Stephanie at Voices.com is a prolific writer with many excellent Blogs and Podcasts and Articles on Vox Daily. Her thoughts today on the speed at which casting is done these days is a good one for any voice talent to take to heart. Add Nancy Wolfson’s (BrainTrax Audio)insight to the mix and you can see how you need to be ready (with speed and ability) to land the jobs.
Oh for the days when the agent did the negotiating and invoicing! I tell you, this is the hardest part of my job. I wrote recently about negotiating and some of the pitfalls there, but another area that takes time and creates a great deal of frustration for me is the Invoicing part of the process.
I switched to QuickBooks a couple of years ago to try to streamline this whole process – reducing what was a three-step process to one. I used to enter client data into FileMaker, create Invoices in Outlook and then reconcile through Quicken. Now it’s sort of all in one place, but I still find QuickBooks to be confusing. I am not an accountant.
Quicken is simple – it is a checkbook ledger. Not QuickBooks! Oh it has some interesting features, like the ability to set prices for each regular client as necessary and create lists of […]
My goodness. I pinged Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo and MySpace about my new website and blog yesterday and in less than 18 minutes I had a dozen hits to the new blog. From zero to 30 in one day.
OK, that may not seem like all that many hits, but the immediacy of the response is what is amazing. Many many many of us are addicted to technology.
I read an article yesterday (I must remember to copy and paste the links for blog use!) about email – and making the leap – social media addiction. Ever since getting a BlackBerry, I find that I spend a little less time in my office in front of the main computer tower, but I have that phone with me everywhere. I have seen the signs of email addiction for quite a while now.
Let’s get this out in the open. All good stage, film and TV actors do not make good voice talent – and vice versa. If you are used to having your script days ahead of time, with hours or even days of rehearsal with a director, you may not be able to get into the VO vibe.
Using a studio session as an example…let’s say a session is scheduled for 9 AM. You get to the studio at 8:55 (or earlier). Someone asks if you want coffee. You’re thinking “A script would be nice.” Someone hands you the copy around 9:15. (Traffic was bad?) If you are lucky, they may spend a minute filling you in on what they feel you should do with the copy before hustling you into the booth.
At 9:17 you enter your padded room, adjust your headsets. Look for a pencil with a sharp point (or pull […]
I’ve been in redesign mode all week and the blog I created last month for my Voiceover Acting Class has a completely different look than the new website I created. This drew some comments when I asked for input and critique on the new website. So I decided to look for a theme that blended with the blues and greens of the new website.
In the process of doing this, I realized that I needed to either maintain two blogs – one just for VO Musings and the other for my class – OR – change the look of the existing class blog.
I’ve decided to try keeping two at the moment. I really want the students to have their own space and be able to actually see their assigments.
So I moved some content from the Class Blog over to here to fill it out a bit. This has pretty much taken over […]
I had a long conversation with a career coach this week and was inspired to redo my website. My last site was pretty packed with information (much of it not really related to earning money) and in effect tried to do far too much.
The new site is cleaner and more focused on marketing me as a talent. As a talent working the higher paying jobs. At least I hope it is. It’s probably still got a few bugs to check, but I got on a roll and managed to design and create it in a relatively short period of time.
The basic design is from a background collection from Digital Juice. The inner pages were created using the colors and basic idea of the circles and lines. I wanted to keep a lot of text on the inner pages. There are some little issues and […]
Negotiating rates is the hardest part of my job. I much prefer to have an agent involved in this process, but more and more of my work comes directly to me from my website from places outside the range of my various agents. So more and more, I find that I am providing quotes. Add in the auditions from the P2P sites and a LOT of time is spent figuring out rates.
I have a set rate card for most projects now that I use as a starting point, but there is always something that makes the rate card difficult to apply. The nature of the material may require additional dollars (or not). Or the turn around time is short necessitating a rush charge (or not). The project may be for a really good cause that warrents a discounted rate (or not). The project may actually be more than one project, […]
I just spent about an hour and a half going through about 50 pounds of paper scripts that have been piling up over the past couple of years. While I would probably read a lot of these scripts right off the screen, during the school semester I usually bring in scripts from sessions to show my students what a professional voice talent may see in the course of a week.
Scripts range from very “formal” radio and TV scripts (with logos and official titles to help the radio and TV stations figure out which spot to run when), to a hasty email with a single line.
Normally, if I am going to work in my ISDN studio, I need to print out the script, as there is no monitor tied to a computer. I may do that one day (add a monitor), but frankly I like to mark the script when I am […]
At coffee – the BlackBerry rings – it is an agent from the other side of the country. “Got a job for you today if you are available. Don’t know what the pay is or anything much about the job, but they have to have it on the net tomorrow.” I ask if it is ISDN (yes, it will be) and assure her that I can carve out some time today to do the session.
Walking back from coffee – the BlackBerry rings – it is the agent from the other side of the country. “OK, how’s 2pm? It is about a 10 minute corporate piece for a hospital. How’s $800?’ 2pm is fine and $800 is fine.
Back home and in the studio, I start working on my In Box – it needs attention – sorting email, following up on auditions, confirming upcoming work and reviewing the scripts. Some prep work […]
One of my former students stopped by today to record a couple of auditions. His setup was on the fritz, so I let him use my wireless laptop studio in my ISDN space. I couldn’t let him use my main studio because those darn roofers are still across the alley pounding away (yeah – they’ll be finished by noon – yesterday! Ha!).
Anyway, this kid is very talented and is the voice of a new video game that is using AFTRA talent and now he is a “must join” and has to fork over the $1,400 initiation fee. Because this is a video game, he is not being afforded the opportunity to pay in increments. I don’t have all the facts, but with unions losing ground day-by-day, you would THINK they would be open to this option.
Because he does on-camera, comedy, stage and voice work, and is planning to move to Los Angeles, […]