I thought it would be a good idea to round up some of the voiceover business stories I’ve found most interesting and useful on my travels around the internet recently. So here, in what I hope to make a weekly feature, I present “Gobs on the Web”. This first one is going to be a bit longer than I expect these posts to be in general, because there’s been a lot of good stuff in recent weeks which I’d like to pull together in one go.
So, first up, Edge Studio this week posted the latest in their helpful series of posts for voice actors: The Voiceover Mistake Chart, listing the kind of mistakes that new – and sometimes experienced – voiceover artists make when going about their business. It includes everything from titling your demos in a way that makes them impossible to decipher, to wearing too much cologne in the VO booth and upsetting the next talent. The first section also deals with common pronunciation mistakes (though having had a read through, that section is more on the money for American English than for the rest of us). Edge Studio say they’ll keep adding to the list, so it’s a good one to bookmark. The guys have also very helpfully provided an archive of 3,500 voiceover scripts which talents are free to use to practice and demo with! Kudos to them for that (and thanks to Tracy Pattin on the VoiceBank blog for spotting it.)
Meanwhile over on the ProComm Voiceover Blog, Dan Freeman has posted an excellent article on choosing the right microphone. His advice? Listen before buying if at all possible. And for those of us whose location doesn’t allow auditioning, he has some great “stock suggestions” for good starting points which shouldn’t embarrass you. (I was pleased to see my own mic, the Neumann TLM 103 on the list – it’s a cracker!)
Voice Actor, Producer and Coach, James Alburger, posted recently on VoiceOverExtra about how to work remotely with your clients. It’s all very well living in the digital age and being tape-free, but email doesn’t cut it for sending big files without a lot of compression. James’s excellent article explains the various options for remote session recording and walks anyone who’s not sure through the basics of ISDN, Phone Patch, and newcomers like Source-Connect for live sessions, before going on to talk about FTP and file delivery services (including my own personal favourite, YouSENDIt.com, which even has its own iPhone app for you to monitor who downloaded the file and when).
Stephanie Ciccarelli of online casting service, Voices.com, is in the middle of a series of great posts over at VoxDaily. First of these is 95+ Podcast Resources for Voice Actors. 95?! She’s been busy, I’ll say that. Aimed primarily at those trying to get into the business and build their client list, Stephanie has helpfully categorised this mammoth list into sections like “Getting Started”, “Marketing”, “Branding”, “Demos”, “Technique” and so on. There should be something in here for everyone, though I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve not personally been through all of her recommendations. (If you’d like to read my own series on Getting Started then click here and read from the bottom up…)
In much the same vein, check out Stephanie’s other posts of recent weeks: 4 Ways to Increase Your Voice Acting Income and 6 Ways To Get Experience in the Business of Voice Acting (Stephanie is very fond of numbers.)
Finally, some lighter reading: Bill Pryce of Austin, Texas got stopped at security with a Sennheiser MKH 416 shotgun mic – which appears to have been mistaken for, erm, a shotgun… And congratulations to Rory O’Shea, who’s living the dream and has just completed building his basement studio in Toronto. In fact he’s so happy, he’s giving us a tour.
I hope you enjoyed this first roundup – do drop me a line and let me know. Comments are welcome as always!
