VO-BB - 19 YEARS OLD!

[jsgilbert]

I have no idea who Direct Voices is. I can only assume they are one of the 20 or so v.o. businesses opening up every week that I can't imagine having lived without.

Most seem to be innocuous at best, reminding one of the rule of "caveat emptor".

But, every now and again I see some really bad advice or the baltant rip-off.

In their latest blog post, they actually give people a link to a place that sells egg cartons. No, I'm not talking slang here, these are for real, "use this to carry your eggs home from market".

I decided not to punish myself anymore, so I haven't bothered to read any further. I particularly like the way they've somehow put me on some sort of subscription email lst of sorts. They do have an opt-out, but every time I've tried that it's just resulted in my getting emails more frequently.

Check it out and let me know if it gets any worse.

http://www.directvoices.com/plaza/no_ambient_noise/
_________________
j.s. gilbert

js@jsgilbert.com
www.jsgilbert.com

"today is the first day of the rest of the week"

[Kim Fuller]

Had to delete them from my twitter account. The daily offering of useless advice was getting annoying.

[Bob Bergen]

OY!!! (sigh) Etc!

Well, my first demo was recorded when I was 16. It was garbage!! Cost my parents $850 in 1980! My teacher said I was demo ready, and being the student and having no idea what demo ready meant, I figured the teacher must know what she was talking about.

Lesson # 1: YOU will know when you are demo ready! Don't let any teacher tell you that you are. You might even have the chops, but if you don't have the mindset or the confidence to compete with the best of the best, hold off! The business will always be there. But you get only one opportunity per listener.

So, this first demo was recorded in a bathroom. Yes, a bathroom. With egg cartons on the walls. Hey-what did I know??!! I'd never done a demo before. I did have a convenient place to sit.

Lesson # 2: How undemo ready was I? Completely! I sucked!!! I had zero acting skills or training. I just had a teacher tell me I was demo ready. And a bathroom demo.

This demo cost me 2 years of work. I spent a lot of time gathering it back from those I sent it to. I think I got all but 20 or so. I'd sent out over 100.

Today, bad demos get posted online. For the world to hear. Everyone and anyone. Not just 100. Everyone. And even if you take it down, you never know who might have kept it or what kind of an impression you left.

Lesson # 3: ONLY post brilliant work!!!!!!!! Assume everyone has access to every site, even those that require a membership. If you want to get a pro's opinion on your demo? Send it to them. But by posting online you are opening yourself up to long term career judgement by that demo.

I play my first demo for my students. Just to show them that even those of us who are successful today started somewhere. And by somewhere, I mean sucked!!

There's a sandwich board in LA that advertises "vo demos for $200." I'm dying to hire them to see what kind of demo that they can do for me. I'm willing to throw away $200 for an business experiment.

Bottom line: Caveat Emptor!!!!

[captain54]

I would tend to disagree with Bob, to some degree.. here's why:

Buddy Guy, probably the greatest living blues guitar player, started out playing guitar with a guitar he made from the strands of screen from a screen door.. did it sound brilliant? probably not.. Point is, you gotta start somewhere..

Some people learn better by actually doing.. I don't know if I could have improved by taking 10 yrs of classes and coaching and practicing in my bedroom trying to become brilliant..

With all that being said, I would say to a new person.. get a reasonable amount of coaching and classes under your belt, find someone who can coach you into some decent takes and is real with you, and go for it.. I would not advise however, shooting for the 5 star big name agencies off the bat.. start out local and smaller..
_________________
Lee Kanne
www.leekanne.com

[Bob Bergen]

But here's the difference. Buddy Guy played live. It was a time, and a craft that allowed you to be bad without damaging your entire career. This is my whole point. The online world can be a great thing. Everyone wants to represent or work with the next great thing. Post before you are ready and doors shut hard. This business will always be here. No rush.

Online vo has also brought a generation of voice actors who do this for the money. This is a pretty recent phenomenon. Generations of actors did it because they had to. Being paid was a chance byproduct. Making great money was a rarity. But you acted because you just aren't happy not acting.

With the age of online vo came the desire to make money at vo. Generations of actors used to wait tables to pay their bills as they honed their craft, demanding only the best of the best from their career. Today, people just want to work. So, they post anything online, whether it's brilliant or not, just to possibly get anything. I'm not saying it's wrong. There is no right or wrong, as long as you are happy. But then these same people ststistically cannot understnd why the cannot take their career to the next level.

I made mention of this Documentary I Know That Voice on this forum. There ain't one successful actor in that film who did this for the money. Several even mentioned they'd do this for free, they love it so much. Every single actor demanded to be at the top of their game. It all depends what you want out of your career or if you even want a career.

[captain54]

[Bish]

Yup... I got that one as well. I think what bothers me (with this, and a lot of the new sites that are popping up like mushrooms) is the perpetual dumbing down and minimizing of the time and effort required to make a success of VO. I'm a late-comer to the business... but it's taken me years of hard slog to get to where I am now (that would be having a few agents, a union card, paying the bills... and then having a few bucks left over for a Guinness). All this stuff is a blatant cash-grab for subscription money... and it's annoying. It's not helped by self-publicizing "experts" wanting to share their "experiences and advice" with constant meaningless blogs that just recycle the same old crap... and in some cases, misleading crap.

An unfortunate side effect of all this, is the bifurcation* or stratification of the industry. As a segment of the marketplace becomes happier with poor quality/cheap VO, there will be (is) a growing number of web entrepreneurs who will feed on it and chase the low price, high turnover model. There is obviously a grey area in the middle where there is some cross-over, but I, for one, am trying to distance myself from the ever-expanding bottom end... and this is enabled by my own diligence in trying to improve and expand my capabilities and not chasing the quick buck. To put it simply, my "Duh!" moment came a while ago, when I realized that chasing ten, two-hundred dollar jobs was (by far) more work than chasing one, two-thousand dollar job.

*There is an expectation from some people (you know who you are) that in any serious message about the industry, I will work in either "obfuscation" or "bifurcation". I do this here so as to not disappoint anyone.
_________________
Bish a.k.a. Bish
Smoke me a kipper... I'll be back for breakfast.
I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls... I will not feed the trolls.

[Lance Blair]

I thought his advice was pretty good. He recommended using egg cartons only on the ceiling, which is a better situation than a flat ceiling if you can't rig clouds in your room. Also, he links to a good article from Sound on Sound at the end which says among many other things that Egg Crates can help for treatment but does nothing for soundproofing. http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul00/articles/faqacoustic.htm

I went to an egg distributor and bought a crazy load of egg crates for my band's rehearsal space (which was too large to cheaply treat with proper panels) and it definitely improved the sound for little investment.

This article is all about getting started. It's one of the better ones I've read in that regard.
_________________
Skype: globalvoiceover
and now, http://lanceblairvo.com the blog is there now too!

[Mike Harrison]

What Lance said. All egg cartons can do is provide multiple and various angled surfaces for sound to bounce off of, but they do absolutely nothing in the way of absorbing sound.

AND what Peter said:

[cyclometh]

There's a studio I've spent some time at in Seattle. I've taken several coaching classes there. When I first started working toward becoming a voice artist, I was taking a lot of coaching and so on.

There was a comic, I think clipped from a music or guitar magazine, framed on the wall behind the booth. It showed the four stages of competence in an amusing fashion, with garage band idiots making screeching sounds and crowing about how amazing they were at the "unconscious incompetence" stage.

For reference, the idea is that there are four stages of competency for any activity: Unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence, and unconscious competence.

Too many people in VO make the leap into the business before they have reached the "conscious competence" stage. The vast majority don't ever make it to that point- they stay forever mired in unconscious incompetence and fail.

There's no bright line for when you should be trying to get work, but you can't let the fear of failure be the thing to stop you, nor should you have an unreasonable expectation of being as good as a long-time veteran before you try. You SHOULD know thyself first. Overestimating ones' ability or talent is the biggest reason for failure in this business, I think. A close second is underestimating how hard it is to ramp up a business.

As someone who has been working full-time at this for just about a year now, the longer I do this the more I realize I do NOT know, and that's OK, because knowing what I don't know means I have something to work toward.

At some point, the only way to improve is to put your skills to work in the real world. Where that point is, I can't say. I can say that far, far too many don't even know themselves well enough to try and even identify where that point is.
_________________
Corey "Vox Man" Snow
http://voxman.net

[jsgilbert]

Corey,

I've probably mentioned those four stages of learning as they pertain to voice over about 20 times over the years in varied posts. In particular with regards to one woman asking another about "demos".

We'll say Mary is looking to make a demo and she asks a classmate, Sharon her thoughts. Sharon says "You have to have Wendy produce your demos. She's the absolute best." Based on that recommendation, Mary calls Wendy and makes an appointment."

The problem is that Sharon doesn't even have the knowledge to know that her demo stinks. She has sent it out to dozens of agents and production companies and not a nibble. She even contacted some referrals from family members and friends and nothing panned out. She's done 1 job for $50, saying a sentence as a real person in a commercial lined up by one of her teachers, who also took the opportunity to sign Sharon up for another $1,500 of classes.

But it goes way beyond this. For example, one of the biggest "myths" in voice over, which has absolutely no bearing in fact, is that "It takes 5 years to get to the point where you are making a living in voice over".

And I have seen quite a few intelligent people tell that fable, without them ever stopping to ask "Is this true?" "Where does this come from?"

There may be few "absolutes" when it comes to voice over, but things like classes with titles "How to make a living doing voice over for video games" are beyond misleading, as are teachers who offer classes like "How to make money writing jingles for commercials". Of course, both can be true if you believe that $6,000 is "making a living" or that $700 is "making money".

I'd suggest that before you hang egg cartons on the wall or ceiling, that there's 100 other things you probably have lying around that would be a far better choice.

You can actually turn a speaker into a microphone, but I wouldn't suggest that either.
_________________
j.s. gilbert

js@jsgilbert.com
www.jsgilbert.com

"today is the first day of the rest of the week"

[Lee Gordon]

This all goes back to Bob's first point.

[Bob Bergen]

Wow, I have never heard anyone reputable give a time frame for making a living at VO. I absolutely agree to stay clear away from any workshop or coach that advertises or promotes "make money at VO."

I was called by a very successful broadcaster who recently lost his high profile job in news. He wanted to pick my brain on vo. He asked me, "Realistically, how long before can make money at this?" I told him unless you are a psychic there's no way to know. Short of a couple of upcoming jobs, I have no idea when my next gig is. I do know when my next residuals will be coming in. That info is on the residual tracker page on the union's website. But my next job?? No idea. He asked how I could live like that??!! I told him, because I'm an actor. Actors have to act. They don't have to make money at it. Don't get me wrong, getting paid for what you love is the ultimate. But it's not my incentive. Being creative at the mic is.

Again, you don't go into acting or anything in the arts for the money. Ever! This doesn't mean that once you do start making money as an actor you ignore your income. You are beyond fortunate. Live below your means. Know that it's going to be a roller coaster. Gotta love the journey.

And Lee, I absolutely think you know when you are demo ready. That doesn't mean you won't continue to grow as an actor. If there is the slightest doubt, you are not demo ready. If your doubt is your prospect of success, that doubt never goes away. I have no idea what 2014 has in store for my bank account. What I do know is, I can be handed any piece of copy and give a competitive, believable read, delivered with my own personal brand and style. With the exception of audio books. I have zero audio book skills.

But anyone who says it will take a certain length of time to become a working actor is full of it. You could book from the get go. You could go years without a callback. In both cases you could be a brilliant or a lousy actor. There is no science to this. But in any case, you act because you have to. It's an obsession. If it's not your obsession, find what is. You will always feel more fulfilled doing what you love than doing what you hate. I'd rather be 75 and poor than 75, rich, and hating the day to day that got me there.

[Bailey]

[Lee Gordon]