Blog – Page 22 – Connie Terwilliger

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 […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:38+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

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:38+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 […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:38+00:00August 17th, 2010|Categories: Business, Techniques|Tags: Adobe Audition, naming files, quality assurance, Recording, VO-BB, Vox Studio, Word2Wav|

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 […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:38+00:00August 14th, 2010|Categories: Business, Marketing|

Time Balancing Act

There has to be a better way to allocate my time. Lately I seem to be living in reaction mode. The BlackBerry has a lot to do with this I think.

Ever since I got the little pacifier, I am a slave to the flashing red light. It sits next to my keyboard while I am working on an edit or doing some research or marketing or bookkeeping – and when it starts to flash I am COMPELLED to stop what I am doing, pick it up, and see what emergency is calling.

OK, not very many emergencies in the voiceover business, but probably more than one would expect. But usually it is something like an ad for discount travel or hotels, chain letters from friends, Facebook updates, and auditions. I also get scripts from clients for jobs and requests for quotes for possible jobs.

The point is that instead of finishing up what […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:38+00:00July 28th, 2010|Categories: Business, Communication, Marketing, Musings|

FaffCon? What the heck is FaffCon?

So what the heck is FaffCon – that isn’t a real word. No. But it has deep significance for us voiceoverists. (At least those of us who hang out on the VO-BB.)

It comes from the word faff “which means to blow in gusts…..so to go nowhere in particular….to mess about. ” This is from a UK Yahoo Answers page.To some “faffing about” means – “To muck about, wasting time doing something not necessary.”

But this coming September it means a lot more than that. If you’re a working voice over professional, you’re invited to the first ever voiceover unconference in Portland Oregan (USA)! FaffCon!

Far from being just something the waste a bunch of time and money, FaffCon promises to be (according to Faffy*) …

You know all the […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:38+00:00July 16th, 2010|Categories: Announcements, Business|

Head’s You Win – Tail’s You Win

I have missed a bunch of Paul Strikwerda’s blogs recently, but this one caught my eye in an email update on one of my LinkedIn groups.

He postulates that you have to be many things to be a freelancer. Some things are diametric opposites and yet it is often best to do them both. He uses the Ying and the Yang concept.

His first question – should you Specialize or Generalize – big debate about this actually – but his advice – “find your own voice and be flexible” – works for me. Too narrow a focus and you limit yourself and end up doing the same thing over and over. Too broad and you risk being just another nameless faceless cog.

He ended the article with a nice long list of other “contradictions.” My favorites…

Be personable and keep things strictly business.

Be proud of your accomplishments and stay humble.

Be […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:39+00:00July 16th, 2010|Categories: Business|Tags: Paul Strikwerda, voiceover business|

Marketing Maxim from Maxine

My dear friend and fellow voiceover talent Maxine Dunn had an article published on VoiceOverXtra discussing something near and dear to my heart – Cold Calling.

“Smiling and Dialing.” The act of picking up the phone and actually speaking to someone. People make a huge deal about the idea and the reality of “cold calls.” In reality – it ain’t that bad – and it can yield fabulous results.

http://www.voiceoverxtra.com/article.htm?id=5kegz3y2

The Competition?

One of the Social Media Networks on my radar is the Working Voice Actor group on LinkedIn. The group host is Ed Victor, a voice talent now in Florida. He tries to “whack the hornets nest” each week with a topic. This week he posted a question about competition or camaradarie. Are we competing against each other for the job? Or are we simply “trying out” to see if we’re the right fit?

The voiceover community seems to be heavy on being congenial with the competition – probably because we are all different. We offer advice to newbies who may end up auditioning for the same work. We actually like to travel – sometimes long distances – to have a chance to see each other face-to-face.

More and more – as the ways of doing business evolve away from in-person auditions to […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:39+00:00July 9th, 2010|Categories: Auditioning, Business, Marketing|

Mixing Business with Pleasure

So, this trip to Europe that I just took – two weeks traveling around Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland – was part pleasure and part business. I was visiting my brother in Munich, but was headed to Italy to meet with a client. My mic and pre-amp were not on my packing list, because I knew I was going to be traveling quite a bit, and didn’t think I would have time for jobs or auditions.

As it turns out (see earlier post), my brother’s practice room was actually a sound booth, so I could have worked while I was in Munich – and a good audition did appear in the In Box. But there was a lot so see and do there before I headed off to Italy to meet my business associate.

I did check for jobs and auditions each day – had a loaner BlackBerry with global service – and was able to postpone most of […]

Connie Terwilliger2018-02-06T06:48:39+00:00July 2nd, 2010|Categories: Business, Marketing, Recording|Tags: Connie Terwilliger, Jerry Kay, MediaPiu Studio, Paolo Tonetto|