Oh look! I’ve just got bigger Down Under…

I’m pleased to report that Sydney-based Kathy Evans Voice Management is now acting as my agent for voiceover work in the Southern Hemisphere.

As a result, I’m hoping to take my voiceover work to a greater audience in places like Australia and New Zealand.

Read the full story here.

Murder for Hire…

This week I provided the voiceover narration for two documentary programmes coming soon to the Crime & Investigation Network. They’re UK versions of two Dateline NBC programmes on the phenomenon of “murder for hire”, where a spouse pays a hitman to “take out” their spouse (and I’m not talking about wine and roses, either).

The sting in the tail for the people in these programmes is that the people they thought were contract killers actually turned out to be undercover police using secret filming techniques.

Currently, programme one “Caught on Tape” is slotted for first transmission on Wednesday 29th July at 9pm, with programme two “Sleeping with the Enemy” the following Wednesday 5th Augst at the same time.

The Crime and Investigation Network is on Sky Digital channel 553 and Virgin channel 237.

The Black Widow – now on the web

“The Black Widow: A Web of Suspicion” is the first of two programmes I revoiced recently for the UK’s Crime & Investigation Network. It premiered last night.

A look at the bizarre life of Sandra Bridewell, a beautiful Southern belle and wealthy socialite who became known as the “Black Widow” when three of her husbands ended up dead and Sandra pocketed big life insurance payouts. The programme follows detectives and newspaper reporter Glenna Whitley as they investigate Bridewell’s trail of death and deceit and prepare to spring a trap for her.

The programme airs again today at 3pm on Sky channel 553 (or 4pm on the “+1″ service on Sky 554). If you miss it, keep an eye out for it in my TV Schedule on my website. In the meantime, or in case you’re outside the the UK or don’t get Sky Digital, here are two short clips: one from the start of the programme, and one from midway through. I hope you enjoy them!

Great sounds. Minimal pounds.

VoiceArchive in Denmark sent out their newsletter this week, including a link to a great article by their Sound Engineer, Jacob Horney, on getting the best sound out of your studio or recording space.

VoiceArchive are still finding that some of their talents’ home studios don’t pass muster, and this in turn creates problems when sending audio on to clients. With that in mind, Jacob has come up with a great piece on how to improve things – without (here’s the important bit) breaking the bank.

You can read Jacob’s piece here, and he’s also included links to some excellent articles from other sources on such things as building a vocal booth and studio design.

twitwoop-de-doop!

If you follow me on twitter, you may have stumbled across this message yesterday:

“We are happy to have voice artist Mike Cooper @LondonVoiceover as our official English voice on the @twitwoop voice service.”

So reads the tweet. But what does it actually mean?

Well, “twitwoop” is a spin-off from German Voice Application Service Provider, “woopla“.

Still no clearer?

OK, here goes. twitter, as you must surely know by now, is an online service allowing you to send short messages of 140 characters or less for other people to read. twitwoop takes the idea a little further:

“Let your followers hear what you are doing. At the ocean? What about some ocean breeze? Stuck in traffic? Let us hear some New York horns. Sing a song, tell us a joke or simply say something with a meaning. twitwoops can be 140 seconds long – that’s twitter style.”

twitwoop is a new service which allows you to post audio to your twitter timeline

The idea is that you register up to two phone numbers (typically your mobile and a landline) and give them access to your twitter account. When you dial in, the system recognises your number automatically and allows you to post audio. At this point there are numbers in London, New York and LA, as well as in Germany. You can choose to post to your own twitter timeline, or to twitwoop’s own public timeline.

When I called in yesterday to try it out, I found it worked rather well, but it was apparent that the voice prompts had been recorded by a German speaker. Don’t get me wrong: Mark’s English voice prompts are far and away better than anything I could attempt, even in my best GCSE German, but there was still a noticeable accent there. So, I seized the opportunity and offered to make them some new ones!

A couple of hours and a bit of mutual back-scratching later (I recorded their voice prompts; they are now kind enough to promote me on their web pages and allow me to do likewise in the intro prompt) and I have become the English voice of twitwoop. It’s cost nobody anything for this to happen, but there’s a mutual benefit.

Sometimes a little deal like this is a great way to improve the reach of your voiceover business and get heard by more people (last time I looked they were up to over 1,000 followers). And, just as importantly, the whole thing’s quite a fun thing to be involved in.

Check it out at twitwoop.com, select your country from the drop-down list, then dial in and have a listen!

Mike’s Mid-June Voiceover Update

The year is whizzing by faster than I seem to be able to keep track. This weekend it’s the longest day of the year already, which means it’ll soon be Christmas, no doubt. I’ve been keeping busy the last few weeks with some interesting new projects.

A couple of weeks ago I voiced a documentary for an independent film-maker based in Sydney, who’s producing a programme on the preparations for next year’s football World Cup in South Africa. The programme is still in the editing stages, but when it’s finished the idea is that it will be shown at various festivals and sold to interested broadcasters. I’ll post an update on this in due course.

An interesting meeting at Pinewood studios at the start of the month revealed some great new programmes coming to Film24, for whom I work as a continuity announcer. These include “Sordid Lives: The Series”, which will be airing on Film24 from the start of August. Think “Desperate Housewives”, but set on a trailer park, and with Olivia Newton John and Golden Girl Rue McLanahan, and you start to get the idea. Andrew Burns, CEO of the channel, has some other new programming ideas up his sleeve for the next few months too, all of which should bring exciting improvements to the schedule.

Also this month I’ve voiced a science documentary which will soon start showing in museums in the United States. Called Planet You 3D, it’s been produced by Chedd-Angier-Lewis, in Watertown, MA, and will shortly get its premiere at the Health Museum in Houston and the Museum of Science in Boston, before hopefully rolling out to science centres across the United States. You can read the production blog (including the very nice things they said about me) here.

Aside from these projects it’s been the regular round of corporates, including jobs for Capgemini and British Gas, commercials for radio stations in the UK, and my ongoing work for the BBC World Service and the History Channel. And outside work I’ve been trying to get to see as much of the ICC World Twenty20 cricket as I can – after all, I only live ten minutes from Kennington Oval!

So, if you won’t work for $25, how about for nothing?

A little while ago I blogged about whether the $25 rates that keep cropping up online for jobs were acceptable remuneration for the services of a professional Voiceover Artist. Mercifully, the deluge of comments I received, both here and via LinkedIn, left me in no doubt that, like me, you believe this kind of fee is way, way too low.

So what happens when someone asks you to work for nothing?

A couple of weeks ago I received an email via my website:

“Your voice is perfect for a project I am doing at college…

The script that I have has a mocking, sarcastic tone… You are great!

I am a student so I would not be able to pay you. But it would be great if you could read a script for me, it wouldn’t take too long. It’s 5 minutes long.”

I think the first part’s what’s generally known as a “back-handed compliment”, and I decided to take it as such (rather than tell my correspondent in my most mocking, sarcastic tone to stick the offer where the sun doesn’t shine). Personally, whenever someone says “You’re great!” I think it’s best to take it graciously and not ask too many questions. Of course, my heart sank a fraction when I realised there was no money involved, but hey, I’m a businessman, after all!

I pondered the point with my good friend and guru, Trish Bertram. As well as being a phenomenal voice talent, she’s someone who often has a wise word to say on such things. Sure enough, she made two very valid points. The first is a sound business point: namely that the people making videos and having the awareness to request professional voice tracks for college projects today, are likely the rising star producers of tomorrow. Who knows when they may be in a position to pay you back, and probably with interest?

The second point is a bit more abstract, and comes down to “karma”. It’s the idea that a good deed done “pays one forward”, and that at some point the universe is likely to reward you in kind. Of course, you’re not supposed to expect for this to happen – that goes against the principle – but it’s a nice way to live your life, isn’t it? The thought that you go through your own life with an attitude of giving to others, without prejudice, and – just now and then – there might just be a nice surprise when you least expect it.

By way of illustrating, Trish reminded me of two people she’d taken under her wing in years gone by. One was a “runner”, who went on from the lowest job on the studio floor to produce some very big Light Entertainment shows, got her in to be the Voice of God (if God’s a woman then Trish is definitely the voice who should play her) and who still offers her a supply of work even today.

But the other was a real case of karma at work. Some years ago, at a point when she was going through difficult times in her own life, Trish was approached by someone who was keen to become a continuity announcer. She gave her time and effort without any question of reward or what the guy could do in return, and thought no more of it. A few months later it turned out that the gentleman in question worked for a major airline, and he offered to fly her – business class, no less – to Australia. Which, coincidentally, was just where she’d been wanting to go. Cynics, of course, snidely suggested that she’d been planning it all along, but I know for a fact that she was completely surprised and taken aback. Sometimes the universe really does provide. And maybe, as a “universal thank you” for his own good deed, he got what he wanted too: he went on to become a continuity announcer, and fulfilled a dream he’d held for twenty years.

Of course, I did the free voiceover track, and no, this isn’t an invitation to a deluge of similar requests for either myself or Trish – but next time you’re asked to work for nothing, it might be worth keeping what I’ve said in mind…

If you’ve got any stories to share, I’d love to hear them. Your comments are very welcome, as ever!

Ode to o2 (an off-topic attempt at some balanced thoughts on the new iPhone)

Before I say anything else, let me nail my colours firmly to the mast and say I love my iPhone. I’m a convert: a good friend gave me his first-generation model on the day the iPhone 3G came out, and I promptly hacked it to work with my Vodafone SIM card. Within two weeks I was so hooked that I bought myself out of my Vodafone contract and joined the happy 3G throng. This wasn’t a cheap exercise, but I called it a Business Expense and haven’t looked back.

Yesterday, Apple spoke to geeks worldwide and announced the new iPhone 3G S (the “S” presumably standing for “Sexier-than-your-current-iPhone, Suckers!”). Harder, better, faster, stronger, and all that. The new model has an improved camera, more memory options, a faster processor and a couple of other bells and whistles, much like any next-generation mobile phone from any manufacturer would have over any of their preceding models. None of it’s Earth-shattering stuff (a compass and a 3 megapixel camera aren’t exactly going to set the world on fire, let’s face it), but in the less-than-twenty-four hours since the announcement, and since the publication of price plans on the o2 UK website, iPhone users here in Britain have been throwing their hands up in despair at the pricing, the cost of upgrading, the cost of using “tethering” (connecting your phone to your computer for mobile data), and so on. Twitter has been ablaze with incensed posts about how o2 is ripping us off, and I’m not sure that the official o2 Tweeter (@o2) was ready for the onslaught. Already a petition has gone up to demand that o2 be more “reasonable”. There are bits of this that I sympathise with, but a lot that I don’t get, so this post is my attempt at gaining some clarity.

Right then, let’s try and gain some perspective…

Firstly, the iPhone is, in the words of Monty Python, “not the Messiah”. No question, it’s a very, very, cool bit of kit and it’s allowed me to connect to the rest of the world in ways I’ve never been able to do before – certainly not with any of Nokia’s or Sony Ericsson’s models (my N95 8GB, for example, crashed every time I tried to open Gmail). But at the end of the day the iPhone, in any of its incarnations, is no more than a cross between a mobile phone and a low-end laptop computer (yes, I’m dodging lightning bolts as I write).

Secondly, it’s normal here in the UK for any mobile operator to subsidise the cost of a handset, lowering the cost to the customer as a result. If you’re prepared to hold onto the phone for the contract term, you “win”; if you decide you need the latest phone sooner then you “lose” by having to pay a fee to upgrade. This is absolutely normal. Last year o2 did a Very Unusual Thing by allowing owners of the first-generation, 2G iPhone to upgrade without penalty. This set a precedent, and was probably all about addressing the very evident shortcomings of the original model whilst keeping the hype machine rolling, but I don’t see how they could do that every time a new model is announced, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect it. You signed a contract saying you’d keep the phone for 18 months, or (foolishly, in my opinion) 2 years when you took out the contract. Don’t sign the contract if you’re not prepared to keep to it. And why should iPhone users get to switch phones whenever they like, while o2’s other contract users with other phones can’t?

Next week sees the release of iPhone software 3.0 (or “iPhone three-oh”, as the Apple geeks insisted on calling it). This will bring most of the functionality of the new phone to the existing iPhone 3G, including the much-lamented ability to send picture messages (for the price of four SMS messages a throw, included in your price plan, no questions, no fanfare). What’s more, iPhone 3.0 is a free upgrade! Who else would do this? Microsoft?!? Sure, it won’t turn the existing camera into a video camera, and it won’t make the processor any faster, but then my digital camera has several megapixels fewer than the current models, and my iMac (now nearly two years old) is a bit slower than the models on sale now. They both more than adequate, and if someone offered to upgrade the software on either free of charge I’d be as happy as a pig in shit (conversely, “Snow Leopard“, the next version of Mac OS X will probably cost me about £25 at release later in the summer). The thing is, if I really wanted, or felt I needed, a better version of any of my existing electronic trinkets, I wouldn’t expect anyone to subsidise my greed for a newer model. So pay up, or shut up.

Thirdly, and this is where I beg to differ with o2’s approach, they’ve decided to charge for “tethering” your iPhone to your computer for data. This, to my mind, seems to go against the spirit of the “use as much data as you like, within reason” philosophy. I’d argue that anyone who wants to use it as their primary modem and who expects to get through massive amounts of data should pay accordingly, but it seems churlish not to include what they’d let you use through your iPhone anyway, whether it’s terminating at the phone or on a tethered machine. When challenged on this, the beleaguered o2 Twitter-Monkey responded by saying “iPhone tethering costs more as it uses a lot more data than traditional browsing on your iPhone itself”. Really? Surely if the processing overhead is that great then there’s something wrong with the code, no? And if that’s the case, does that mean that anyone paying £15 for 3MB will really get 3MB? o2’s costings at launch for iPhone tethering are either £14.68 or £29.36 per month (nice round figures, presumably thanks to the current 15% VAT levels), with a minimum one month term “so you can turn it on and off when you like” (yeah, thanks). But a quick scout around quickly reveals that this doesn’t compare favourably with USB internet dongles for laptops from the other carriers, who I’m sure will seize on the opportunity to undercut that o2 has just handed them.

All that said, is tethering really that great an option anyway? You can use it over USB or via Bluetooth, but the latter is likely to drain your iPhone battery even faster than normal, and using your mobile as a data modem with a USB cable is all a bit 2004 for my liking anyway. Plus, calls interrupt data access – or at least they have up to now. Add into the mélange the fact that o2’s 3G coverage is woeful, even in Central London, and it ceases to be that much of a deal-breaker for me. (Don’t get me started on roaming onto BT Openzone hotspots: they’ve never worked properly for me and are the subject of ongoing correspondence with the office of the CEO, Matthew Key.)

Finally, there’s the subject of cost compared to the prices in the US, and on this matter I’m not so conciliatory. In the US, the 32GB iPhone 3G S will cost $299, with the 16GB version at $199. So why are the UK versions £274.23 and £184.98 then? I know times is ‘ard and all that, but did the Pound just take an almighty whack against the Dollar when no one was looking? I think not. I’m tired of getting ripped off in Britain for stuff that’s priced lower elsewhere, and on that point, I really do feel something should be done. o2 aren’t alone in this, but with such a high-profile item, it would have been a perfect time to set a good example.

So, is this really as much of an “#o2fail” as the Twitterers are claiming? I’m not so sure. It’s rare to get something for nothing, and I’m old enough and wise enough to have reached a point where I don’t expect it. For now, I’ll take the “iPhone three-oh” software and congratulate myself on having beaten the system (kind of). At least in the UK we’ll get MMS at launch, included in our iPhone tariffs, which is more than can be said for our friends on AT&T.

Google Calendar 101. A personalised TV Schedule.

Today I set up a Google Calendar, which details when programmes I’ve voiced are showing on various channels here in the UK. I started doing this mostly for my own benefit, so I could keep track of the growing number of programmes I’ve now added my voiceovers to. But I realised midway through that it might prove to be an interesting website addition. If there’s a way of extracting the data to Twitter for automatic Tweets just ahead of the billed times then that would be even better still, but let’s go one step at a time!

I’ve included channel numbers for Sky and Virgin in the “location” field (crafty, eh?) and also flagged up days where I can be heard as a station continuity voiceover for History and Film24, as well as the BBC World Service. The next step might be to add links to clips from the programmes, but I’m not sure that URLs can be embedded in Google Calendar entries (any thoughts?)

There’s no way to automate the process of adding new showings or altering late changes, unfortunately, so that will have to be a weekly task for yours truly, but at least now the bulk of programmes and their billings are in the system, they can be “duplicated” to new showing times as needed, with top-ups as I voice more material.

After some playing with the options and embedding the resulting code into a fresh page on my website, I now have a rather nicely-presented TV Schedule page, which you’ll find here.

The cost of all this? Absolutely nothing, other than my time. And the beauty part is that, as a Public calendar on Google, it gets indexed by You Know Who, too…

Mike’s Late May Update

It’s been a busy month, all told. I’ve been writing furiously for the History Channel (which now prefers to be known simply as “History”). They’ve asked me to become a regular continuity announcer for the channel for the next little while, so I’ll be popping up between programmes there quite a lot for now, and I’m actually on air all week this week (26-31 May).

WhP, in France, asked me to produce some voiceover material for the Renault Academy last week, which I delivered this week. A complex project which involved a lot of editing to produce files which could be split up by an automated process. I learned a lot about the new Mégane Coupé in the process, should anyone ever call on me to do a repair.

Meanwhile, IC Group in Winnipeg, Canada, approached me to voice the British version of some training materials for Brit Insurance.

And tomorrow I’m looking forward to voicing a documentary programme about the preparations for the FIFA 2010 World Cup in South Africa, with a producer based in (wait for it…) Sydney, Australia!

Never let it be said that I don’t get around…