42nd Street Productions Writes Again…

paper puzzleHere’s a riddle. What is it?

“With many keys, but cannot open a single lock.”

Here’s a clue. I’m a writer.

You may not know that, since most of the past dozen or so years, I have focused on voiceover work. But my background is in producing and writing.

I ended up with a Master’s in Radio and TV after my Art Degree opened the door to working in a TV station right out of college. What a wonderful thing that turned out to be. But I knew OJT wasn’t going to be enough, so off to grad school I went.

Degree in hand I fled to cold and moved to sunny SoCal and wore many hats – producing / writing / and doing on and off-camera spokesperson work focusing on corporate communications – both in-house and as an independent. Concurrently I was doing a lot of […]

2018-02-06T06:48:03+00:00September 23rd, 2016|Categories: Announcements, Business, Writing|Tags: , , |

Updated Live Audio Recording Options to ISDN Information

Audio Recording Chart UpdateJust a quick post to give you the updated version of the Live Audio Recording Options chart that I created last month. Did some research into the COMREX solution someone referenced in a post to Facebook.

It is one of the more expensive options for both the studio and the talent side of the glass, but does offer a lot of options.

The more I delve into this, the more it looks like the cost of differentiating yourself as a voice talent may remain much the same. We will probably have to have several options ready to go depending on our client’s needs/desires. At the moment, I have ipDTL, Source-Connect (original), ISDN (for as long as it makes sense), Bodalgo Call and now ConnectionOpen.

Some of these are free options that will be acceptable […]

June Came and June Went…

What the heck just happened? The month of June just sort of disappeared in a vortex of VO work. Which is a good thing, but makes it hard to find the time to compose something interesting, relevant or amusing as a blog post.

And that is the goal of keeping a blog – at least as I understand it.

My class blog is easier to keep up to date, but can become a tad boring and even repetitive for people who are not active students in the class. If there was a way to filter OUT the homework assignments, and only keep the interesting videos and articles that would be different, but I haven’t figured out a way to do that yet.

One of the things I talk to my introduction to voice acting students is that just because you are hired to record […]

Excellent Advice for Self-directing Audio Book Narration

One of the things that a professional voice talent MUST have to succeed is the ability to self-direct. We do so much of our work – at least initially (and in many cases most of our work) – alone. Alone with our doubts, our insecurities, our patterns.

When we are auditioning, the ability to self-direct can be the determining factor in getting the gig. We don’t want to send out the “same” read that 95% of the rest of the talent is submitting. We want our audition to leap off the mp3 and straight into the “book that talent” column.

Last year, I tried my hand at fiction audio books for the first time. I am finishing up the 3rd. And while the verdict is still out on if I actually like this area of voice work, I have greatly enjoyed the process. Discovering how much time it REALLY takes. Is it […]

2018-02-06T06:48:14+00:00January 19th, 2013|Categories: Techniques|Tags: , , , , |

Advice for Producers is Also Good Advice for Talent

Just ran across this blog post by Marc Scott cross-posted on Voice123. It is aimed at the people seeking voice talent, however it is good advice for both the seeker and the seekee! In fact, as a user of the online casting sites myself, I have a similar set of guidelines as I decide which projects to audition for.

One of the biggies for me is a poorly written script. As a long time award-winning scriptwriter and corporate producer before jumping into voiceover full-time, I wrote many many scripts for other talent to read. A well-written script is ALWAYS easier for the talent to deliver. If you are new to the art of writing a script for someone to verbalize, put your words to the test. Record yourself reading the material aloud before you send it off for auditions. If you have a hard […]

2018-02-06T06:48:14+00:00December 15th, 2012|Categories: Auditioning|Tags: , , , |

Am I on Twitter?

So, I keep seeing this question pop up on various social networking groups…

“Are you on Twitter?”

Well, yes, I have a Twitter account. @ISDNVoiceover

And I have people who actively follow my tweets. Or have at least clicked on the link to Follow Me. And many of them will probably see this post when it gets fed to the various places it gets fed to when it is published.

But am I ON Twitter? Not very much.

I still don’t get it. Unless I am using it all wrong, it seems like a pull website. Where I have to go to it and pull the information. OK, Facebook is that way too, but for some reason I WANT to go to Facebook and check out what is happening. I just don’t find myself drawn to Twitter the same way.

Perhaps I just need someone to break it down for me. Talk to me like I’m […]

2012-07-03T12:00:16+00:00July 3rd, 2012|Categories: Communication, Marketing, Musings|Tags: , , |

Why Can’t People “Hear” Themselves?

Today it is easier and easier to get feedback on what you are doing. Why don’t people listen? Or perhaps, why – when given good feedback – why don’t people take action to improve what they are doing? Do they simply not hear themselves?

So many people these days have been told by endless “voiceover” coaches that they can make it – all they need is determination – and their signature on the bottom of that check paying for more classes. They stop listening to themselves and never develop their self-evaluation skills.

Most of the forums for voiceover people include critique areas where people can post demos for comments. I’m referring to demos from newbies, not updated demos from people who are making actual money doing voiceovers. You can get honest, yet sometimes highly conflicting advice. And if you follow the subsequent comments to a thread, this advice is often rejected by […]

In Between Sessions

I wish I could say that I was so busy that I had back to back sessions every day and had to squeeze in the bookkeeping, marketing and plant watering. Well, I’m busy enough that I make a living doing this voiceover stuff without the back-to-back sessions. And even if I don’t have projects stacked up waiting, I still have a hard time getting all the other stuff done. But there is simply no way I can actually organize a day with any strict rules on when I am going to do anything.

The day started out like a typical Tuesday. Walk down to the coffee shop for my 7-8 AM solve the world’s problems group, but the phone rang and I had to race back home to get the car to drive out to my mom’s Assisted Living Community to call off the Paramedics. You would think after 7 months […]

The 1% (or whatever it is) in the VO Biz

With all the talk about the 1% vs the 99% these days with regards to Wall Street and Jobs and Taxes, something crossed my eyeballs this morning that shows that this spread exists in other areas as well.

Voiceover actors have been chatting about the jobs being lost to “celebrity” voices for years now…ever since the animated Alladin was released featuring Robin Williams as the Genie. There is no doubt that Robin Williams stole that movie, but it paved the way for more and more celebrity on-camera actors being cast in animated features and fewer and fewer opportunities for working class voice actors.

Written by SCOTT MESLOW – an Atlantic contributor and a film and television writer based in Washington, D.C., who has also written for Campus Progress andWealthBriefing – this article highlights how the “A-list” actors are nudging out the “ubiquitous but nearly anonymous, traditional voice actors.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/10/how-celebrities-took-over-cartoon-voice-acting/247481/

His main question is whether there […]

2018-02-06T06:48:19+00:00October 31st, 2011|Categories: Business, Musings|Tags: , , , |

In the Online World, Context is King…

It is hard to get any work done these days because you follow links which lead to more links and suddenly you have forgotten what you went online to do in the first place, but it is almost always an interesting distraction. Sometimes pure silliness, sometimes thought provoking, sometimes good for business. I’m always looking for interesting tidbits that will help the bottom line.

One of the mantras of video has been “Content is King.” With the emergence and tsunami of online video, it may be that the context will be driving the dollars.

Today, I was reading a post from MediaPost and it led me to an article called “Context is King: How Videos are Found and Consumed Online” packed with information from a November 2006 study by Bear Stearns Cable and Satellite analyst Spencer Wang called “Why Aggregation & Context and Not (Necessarily) Content are […]

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