One door closes…

I saw a Facebook post from a friend today that talked about a regular client who had decided to move their voice work in house – so minus one job. But shortly thereafter a new client entered the picture. Subsequent comments to her post illustrates that this is a common occurance for people in our business – with those who are good at what they do.

The same kind of thing happened to me today. I was just starting to record the first of 4 modules for a semi-regular client, when I ran across some small questions about the script (acronym land) and called to clarify. He was in the process of writing to tell me that plans had changed and the end client had suddenly decided not to move forward on the project at this time. So, he told me to bill him for my efforts so far and we’d […]

2018-02-06T06:48:37+00:00August 31st, 2010|Categories: Business, Marketing, Musings|

The Audiobook Journey

Well, this is a bit after the fact, but I had the opportunity to take a journey with Pat Fraley and Scott Brick this past weekend here in San Diego – a journey to discover my potential recording audiobooks.

I’ve been keeping my eye on Pat’s workshops for a while, but just wasn’t able to carve out the time to spend the weekend in LA, so when they were looking for participants for a workshop in my neck of the woods, I jumped – as did 11 others from around the country – including Hawaii.

My focus was Fiction – looking for the right kind of pieces for my voice and brain. Long form non-fiction is something I do on a regular basis, but Fiction has been on the back burner. So getting a chance to work with two pros on several excerpts and ending up with a good marketable fiction demo was worth the money. (And being […]

2018-02-06T06:48:37+00:00August 30th, 2010|Categories: Musings, Recording, Techniques|

Video of the Vocal Cords

I subscribe to the Voiceovers group on the Yahoo newsgroups and this link came during a discussion on care for the voice. If you have never seen your vocal folds in action, then you might want to check this page out. While it is aimed at singers, voiceover folk use the same equipment.

http://web.me.com/bdietzler1701/Mr._Dietzlers_MusicPage/VocalCords.html

And then scroll down the page a bit and see how the diaphragm works.

2010-08-26T14:34:20+00:00August 26th, 2010|Categories: Techniques|

Another set of ears

Interesting stuff happened in my class today. I teach one class a semester at a local community college – an introduction to voice acting class. The assignment was to listen to demos – I gave them voicebank.net and voice123.com as two places they could hear lots of “demos.”

I told them to listen primarily to commercial demos at this point in the class. And gave them a couple of things to be aware of with each site. Voicebank – depending on which agency you select – will have the “stars.” Many of whom don’t have real “demos” – well, because they don’t need no stinkn’ demos. And in fact, that is what some of the students discovered. Several well known actors didn’t have real demos – just a sample of a spot or two. Others found great demos from both the stars and the non-stars.

On Voice123, I told them that they […]

2018-02-06T06:48:38+00:00August 25th, 2010|Categories: Auditioning, Business|

I’ve Got a Shotgun and I’m Not Afraid to Use It

A shotgun mic that is…

That is just one of the plethora of sayings you could have on your very own T-Shirt, sweatshirt, mug or water bottle. How do you get one? From the FaffCon website.

FaffCon is really shaping up. The Door Prize list is incredible. If you don’t know about this UnConference for Working Voiceover Pros, you need to check out this link. I’ve booked my flight and will be there to faff about with lots of other VO folk – exchanging creative, business and technical ideas…along with getting that much needed jolt of energy that comes from face-to-face interaction.

But, back to the logo gear. There is a new page to the site though that I thought I would let you know about – great Voiceover related T-Shirts and other clothing, bags, etc. Seriously fun stuff here!

http://sites.google.com/site/faffconwiki/home/official-faffcon-t-shirts-more

2018-02-06T06:48:38+00:00August 18th, 2010|Categories: Announcements|

Quality Assurance Meets Absurd Quantity

We all need differentiators to help set us apart from the growing army of voiceoverists* so that we end up with our fair share of the sacks of money* waiting to be spent on voiceovers.

(*Inside joke from the VO-BB.com)

One of the things I “sell” is my quality assurance. I spend time making sure that the files I send are as close to perfection as possible. This is fairly easy to do if you have a standard :30 or :60 spot. Couple of minutes to record a couple of takes. A quick couple of minutes to listen and clean up any little blups and boom, the file is out and you are 100% sure that it is ready for your client to drop into their production timeline. Make mistakes with this simple kind of work and you won’t stay in business long.

But much of my work includes vast numbers of […]

Get your ACT! together…

OK, that was probably not very original, but I really need to get my contact act together.

I mentioned in an earlier post about being in reaction mode – and one of the ways to help this situation is to get a better handle on my contact database. I tried Outlook Business Contact for a while, but after many phone calls with their tech support,helping them debug the software, I just gave up and have been limping along with the regular Contact part of Outlook for the past few years.

After researching several other CRM solutions, I installed ACT. While still in the early learning stages of this new software, I see that it integrates pretty well with Outlook – although I don’t know exactly how at this point.

So I imported more than 1400 “contacts” from Outlook into ACT! and started weeding and feeding. After the initial purge of duplicate cell phone numbers created in […]

2018-02-06T06:48:38+00:00August 14th, 2010|Categories: Business, Marketing|
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