Voice Acting For Dummies

by David Ciccarelli

  Being conscious of your voice is very important. Practice recording and listening to yourself perform to hear your artistic choices. Did they sound informed, deliberate, and committed? Were you able to identify any areas, whether technical or artistic, that you’d like to further develop or explore?

  Using the “series of three” audition trick

  Using the series of three, based on a method taught by voice coach Pat Fraley, is an excellent way to provide direction for yourself when auditioning for voice-over work. Essentially, what you do is prepare three different takes in your audition for a client to consider. This can be done either in person or through an online audition. You can also use this method when working on a project in your recording studio or practicing at home. If it’s a long script that you’re recording, simply do a portion of it.

  The series of three is as follows:

  A: Your primary interpretation

  B: An interpretation different from A

  C: A mix between takes A and B

  You can easily make your C role how you interpret the copy for any voice-over job, not just character voice work. You’ll certainly notice a difference in how you perform and your clients will too. Most directors end up casting your C role. Think of this as the Goldilocks method — too hot, too cold, just right:

  Too hot: In voice-over terms, the read is over the top, perhaps aggressive or overly confident. The feeling or interpretation motivating your read may be the first thing that comes to mind and needs to be clear and effective so you have something to build on for your other reads.

  Too cold: The read contrasts significantly from the first read. Maybe this read is happy, perhaps cheerful even! Whatever it is, it needs to be different from the first read and express a different feeling or sentiment using the same words.

  Just right: This read is somewhere in the middle of hot and cold. It’s described as a warm read or combination of the two.

  You can play with pitch, inflection, timing, and more when compiling a series of three sets of reads. Something helpful in this case would be to let clients know that you’ve prepared a number of contrasting reads for their consideration.

  Your first two choices don’t have to be complete opposites to be effective. If you want, you can experiment with using a sliding scale, hovering around the same feeling with ever so slight changes in interpretation. Employing a lighter variation strategy can result in complementary rather than polarizing interpretations and produce a more targeted series of reads, if the client has been quite clear with his requirements and creative direction.

  Achieving Success during Your Audition

  If you’re auditioning for voice-over jobs on your own, we hope you’ve adopted an agent’s mindset for qualifying your opportunities. Thinking like an agent saves you time (which can also equate to money) and energy, and doing so also gives you a better shot at booking the projects you’re auditioning for.

  See each audition as a means to keep in shape. When you audition, know that with each piece of copy you read, you’re getting better and better. Whenever you invest time and effort into something, it begins to yield fruit.

  Being consistent is important in terms of achieving success with regularity. Having a membership on a marketplace site allows you to “speak to the world” from the privacy of your own home and provides opportunities for you to work with repeat clients.

  Some things you can do include

  Auditioning multiple times a day

  Inviting clients to add you to their Favorites

  Teaching clients how to leave feedback for you after completing a job

  Responding to a job posting as soon as it arrives

  Something you can do to make your auditions sound better is editing out breaths when it makes sense to do so. Editing breaths out of auditions may be a reasonable thing to do, especially if you’re having some respiratory issues or have a cold. You can remove the breaths to make the audio sound cleaner, but the end result could be that the voice-over loses an aspect of its humanity and may sound unnatural. Check out Chapter 19 for more specifics about editing.

  Slating Your Name

  What does it mean to slate your name? Simply put, slating means to read your name aloud prior to performing the audition copy so the casting director, or decision maker, knows who he’s listening to. A slate can also foreshadow what the listener will hear as well as potentially surprise the listener depending on how the slate is executed.

  Slating your name, whether in person or online, is part of the auditioning process and is as industry standard as anything. Given the frequency that you may be using it, something you may wish to do is record your slate as a separate file and store it in your session template/settings in your digital audio recording program.

  These sections explain the importance of slating, what you can gain from good slating, and how you can slate for auditions.

  Giving a good first impression with a slate

  The basic slate is simply stating your name at the beginning of the file. A slate doesn’t serve the same purpose as a watermark. A slate doesn’t compromise the trust between actors and their prospective clients.

  Slating serves many these purposes:

  Readily identifies you, the speaker

  Sets the tone for the audition

  Gets your name in the client’s head

  Sets an industry-standard auditioning technique

  Serves as another way to document whose voice is on the file, should it get downloaded

  Identifying the main benefit to slating

  One benefit of slating your name is that people in the press or podcasters can instantly know how to say your name. Having a slate can help to prevent mistakes and embarrassing moments for people trying to contact you, promote you, hire you over the phone, or reference you on a program.

  People, whether in the media or otherwise, mean well, and they want to say your name right the first time. Give them the opportunity to ace it by having a slate accompany your demo.

  Knowing the different ways to slate

  Slating can come in two different ways:

  You can slate your own name.

  You can enlist a colleague to slate your name.

  Many voice actors who incorporate slating into their promotional and auditioning techniques choose the second option and have one of their voice-over pals, usually of the opposite gender, record their name in an MP3 file that they then use to introduce their demos and auditions.

  In the majority of instances, having someone slate your name works in your favor, but sometimes the actor who slates your name can end up getting the job. Rest assured that this isn’t the norm, but it’s still another good reason for having a voice actor of the opposite sex slate for you. Try working with a voice actor who has a different accent altogether from your own and is the opposite gender. Above all, the slate is supposed to prepare the audience and enhance your performance, not take away from it.

  Getting a Callback

  When you get a callback, you’re over the moon! You’re that much closer to booking the job. Only a select number of voice actors receive invitations to read again, so this feedback is wonderful for actors who wonder if their read was what the client was looking for.

  Feedback of this kind is rare as are callbacks for most voice-over jobs. If you do receive a callback, you are on the right track and are one of the select few who caught the client’s ear with your interpretation of the client’s script with the help of your voice.

  For the callback, here are a few things to consider:

  Respond to your client. One of the best ways to communicate with clients where documentation is concerned is by using the internal messaging system with your online account or sending an email if you’re working with someone who hired you through other m
eans.

  If you book a job at Voices.com and communicate using the internal messaging system, all communications, from the audition through feedback reviews, are stored safely within your account for you to reference if need be.

  Ask what the client liked. Given the opportunity, you may wish to ask a client what it was about your audition that he liked. This isn’t always an option, but if you find that you do have access to a direct communication line, you can dig a little to discover more about what it was that singled you out.

  Improve from your original audition. If you made it this far, whatever you did in your original audition can serve as your benchmark for success. If you made any technical or artistic mishaps in your original audition, you can now fix them.

  Understand the client’s requirements. Make sure you know what the client expects of you. Doing so is a surefire way to best prepare yourself in a callback situation. You may find that the callback contains more detailed information and requirements that the client only wanted to disclose to contenders for the job.

  Thinking beyond the Audition

  Although curiosity can be a healthy thing, you can take it too far, and it may prove to be a point of frustration. This can be especially true when pondering the potential outcome of a job application, auditioning for a role, or submitting yourself for consideration — all of which put the ball in someone else’s court.

  Auditioning requires a boldness to step out and the willingness to become vulnerable in the presence of someone else. When you give of yourself, you’ll experience a certain level of vulnerability. The decision ultimately resides with the person you’re trying to please and convince on the other end.

  After putting so much of yourself into an audition, it’s no wonder you feel curious and want to know what came of your efforts, but that’s part of your job as an actor. If you were to spend all your time worrying about past auditions, you’d have time for little else.

  How can you get past the audition and move on, even though you don’t have a definitive answer? Try these suggestions:

  Don’t use the word rejection. Just tell yourself that you weren’t the right voice for the gig.

  Remind yourself that not getting the job or not hearing about the job has left you time and energy for the right gig to come your way.

  Think “I’m perfect for the next project!”

  Use the fire and forget method. Do the audition as best you can and then forget you did it. Then if you get the call, it’s a pleasant surprise. If you don’t, you haven’t lost anything.

  Think of supplying the best audition you can as your job. After that, it’s in the client’s hands.

  Modeling What Other People Who Book Regularly Do in Your Auditions

  What sets successful voice actors apart from those individuals who don’t get jobs? When you get right down to it, people who book as their own agent have mastered the arts of communication and marketing and are able to meet the artistic and technical needs of their clients.

  Voice actors who are their own agent have less time to complain or second-guess themselves. Many voice actors in the business like to not only receive demo feedback from prospective clients offline, but they also want to receive feedback from clients online. For instance, they want to know details, such as whether the client has listened to a demo, what the client thought of the performance, and also why they weren’t chosen for the part.

  Based on what we’ve experienced, these actors

  Were the right voice for the job

  Quoted an amount that the client was prepared to pay

  Customized auditions (both demos and proposals)

  Made clients feel at ease and reassured them of their professionalism

  Added value to the customer and had a unique selling proposition

  Were able to identify and relieve their customers’ “pain”

  For most actors, the proof is in the pudding. A paycheck is equivalent to a client’s feedback and pat on the back for a job done well. Those actors are busier working and have no time (and certainly waste less time) to contemplate why they did not book a particular job. They adopt and live out a send it and forget it mindset. In their opinion, it’s not about rejection. It’s about selection.

  Reflecting on Why You May Not Win an Audition

  Take a moment to pause and think about what it is that may have contributed to your not landing a gig. For some actors, they can point their fingers directly at the fact that they didn’t record a custom demo, provide the client with a sample read from their script, and so one. But for the most part, focus on the Big 3: the right equipment, desire, and ego.

  The right equipment

  Do you have the time to just stop everything and record a custom demo? For those of you who work at home, equipped with industry standard studio gear, recording on demand can be as easy as creating a new session, positioning yourself in front of your trusty microphone, and getting down to business, script in hand (or in browser window, whichever works for you).

  That’s wonderful for actors with pro studios, but what about actors who don’t professionally record from home? This is where the custom demo may go out the window.

  “But, what about recording it through an online system or on a portable, hand-held MP3 recorder?” you may ask? We don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but online recording software that allows you to simply use your computer’s internal microphone often comes across as tinny, poor quality, and incredibly difficult to enjoy from a client’s point of view. Recording in this manner jeopardizes your chances of landing a job.

  Right away, you face

  Distortion

  Reduced quality

  Low fidelity

  Limited amount of time to record

  Not being able to edit the recording

  Having no record of the recording on your personal computer

  Relying on a particular service to submit lower quality audio

  Clients not being able to or not wanting to share your demo with colleagues

  A poor first impression of what you can do for the client

  If you have the choice to record a really solid custom demo with proper equipment, don’t settle for providing a potential customer with inadequate audio and a poor first impression of your work. In most cases, if you aren’t prepared to record a sample of the script (and have the time and resources to do so), perhaps you really aren’t as interested in the job as you may have thought.

  Desire

  When it all boils down to it, do you really want this job? Client feedback has revealed that submissions without custom demos aren’t worth reviewing. They interpret a stock demo as obvious disinterest in the project.

  If you truly want the job, prove it to the client and give the client a taste of what you can do for them.

  Ego

  Do not let your ego get in the way. Don’t think “I’ve been the voice of superstar blue-chip clients, and I don’t need to prove myself to you.” This position is a dangerous place to be for a voice actor who’s trying to find himself work.

  You may have numerous credits that indicate your extraordinary voice acting roles, clients, and so forth, but odds are that the majority of clients will have no concept of the breadth of your voice acting history. In most instances, clients won’t make the decision to hire simply because of past credits and one’s clout as a voice-over phenomenon. It all comes down to how you can serve clients and how you can serve the people in their charge — not about the latest voice acting project you’ve starred in or the most recent national commercial you’ve recorded.

  Chapter 12

  Auditioning in the Virtual World

  In This Chapter

  Knowing the ins and outs to auditioning online

  Recording your a
udition and naming your demo file

  Safeguarding your auditions

  Quoting pay rates for clients

  Giving your audition portions a second look

  Auditioning leads to work. When you audition for a voice-over job, you need to concentrate on what’s being asked of you, and how to best convey the purpose and sentiment of a script, and you need to persuade clients to work with you on their projects.

  In this chapter, you discover how to submit an audition online at a voice-over marketplace, including receiving job posting notifications, reviewing job details, interpreting a script, recording a custom demo, deciding whether to include music in your audition submission, and filing naming conventions. You also gain insight into the quoting process, find out how to write a great proposal to accompany your custom demo, and move on after you’ve sent in your audition.

  Following the Steps for Auditioning Online

  When you’re listed on an online marketplace, some membership levels give you the opportunity to not only showcase your voice but also apply for work. This application process is commonly referred to as auditioning. The process is simple and designed to help you put your best foot (or voice) forward. Here are some sample steps you can follow when auditioning online, on a marketplace website.

  Step 1: Creating an online account

  Clients are constantly in need of people who can do voice-overs. They create a job and post jobs for you to see on a marketplace site. The job postings outline requirements and what types of voices are needed. After the job postings have been submitted and approved, you can peruse the listings. But you can only do this if you have an online account.

  To create an account, find the audition sites you’re interested in and register. Some online sites where you can find voice-over auditions include Voices.com, elance.com, and guru.com.

  Step 2: Locating jobs

  You can locate jobs through sites that you are registered for in two ways:

  Peruse job listings. Check out Chapter 10 for where to locate job listings.

  Email links from clients.

  Only voice actors who are logged in to their accounts can audition for jobs.