right place. My friend Liz de Nesnera, who does voice-over in English and French, has a client who was looking for native German voice talent. I told her that if her client was desperate she could let him know that my German was very good. Apparently, he was, because he hired me. Not only that, he made the same mistake a few weeks later, and it looks like I’ll be working with him on a regular basis. I am really quite thrilled. It was a little scary at first, but I’m here to tell you, it is very good for us to stretch our wings and get out of the place where we’re comfortable.

So, it is back to school again for me. I took a one-week course in medical Spanish during interterm at the local college, and now am in Contemporary Culture (in Spanish) AND “high intermediate” German. I’ve survived the first week unscathed and am in linguistic heaven.

A link to a snippet of that first German narration job is here.

MCM Voices — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:39:00 +0000

Networking in voiceover.

In voice-over as in all business ventures we think a lot about networking, and numerous articles have been appearing about it lately in various internet haunts that I frequent, including voice actor haunts like the Voice Registry Blog. It’s an indispensable activity, intimately related to marketing. But, it is not marketing and it shouldn’t look like it. It's just making connections of all kinds in all kinds of ways. What does it look like for you?

I have several formal outlets for networking: my local Chamber of Commerce, my local Ad Club, and another local group called Hidden Tech. The Chamber has the most regular meetings – a monthly “Arrive at 5”, quarterly breakfast meetings, and in addition I’m a member of its tourism committee. The Ad Club has a monthly luncheon series and an annual holiday party. Hidden Tech meets occasionally. I have not seen any measurable benefit to my business from the Chamber or the Ad Club - but then, I'm not measuring! A member of Hidden Tech needed a favor, which I was able to perform, which led to her giving me a spot as a speaker in a program she was organising, which led to a reporter writing a story about me for the local paper, which led to a call from a toy maker who needed a voice for a talking doll. My goal in participating in these various organisations is to be part of a community, which is especially important for those of us who work alone. When I go to these meetings, my challenge as a shy person is to talk to one or two people in some depth (not the trap-your-neighbor-and-talk-their-ear-off kind of depth, more like, find something that interests them and get them to talk about it). I want to make sure they know what I do for a living, and everybody asks, just as I ask everybody what they do. But nobody wants a sales talk at a party – what a turn-off! For thoughts on how not to network see a recent article by Ilse Benun.

I’m sure I’m not alone in this – at networking events, far more often than we voice actors hear “oh, you do voice-overs? I might have a job for you!” we hear, “I’ve always wanted to get into that – how did you get started?” There is nothing to be lost by giving a helpful answer to that question. Although I didn’t get started in this business by asking a voice actor how to do it – I was already in the demo-in-hand marketing phase before I ever talked to a working voice actor besides my coach – I hope I will never be too busy to try to give somebody a hand if they need one. We are always hoping somebody will give us a hand and we need to make sure the universe is balanced! I really like what casting director Bonnie Gillespie has to say about that in her column, The Actor’s Voice:

How often do you meet with new-to-town, enthusiastic, completely-clueless-to-the-biz actors upon whose lives you could make a huge positive impact, just by showing them how to format their resumé or where to download sides? Not too often, right? ("Why would I? What's in it for me? Who has the time?" Exactly.) Well, let's seek to change that. Do a little mentoring. Pay it forward. Invest in a relationship with someone who offers you absolutely nothing whatsoever in return....It could even connect you with someone whose career will skyrocket long before yours does, and that person might be so grateful to you for the early support that you'll benefit in ways you never imagined possible.

Hear hear! At the very least, being helpful makes the world a more pleasant place for our own selfish selves - that's worthwhile in and of itself, isn't it??

Blogging is another way that I network. Most of what I write is just more internet noise, but occasionally something will resonate with people and then I get a lot of email about it. Most of the people I hear from are other voice actors, which is a great boon in this age of isolation. It’s really nice when people email and leave comments at my blog, and I try to do it myself at other blogs. If you’ve never left a comment here, please think about doing it – as soon as you leave a comment, you become visible – people learn that you exist. That’s a good thing! So leave one here, and then go to some of the blogs listed on the right and leave a comment there too.

I have to say that, so far, social networking has not taken up much of my networking time-budget. I have a profile at the major sites and a bunch of others, and have spent some time reviewing others’ profiles for possible connections. But I spend more than enough time on the computer as it is, and I SO do not need another reason to be here – there are more efficient ways to connect with colleagues and with potential clients, and I’m too old to be using them for friendship-related stuff (as it was so well stated at Beyond Madison Avenue: “social networking is only social if you’re alone”).

I think the most important thing to remember is that any networking you do as a voice actor and business person is like creating a garden from bare soil – you don’t plant only one kind of plant, such that your garden will look great for a week when all the flowers are blooming, and then there’s nothing going on at all. You’re planting for the present and for the future – a variety of annuals with different blooming times, a variety of perennials and shrubs and even some trees. Aim for great diversity, so that there is always something going on in your garden. Although I can't point to concrete ways that my business has benefited from all of my networking activities, I never know when some little seed I've planted at a party might take root and grow into something wonderful. It takes 3-5 years to establish a business, so get out there in the dirt and get busy!! And don’t forget to leave a comment to tell me how your garden grows.

Note on 5 Feb 2008: another article on acting and networking! It's in the air - as it always should be.

MCM Voices — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 15:57:00 +0000

Protecting your investment in voiceover.

What do you do to ensure you don’t provide voice-over work for free, unintentionally? You’ve worked hard to achieve your current professional status as a voice talent, you've made some hard decisions about the rates you will charge, you are striving to make a living, and you don’t want to give your work away except by your own choice. Most people who hire us are honest, and until recently, I’ve always gone into voice-over work relationships with nothing more than a virtual handshake unless my client has asked me to sign a contract or release form. These documents, by the way, are invariably created to protect the client, not to protect me.

A few things can go wrong when we’re working with people we’ve never met and are unlikely ever to see. One is that they can skip the step of paying you, or they can take months to pay. Another is that they pay you for one thing, but end up using your work for other applications. I’ve been in business as a voice talent for only 3 years, so I definitely have not seen everything, and would like to come up with effective ways to protect my work while not becoming paranoid and suspicious. So I’d like to review the possibilities, and would greatly appreciate input from colleagues about how to start a work relationship on the right foot.

I get most of my work from clients I’ve found by searching on my own for companies that might need the services of a voiceover professional, and from online freelance job postings. If the potential client has a website, that’s where I get my first impression of the company. If the site looks professional, that’s a good sign. If they are members of a civic organisation such as an ad club or chamber of commerce, that also speaks well for them – anyone in the habit of shady dealing is unlikely to want associations that raise their public profile and is unlikely to “waste” money joining such organisations. Membership in the Better Business Bureau is also a very positive sign; many businesses that are perfectly legitimate are not members, but it may be informative to look up the company on the BBB website since complaints can be filed about any business, not just members. So looking up the company at the BBB is an excellent way to do some preliminary checking on a potential client.

Your first communication about a voice-over job may be a request for an audition (Phase I). If I receive a very long script from someone with whom I’ve never worked and am asked for an audition, I just read a few choice paragraphs - possibly the intro and the outro and one paragraph from the middle - depending on the script I will look for a paragraph with technical terms so the client can see how I handle the complexities of the script. This way, they have a read that is long enough to tell them if I’m right for the job, but not the entire script. I prefer this to watermarking (adding music or a sound to make the recording unusable) because it lets the client hear what I do with their script without distraction, while still not doing the entire job.

If I’m hired, then it’s time for Phase II. As I said, I never used to do anything to protect myself from unscrupulous consumers of voice-over – starting from the premise that everybody is honest. Now, after a few negative experiences, it’s time to change that. I have a lot of colleagues who commonly request a 50% deposit via PayPal before starting work, and the rest upon completion. This is a great idea and I’ve recently started to implement it myself. It worked wonderfully well last month when I was looking forward to a quiet week during which I would finally have time to prepare for the holidays. Instead, I suddenly had an influx of work from new clients. I was hustling to get it all done and really did not want the stress of wondering whether all these people that I didn’t know were going to pay me. So, I asked them all for that 50% deposit unless they were referred to me by someone I knew, or in one case, I admit, I just had a good feeling about them and skipped that step (my instinct was good – they paid immediately). For some reason, many of us are uncomfortable about the money side of the business. If you’re new to this sort of procedure, as I am, I recommend writing out your payment policy and practise saying it, so that you can do it fluently and without flinching (or if your communication is by email, no problem – you’ve got the words at your fingertips). It's common practise to request a deposit on a service prior to delivery, particularly when the parties are conducting business remotely, so we all need to learn to do it. By the way, PayPal does charge a fee to the funds recipient (you). You can either consider this part of the cost of doing business and add the fees to your year's business expenses, or you can include them in your bill. Use this calculator to figure out in advance what the PayPal fee will be (thank-you Brian Hart for this link).

The policy of requiring a downpayment will take care of much of the potential problem of non-payment, unless you’re working with a client in another country that is unable to use Paypal. For such cases, you may be able to use Western Union instead of Paypal. For direct bank-to-bank wires, your bank may charge a fee for incoming transfers, as mine does – I solved that by shopping for a local bank that doesn’t, and opened an account there just for receiving wire transfers from overseas clients.

As for the clients who didn’t pay me – there have been two. The first one simply never paid and does not respond to my emails. The second one sent a check that bounced. Since my bank charges a fee in such cases, I actually had to pay to do that particular voice-over job, which I considered a pretty outrageous insult on top of the injury. I wrote to the client, who apologised profusely, said their bookkeeper had embezzled thousands and had been arrested, and he promised he would “make it up to me” right away. Six months later, he hasn’t. I submitted a complaint to the Better Business Bureau, who recently contacted me to tell me they had not received any response from the company. A review of the company on the BBB site reveals that they have a rating of “F” for not responding to complaints, of which there have been several. If I had done my homework I would have seen this and saved myself a headache, but I hope I have learned my lesson. I have no further plans to pursue payment for the work I did – it isn’t worth the exasperation.

Will I do the internet research, the BBB background check, and require the 50% deposit for all new clients from now on? Actually, probably not. For many of the jobs I get, I already know enough about the company to feel safe with them, either because they were referred to me by someone I trust, or because I was the one who made the initial contact and had already done my homework. And sometimes I just have a good feeling about them and decide to trust my instincts. If I have responded to an online job posting, however, and don’t actually know the name of the company until they contact me, that’s when I plan to require the deposit. Especially if their first effort to contact me is by phone, it’s important to be ready to explain that policy up front, before I do any work.

Another problem that can come up to threaten your investment in your voice and career is that of overexposure. This is something I had never really thought about until recently. A read I did for a TV commercial in a major market was later used for radio, so my voice was on the air waves a lot. It was a non-union job and I had signed a standard release. The reason this could be a problem was summed up well by Kara Edwards in a discussion at VoiceoverSavvy. She wrote:

I recently had to negotiate a contract with a company. We really hit a cross-roads with the rates I proposed for extra usage of the original audio. When I explained that it was less about money, and more about exposure...they totally agreed with me.

I'll explain: Let's say I sign a contract with company A to do a VO. I don't add anything into the contract about usage, and I give company A full legal right to do what they will with my audio. Company A takes the audio, puts it online, on TV, animates it, makes a talking doll with it, etc. Suddenly, my voice is being heard everywhere and I haven't made much money. Company B (a major corporation) creates a job I would be perfect for...but they are hesitant because my voice is already heard everywhere with company A (for little money), so they go with another actor. Now I am stuck.... (quoted with permission)

Kara further noted that

When I am contacted directly, I always repeat back to them what they've proposed...

"You need a :30 VO for a 13 week run in Louisiana, correct? The fee for this voice over will be $---.--. If you choose to use the audio in any additional manner, I've included my rate sheet for your convenience." (quoted with permission)

So in your preliminary negotiations with your clients, it's important to give some thought to how you will deal with usage fees, buy-outs (an additional fee to give your client unlimited use of the recording for a certain time period), interest on late payments, and other contigencies. You will find some very helpful templates that deal with these matters at Voices.com.

My thanks to Kara Edwards both for her wise words and for giving me permission to quote them. You can expect a blog post on this topic in the next few weeks by Kara herself at her own blog.

I welcome your comments about your own experiences with client agreements, contracts, non-payment and all that other bad stuff! What else should we be doing to minimise the bad stuff and maximise the good?

MCM Voices — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 23:54:00 +0000

Perceived Value in Voice-over.

Those of us in business to offer a service are sometimes challenged by those requiring the service. “I can get it cheaper", they tell you. My previous post on setting rates addresses this question in excruciating detail for the voice-over business (without going into much numerical detail) and might serve as a resource for those of you who come up against this with your clients. The purpose of my current post is to explore a related problem: how to make sure the question doesn’t come up in the first place. Our own attitudes and convictions will go a long way towards that end.

I used to work as curator of birds at a large midwestern university with a natural history museum. My job responsibilities included 1) advising students and teaching general biology (majors and non-majors courses) and evolutionary biology, 2) research and all that that entails (obtaining government funding and writing papers), and 3) curation of the bird collections (including writing grant proposals for collection infrastructure). We had regular curators’ meetings that included all the departments within the museum – birds, mammals, insects, molluscs and so forth. One of the topics that came up repeatedly was how to defend our existence to the dean of our college, who simply didn’t understand why a natural history museum was important. She did not see its value, so the threat of reduced funding and loss of paid positions was always hanging over us. This could be demoralising. A few years ago I heard George W. Bush on the news referring to the Smithsonian Institution as “the nation’s bug collection” as he slashed funding for its programs. A "bug collection" can be a source of pride - a national treasure - or a derogatory term, depending on how it's uttered and how it's perceived.

In contrast, the American Museum of Natural History is a private institution, not subject to the budgetary whims of a president with an agenda that does not include ‘bugs”, nor a dean whose short-sightedness affects their bottom line. The museum has a charismatic leadership that understands the importance of branding and marketing, and that encourages and funds research that regularly makes the news. Some of this research may not directly affect “the human condition”, but it’s snazzy and it grabs the public’s attention. That museum is huge and it’s flourishing. Then there is the much smaller Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks in tiny Tupper Lake, New York. This museum cost millions of dollars to build, and when it opened its doors in July 2006, the Governor of New York and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton were in attendance for the ribbon cutting. The leadership of this museum certainly knew what they were doing - starting out from a position of strength, they hit the ground running with heads held high. No need to defend your existence if you don’t permit it to be called into question in the first place. It’s all about perceptions and posture - attitude.

If someone questions your value and you let such questioning corrode your own perceptions, you can start to feel that you are indeed less valuable than you really are. This sort of situation can be avoided with charismatic leadership. In the case of your business, that leadership is you.

We’ve all seen or received requests to donate our services for non-profit projects or even for producers creating commercials or other assignments “on speculation”. “No pay, but there will be lots of paid work in the future for the person who helps us now”. I’ve heard comparisons of voice-over with other professions such as the plumbing trade, like this: “install this sink for us for free, and we’ll pay you to install other sinks in the future.” Amusing, but not exactly apt. Almost everybody needs a plumber at some point, but not everybody will need a voice-over in the course of their lives. So, do we secretly feel that plumbers’ work is more valuable than our own? Not everybody can install a sink, but anybody can talk, right? Attitude! Anybody can install a sink badly, write badly, or perform a voice-over badly. If Jim Dale were indisposed while recording Harry Potter, would it be okay for one of the audio engineers at Scholastic to fill in for him? Who would be a better choice to voice a commercial for Geico, the CEO of the company, or Jake Wood? To be Bart Simpson - Nancy Cartwright or the kid up the street? Whom would you rather listen to promoting your favorite TV program – your cousin Darrell, or you? You’re not as good as Jim Dale or Jake Wood or Nancy Cartwright, you say? Maybe you are, maybe you aren’t. Maybe you aren’t yet. Read this for more thoughts on that subject. Value comes from quality in many cases, in others it’s marketing, or a combination of both. Gregor Mendel’s research on garden peas was the basis of modern genetics. His work was ignored for years before others were able to appreciate its significance fully and explain its value to the scientific community and to the public, and thus change perceptions.

Perceptions change with changing values. What’s one of the cheapest things you can buy at the grocery store? Salt. Where did the word “salt” come from? From the Latin, sal. And the word salary is rooted in the word for salt. Why? Because in ancient Rome, salt was used as payment. For a while we used gold. The paper money that represented the gold doesn’t have much value by itself. Neither, actually, does the gold. It was merely the standard. Create a need, and the thing that’s needed has value. Create value, and you've enhanced the need.

I received a newsletter last week from Marcia Yudkin of Marketing for More. She has some cogent thoughts about perceived value:

Governor Deval Patrick's proposal to eliminate tuition for Massachusetts community colleges recently received a thoughtful response from the president of Greenfield Community College, Robert Pura.

"We want to really deeply explore what the word 'free' means and conjures up" before we implement such a proposal, Pura said, suggesting that increasing financial aid might be a better way to make college more affordable.

The effective cost might be the same for state residents with both proposals, but "free tuition" might encourage "a wave of students who take their education lightly, over-enroll and drop classes without much thought," Pura told the Daily Hampshire Gazette. Beefing up financial aid communicates responsibility rather than entitlement and may encourage a more serious approach to education.

Likewise, business coach Mark Silver says an acupuncturist he worked with found her patients getting well faster when she raised her fees. It seemed that patients were more likely to do as she suggested between sessions, to get their money's worth, when they were paying more.

Because prices influence perceived value, prices also affect client behavior and their results. Marcia Yudkin, The Marketing Minute (quoted with permission).

My friend and fellow voice talent Dan Nachtrab tells a story about perceived value that remains one of my favorite voice-over anecdotes. He has given me permission to quote it:

A while back, I answered an ad for a narration. A few days go by and I get a call from the producer, who keeps going on that she really has "heard my voice before" and how she would love to have me voice her project. Unfortunately, someone else had answered the ad and said they would do it for FREE, just so they could pad their resume. This is when the sales comes in. The challenge is: How do I not only get the gig, but get her to pay me? The answer: Create value. The hook was baited when she visted my site, read the opening introduction sentence and listened to my demos. (To save you some time, it says "Most likely you have heard his voice.") She truly believed she knew who I was and that I was an established talent. (I can't verify the first, but, hey, how can I argue with the second?) Next, I had to remove the credibilty and perceived value of the talent giving away his services. So, I ventured to tell her "I already have a resume filled with many companies in your same field." Then I related a quick story of one such company, very closely related to hers. This proved I had intimate knowledge of her industry and could provide the service she desired. Now I have VALUE in her eyes. She bit the hook and asked my price. She paid full rate. Remember, we are also in sales. Even though Wal-Mart offers cheaper prices, people are still shopping at Saks.

That last line should be cross-stitched and hung over the door to all voice-over booths. Dan's got it right - he offers great value, but he also knows how to convey the perception of value - he knows how to sell.

It's a rule in voice-over that the clients who are paying the least are demanding the most. You get a few of those and you learn to avoid them like the plague. If you're a professional voice talent, quoting low prices to get the job undervalues the service you’re offering, in the eyes of your customers and, eventually, in your own. Offering a service cheaply may eventually result in loss of quality as well, as you become demoralised and fail to deliver your best work. It is not possible to perform well when you or your customers expect a $50 performance for a $300 job. Much better to give a $350 performance when you’re being paid $300. The next time you’re tempted to quote low, ask yourself why you are undercutting your own services. In effect, you’re on the road to putting yourself out of business. So I ask you - are you offering a valuable service or aren't you? If so, charge a respectable fee - a fee that shows you recognise and respect what you are offering - if you expect other people to value it as well.

Whether you're a voice talent, or a college graduate applying for a job, or a manager negotiating a raise or a corporate executive trying to win a big account, take a lesson from Dan Nachtrab, who was so (rightly) comfortable with the value of his services that he convinced a producer to hire him over the guy who offered to do the job for nothing. Or from the leadership of the Natural History Museum of the Adirondacks, who had the guts to open an expensive institution in a little town in upstate New York in a climate of "the nation's bug collection". Because of their justifiable conviction of their own value, they had the entire state of New York behind them.

Now, go out and get your clients behind you.