Voice Acting For Dummies

by David Ciccarelli

  These sections can help you to discover your unique abilities and leverage opportunities for your voice to shine. The voice is a flexible instrument that lends itself to many purposes and applications. Being able to release yourself from preconceived notions or pigeonholes can only be good for you and your business if you choose to run one.

  Releasing yourself from self-imposed limitations

  As a voice actor, you have the ability to create a variety of different reads and interpretations, and you’re able to fluctuate your voice to achieve a desired effect. As a result, you should exhibit your abilities and talent and offer your clients demonstrations of your abilities by uploading several different types of voice-over demos that show your range of ability.

  Many voice actors don’t record or promote more than one voice-over demo, which is a detriment to being hired. In most cases they only present a commercial demo. By offering several samples of work, you set yourself apart from others.

  Failing to offer something = lost potential

  If you don’t have at least one voice-over demo (we suggest you start with multiple demos) online showing your abilities, you lose out on prospective jobs and ultimately money. Some people don’t have demos, at least demos produced by someone other than themselves, because they consider recording the demos too expensive. Although demos do cost some money to have someone else produce, the expense is relative to what your return on investment (ROI) will be from each demo you have produced.

  If you talk to producers, they’ll certainly point you in the direction of recording a demo in a professional recording studio, which does cost money. If you do have a demo professionally recorded and produced (we discuss in Chapter 8), you need to be able to replicate the voices you did and the production values, such as music, sound effects, and so on.

  An alternative is recording your own demo if you have the skills and technology. This option is limited by your abilities as an engineer. The time, creativity, and energy you invest don’t cost much, but you don’t have the benefit of a producer or voice director to coach you like you would if you professionally recorded your demo. If you decide to self-record your demo, you need to know a thing or two about production elements, such as music and sound effects, copywriting (or sourcing royalty-free or public domain material), and artistic direction. (Refer to the chapters in Part V for setting up your own in-home recording studio.)

  Setting the Ideal Duration of a Voice-Over Demo

  The voice-over demo can range between 60 to 90 seconds to five minutes, depending on the type of demo. For example, commercial demos that promote your skills doing radio and television ads should be around 60 seconds. An audiobook or narration demo needs to last about five minutes in order to demonstrate your ability to stay in character for long passages in a story or possibly even to provide voices from different characters in a dialogue passage.

  The optimum time for a demo to run with multiple spots is about 60 to 90 seconds so the listener has ample time to appreciate your voice and what you can do. Anything shorter than 30 seconds runs the risk of not being long enough to demonstrate your abilities. You may record a shorter demo if you’re not recording a compilation of spots but instead featuring a full 30-second commercial that you produced.

  If you plan on uploading your demo to a marketplace website, you should keep your demo to 60 seconds, which equates to 1 megabyte (MB) in size. A 1MB file loads quickly for a listener, while still sounding great.

  We want as many people as possible to listen to you what you can do. To help with that, in these sections we include a number of tips for how to keep someone’s attention when listening to your demo and ways you can present your demo material for the best possible results.

  Cooking up a sample demo recipe

  A standard demo should include five spots, which are between 5 to 15 seconds in length, give or take. Here’s a breakdown blueprint for a standard 60-second demo:

  Intro monologue, known as a slate (who you are and the subject of your voice-over demo.) Skip to Chapter 11 for more info about what to include in a slate: 5 seconds

  Spot 1: 15 seconds

  Spot 2: 15 seconds

  Spot 3: 10 seconds

  Spot 4: 10 seconds

  Spot 5: 5 seconds

  Closing remarks (including your contact information and a plug for your website): 5 seconds

  Closing music jingle (optional): 5 to 8 seconds

  Always put your best spot at the beginning of the demo and choose to end your demo on a high note, leaving your audience pleased with what they heard but wanting to hear more. Not everyone has time to listen to an entire demo, so start off with your money voice. Your money voice is basically your signature voice, a concept we cover in Chapter 2. Your money voice shines the most brightly, and is more than likely the one that gets you hired most frequently. Your money voice is the strongest read you can muster and deserves first billing on your demo.

  Be sure to leave at least two seconds between tracks if you have multiple tracks. Keep in mind that you can include as many tracks on a demo as you want, but be sure to send people only the tracks that they ask for. For instance, don’t send an audio publisher who works strictly with narrators a sample of your voice that isn’t audiobook narration.

  A demo isn’t just a bunch of spots thrown together, and you definitely don’t want to skimp or cut corners in producing. Your demo reflects your level of professionalism, your range, and the value you have to offer the client. It should provide just enough of a sampling to whet your clients’ appetites, draw them in, and leave them wanting more. It should showcase your range and versatility.

  Working with short attention spans

  So why should most demos be around 60 seconds long? People, including your prospective clients, have short attention spans. Marketers now face a generation of people who are unable to budget more than a matter of seconds to advertisements. If something doesn’t grab a person immediately, the opportunity is lost.

  You want to capture your prospective clients’ attention and keep it, while at the same time demonstrating what you’re capable of doing. If you ramble on for a long time, they’ll quickly lose interest. As a result, you lose out on being noticed. Being able to communicate in such a way that the listener cares about what you’re saying (as well as being able to retain the information and act upon it!) is the primary goal of a voice actor. You’re battling for space in their minds. If you want to get a piece of their attention, perhaps even their undivided attention (and their desire to hire you), what you’re saying and how you’re saying it need to be worth their while.

  Conventional demos and methods don’t always work today on the Internet

  Decades ago, it was popular to have an all-in-one demo that ran five minutes, give or take, demonstrating all that a voice artist could do on something called a demo reel. They were called demo reels because they were recorded using analog technology, and the demos were saved on cassette tapes. This kind of demo is also often referred to as a montage.

  Although technology may have changed from analog to digital, some producers continued to cling to the one-size-fits-all procedure for crafting demos, albeit the montages were noticeably shorter. The montage, however, still offered its listeners a full-course meal to digest whether they wanted to hear the whole gamut or not.

  Even though the montage was effective years ago, technology and consumer expectations have changed, making it necessary to cater to individuals who have unique needs that a combo demo, at first blush, fails to meet.

  Breaking up demos into bite-sized pieces

  Today’s market and business place is hectic, and everyone is busy with little free time. You don’t get a second chance to impress. As a result, you have to be ready to show your skills when prompted. One of the ways of showing your abilities is to be armed with a good selection of your str
ongest work featured in bite-sized demos, organized by application or style of read.

  Presenting your demo in small pieces allows your prospective clients to pick and choose from what best applies to their needs. Opportunity is knocking for you here because people are looking for quick and simple solutions! If you create a number of short demos in a variety of styles, you stand a better chance of those demos being heard and listened to. Featuring those demos online and properly describing them for the search engines is paramount to achieving your goal. If you specialize in a given area, say narration for audiobooks, you may want to have a demo for each genre you read in (such as children’s literature, young adult, business, and so on).

  Avoid recording montage demos because a montage usually includes many styles in one demo, which may turn off clients or fail to engage them as intensely. Some producers still do montage demos (compilation demos that present a variety of different reads for a number of applications, sometimes including bits of commercials, narration, character work, corporate work, and so on). These montages, by virtue of the vast material they cover, must by necessity run longer than the present standard time for demos (the standard demo time is 60 to 90 seconds) because talent and producers try to squeeze in as many relevant bits as possible to show versatility. Clients are busy, and they don’t have time to listen to a long montage to see if you can do a certain style.

  The essence of the montage doesn’t need to go out of the window entirely. If your producer wants to use a montage, make sure the montage is more targeted to meet the individual client’s needs.

  Inspiring Ideas for Demo Subjects

  You don’t have to look far for a project in need of voice-over. A voice can be used in so many different ways, which means that you can create unique demos that zero in on a specialized niche or application of voice-over and voice acting.

  If you stop to think of all the voice-overs you hear in a day, most likely in the hundreds, and list the different applications of voice-over that you heard, a shocking number of possibilities arise in terms of opportunities for your voice and voice acting in general.

  We once asked people how many voice-overs they thought they had heard in a day. Some were thinking 50 or so, and others estimated more than 250. The number you do hear depends on how closely you’re listening and how much media you encounter.

  Considering how vast voice acting is, you may be more attracted to or interested in a certain area of voice-over. The types of demos you record are endless. Here we look at the most popular categories for demos used online today.

  Commercial

  The commercial demo has been a standard for decades despite the fact that there is substantially more work for voice actors in other areas of the business. Commercial demos are typically used for broadcast; however, they can also be used on the web in advertisements that roll before videos on platforms, such as on YouTube, on Internet radio, or on mobile devices.

  Commercial demos used to have a characteristic announcer sound, but the trend has been for a number of years to give more of a real-person read with more emphasis on building relationships with the listener and target market than going in for the hard sell. (Refer to Chapter 4 for the characteristics of an announcer and real-person reads.)

  Telephony

  One of the most popular demos to have is a telephony or telephone demo. Every business has a phone system, and most at least invest in a voicemail recording for their company. The telephone demo can consist of segments such as the auto attendant, interactive voice response (IVR), messaging-on-hold (MOH), and voicemail. You can make each of these segments its own demo.

  If you have a full telephone demo, make sure it’s labeled properly and let people know what they’ll be listening to. If the recording is simply an auto attendant, be sure to call it an auto attendant. The recording technically falls under telephone, but serves a specific purpose within that umbrella, which is to greet people when they first call in. If you also break those segments into multiple demos, you can potentially bring traffic directly to your voice samples and this can often result in delivering a more qualified prospect in need of your services. To discover more about featuring your voice samples online and proper labeling, refer to Chapter 10.

  Business or corporate narration

  The largest category of voice-over work worldwide is business. If you think about it, the corporate world needs voice-overs recorded for a variety of purposes. In fact, more and more businesses need voice-overs than in any other market. Your demos for business work can range from corporate narration projects to e-learning modules, product videos, explainer videos, workplace training videos, and voice-overs on company websites.

  From telephony to training videos, corporate messages and programming, voice-over in this niche can be exciting because a big brand or the shop down the street may need your services. This area of voice-over is often referred to as the bread-and-butter work of the industry and is generally the kind of work that most voice actors make the majority of their money doing.

  Audiobook narration

  Audiobooks is one of the fastest growing and broadest areas of work for narrators and voice actors. This market is exploding because of how digital technology and downloads have decreased the amount of money it takes to produce, distribute, and promote audiobooks.

  Using auditions on your demo for self-promotion: A big no-no

  From time to time, we come across recordings on voice actors’ websites or profiles that are in fact auditions that were recorded for clients posting jobs online.

  Is this a problem? Yes. As a best practice, you should never use audition material on a demo, unless the client has consented to its use in that capacity, because of these reasons:

  The audition copy is usually part of a client’s actual script, and the copyright generally belongs to that client.

  The client may plan to use the copy in an advertising campaign, or it’s from an internal corporate document that the company doesn’t want its competitors to hear prematurely or have access to.

  You can have multiple audiobook demos, each one featuring an excerpt from a different book. Creating several demos (which typically each lasts five minutes) for each genre of literature you’re interested in narrating is well worth your time. The more demos you have, the greater the likelihood that a prospective client can find you and that your voice samples will appeal to more people and audio publishers.

  Character voices or animation

  Just when you thought character voice acting was only required for animation purposes, more work exists than you may have imagined! Think about all the forms of entertainment that require a character voice: cartoons, animated films, dubbing for foreign cartoons, interactive, video gaming, talking toys, computer games, apps, audiobooks, and much more.

  Many people like to leverage their vocal creativity by designing characters in their demos that feature accents, different voice ages, and even physical mannerisms. This area of work is perfect for voice actors who have vivid imaginations and want to put the voices in their heads to work.

  Trailers

  A trailer demo is meant to grab someone’s attention and make him want to see, hear, or take part in the upcoming event. Trailers often include the element of suspense given that they’re supposed to draw people in without revealing the entire story or its outcome.

  Whenever you hear the word trailer, you probably think of movie trailer voice-overs and the field pioneered by Don LaFontaine. Trailers in reality can refer to any voice-over that promotes something that is coming soon and can extend to everything from the launch of an upcoming video game, a published book, or even a save-the-date promotional piece for weddings.

  The voicing style for trailers, movie trailers specifically, is still characteristic of the way the great movie trailer voices of the last 20 to 30 years have been voicing.

  I
nteractive

  Voices can come at you from nearly anywhere, can’t they? Maybe you’ve heard a voice in an elevator announcing the floor you were on or when commuting on a city bus, train, or airplane. These voices interact and guide people in practical terms at kiosks, self-checkouts in stores, and online. Work in this area can be quite diverse.

  A demo geared for this category can include interactive voice response or a menu of choices that need to be selected from. Work in this area is educational or helpful, and sometimes, purely entertaining. Your voice can lead someone through a survey or tutorial online, or engage someone at the pump while filling the car with gas.

  Other types

  The following list contains a wealth of ideas for the other kinds of work available that can warrant having their own demos.

  Announcing

  Bilingual demo if you speak two languages

  Celebrity impressions

  Emotion-based demos

  Husband and wife or multiple talent spots

  Jingles

  Play-by-play or color commentary

  Promo

  Real person

  Tour guide

  Voice age demos (senior, adult, young adult, teen, child, toddler, and so on)

  If you’re interested in one of these areas, search for demos that other voice actors have done that fit in the category of demo you want to record. After you do your research, start planning for your new demo and locate scripts that you can record.

  Chapter 7

  Getting Your Script Ready for Your Demo

  In This Chapter

  Writing your own script

  Utilizing preexisting material for your script

  Practicing your scripts

  Making a voice-over demo is a personal, artistic, and technical process. Your voice-over demo can be your ticket to success and often serves as the first impression of your voice a prospective client will hear. As a result, you want to make sure that the material on the demo not only suits your voice, but that it also flows well and gives you the ability to showcase your range.