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5 Questions for a Professional Voice-Over Talent – Donna Postel

Today’s 5 Questions for a Professional Voice Over Talent are answered by Donna Postel, a professional voice-over talent based in St Louis, MO.

1. The beginning: When did you know you wanted to be a voiceover talent; how did your career begin (please include what year it started) and then when did your passion for voiceover develop into something professional?

I had just dropped out of college — actually, I told myself I was transferring to a school more in line with my goal of being an international star of stage and screen, but the truth was that I didn’t really know what I wanted to do when I grew up. One day a friend asked me to go with him to check out the Broadcast Center, a trade school in St Louis that promised to make its students into the world’s best deejays and news talkers. Fearing a scam, and knowing my friend was incredibly gullible, I accompanied him to save him from ruin.

As we sat there and listened to the owner and some the teachers talk about the program, a lightbulb lit up for me — this is something I can do, and do very very well. I signed up for the course (my friend did not).

One night, the owner’s son, a hot-shot big-time voiceover talent in New York, did a mini master class for us. He spoke a bit, answered some questions, and — lightbulb #2. From that night on, I knew I wanted to be a voice talent too.

The first job offer I accepted in radio was a position as production manager — I was going to be the copywriter, producer, and commercial/promo voice for KFRU in Columbia MO. Another radio job brought me back to the St Louis area, and I spent the next few years as a drive time personality, news reporter, interviewer and whatever else the stations needed.

I still loved theatre, and found the time to do a couple of plays a year as well. A fellow actor in the St Louis company I played with was creative director of a local ad agency, and as soon as I left radio (within days actually) an agent called me with a booking for one of that dear man’s clients, a department store.

Since that day 30 years ago (where did the time go?) I have sometimes given more energy to being a mom than running a voiceover business. There were a couple of years when I was lured back into radio, but commercials and corporate narration and on-camera spokesperson work was always there for me, and I have been extremely fortunate to have been able to support my family while being home when my kids got home from school.

This year I’ve finally been able to launch my audiobook career, and I can’t get over how much I love it.

2. What is the one thing you know now that you wish someone had told you when you first started out in voiceover?

I wish I’d actually listened to all the wonderful advice I was getting from so many generous people, but was too busy trying to appear like I already had all the answers to accept.

3. What do you see as the biggest professional or personal obstacle you face that impacts your voiceover business and how are you working to overcome it?

When your business is your voice, your factory will always have an inventory of exactly ONE. My deeply ingrained DIY mindset has kept me from seeking the assistance that would help me serve more clients. I really need to start using outside editors more (but at the same time I really enjoy editing)!

4. What personal trait or professional tool has helped you succeed the most in your career so far?

Curiosity. I LOVE learning new things, and every project has opened my eyes to something.
Commitment. In performance, I am totally committed to the moment – the emotion – in the text.
Availability. I’m always available to do whatever it takes to make my client’s life easier.
I show up! My tools are ready to go (i.e., my voice is warmed up and ready).
And apparently I have a really reliable internal timecode – I can adjust my read by the frame, if that’s what’s needed.

5. In your development as a voice over performer, who has been the one particular individual or what has been the one piece of performance advice (maybe a key performance trick, etc.) that you felt has had the most impact on your actual voice over performance and why?

Oscar Wilde said it. “Be yourself – everybody else is taken.”

5 Questions for a Professional Voice Over Talent – Bobbin Beam

Today’s 5 Questions for a Professional Voice Over Talent are answered by Bobbin Beam, a professional voice-over talent based in Escondido, CA.

1. The beginning: When did you know you wanted to be a voiceover talent; how did your career begin (please include what year it started) and then when did your passion for voiceover develop into something professional?

My VO career began in an evolutionary way. I can’t remember when I wasn’t a performer of some kind. My sisters and I used to put on “shows” for our parents, singing harmony of holiday songs or the latest pop hits. Later on I formed a drama troupe at age 8 with my friends and we’d put on plays in our barn for the neighbors. My father had a large reel to reel tape recorder. I would watch how he used it. I then took over possession and wore out reel upon reel of his Scotch Brand Magnetic tape. I got hooked on playback! In high school I was in all the plays and was planning to be a theater major in college. In the fall of senior year I narrated an excerpt from Richard Brautigan’s, “Trout Fishing in America” for a class project and my English teacher told me I should consider going into communications. Before graduation, I landed my first job in radio at a progressive rock station. It was a complete novelty to have a female voice on the air at the time. It was a 180-degree alternative to top 40 where music actually mattered. Radio became a passion for quite a few years as I learned how to literally run a radio station by wearing the many hats within and working up the ranks. Then one day I was collecting unemployment. It was 1982. That was when I became an entrepreneur and started working as a voiceover actor while operating my own ad agency. I sold, wrote, produced , voiced, hired talent and purchased air time for my clients. It was a good way into voiceover. I loved voice-over more and more and landed my agents and worked in Milwaukee & Chicago and then moved to Southern California late in 1984 to be physically closer to my big sister and LA. To this day I am thankful during the years I worked in radio I never had to deliver the now dreaded “announcer read”.

2. What is the one thing you know now that you wish someone had told you when you first started out in voiceover?

That it takes guts and a thick skin, that the work ebbs and it flows. And you need to save your money when you’re making it, for those “famine days” that WILL occur. Another thing is to never play small, and listen to your own voice amidst the noise out there. I’m quite the contrarian sometimes. But I’ve become comfortable with the uncomfortable. It elevates my “Vision” and my art to not follow the crowd.

3. What do you see as the biggest professional or personal obstacle you face that impacts your voiceover business and how are you working to overcome it?

Clearly the biggest professional and personal obstacle can be what I call, “Stinkin’ thinkin'” I’m an optimist at heart, and I cannot take the selection process personally. It CAN get to me sometimes. And I’ll cry about it, doubting myself. That always seems to occur before a new creative breakthrough that lifts me and the work to a whole new level. When I go through dry periods , I remember my focus, and read, learn, take more coaching, and stop trying to compare myself to others who appear more successful. And when the mic is off, the marketing hat must go on. I really try to avoid time-wasters. I must do the most productive thing possible at any one time.

4. What personal trait or professional tool has helped you succeed the most in your career so far?

Love. I always choose coming from a place of love and hope. I choose to be impressed rather than to impress. That’s why I love to learn. There is so much that I don’t know.

5. In your development as a voice over performer, who has been the one particular individual or what has been the one piece of performance advice (maybe a key performance trick, etc.) that you felt has had the most impact on your actual voice over performance and why?

I’ve had so many fantastic friends, coaches and mentors to help me work through the nuts and bolts of the work, and my success so far is in large part a culmination of all the things I’ve learned from them. But the one person in my life who impacted my career was my mother. She was always my biggest fan, and she had the most beautiful voice. But she loved listening to me, and would correct me if I didn’t enunciate clearly or when I said something grammatically incorrect. She believed in me and taught me how to believe in myself.

audio’connell in seattle part 2

I went to a high school that is renowned for pushing out lawyers, doctors and other big time muckety-mucks.

What they were not known for is graduating voice-over talents so I am not and will not be a star alumnus. Yeah, the comedian Mark Russell was a graduate as was Tim Russert but they were anomalies (and they had, you know…talent!!)

The point here is that, no I didn’t go to any high school resembling “Fame” and there’s rarely been any kind of business connection between anyone in my graduating class of Canisius High School and me. It is what it is.

Or maybe it was what it was because a connection WAS made this trip that tied my professional life to my high school.

About a year ago, a high school friend of mine, Trip Fanning, invited me over to his house in Seattle with his lovely wife and terrific children and he mentioned he knew a voice talent that I should meet. This voice talent was the wife of a guy, Mark Curtain, who I graduated high school with. Mark’s parents were pals with my parents and I had the great pleasure to play golf with Mark’s parents years ago when they and I belonged to the same golf club.

Mark’s wife is female voice-over talent Grace Regis Bennett who I finally got to meet on this trip, over a year after Trip suggested it (and I didn’t get to see the Fannings which Trip won’t care so much about but his wife is going to be pissed 😉 ).

What an amazing journey her voice-over has taken. Most recently she worked with some fella named Scott Burns on a new commercial demo and her wonderful talent resonates from beginning to end.

She’s been off the voice-over grid outside of Seattle but is looking to come back in a big way. If you’re a production house or agency looking for her demo, feel free to reach out to me and I’ll put you in touch with her.

audio’connell in seattle

What your looking at is probably one of the few times these three men took a breath from laughing during a longer than normal dinner.

Much of the humor cannot be repeated but it should be noted that Scott’s new marketing campaign will include some of the most unique positioning statements ever considered within the voice-over industry.

Well, ANY industry, actually.

My thanks to Scott Burns, Jeffrey Kafer and to Corey Snow who had a change in plans at the last minute (but it was good to be able to chat with him by phone this week.)

a voice-over white paper in the making

Say you are a voice-over pay to play site and you’ve got a pretty good reputation as far this particular business segment goes…those that like P2P sites use you and believe you treatment them fairly; those that don’t like P2P sites are never going to be won over so why bother with them. A reasonable strategy.

So say one day you decide that you want to change your Terms of Service (TOS) – the rules that you as the P2P site owner operate under and that users of your site must abide by if they want to use your site. Most every interactive site has them and there are updates made on all of them as business dictates.

But imagine you are a voice-over P2P site with this good reputation and you want to change your terms of service in what might be considered a controversial way…a way that might dismay or upset you primary revenue source – your voice talents who pay a membership fee.

For example let’s say via your revised TOS you’re going to:

1. Change your P2P site from a relatively open format where a VO can list his/her contact information on the site for prospects to view to, under the TOS revision, a site that bans that VO talent contact information from being posted on the talent’s paid page (as part of their membership fee) on the P2P site.

2. Change the P2P voice-over web site in such a way that any links to outside web sites would be removed on any communication between VO and client (for example, in a template proposal available within the P2P site and used to communicate to the client).

3. Finally, in this scenario, let’s also imagine that all financial transactions between the client and the voice talent on this site must now use the P2P web site’s proprietary payment system that pays the P2P site a 10% fee on the value of the transaction (previously service this was optional). This is in addition to, not in replacement of, the voice talent’s yearly membership fee paid to the site. The P2P site gets paid twice if there is a business transaction on the site.

All of this is legal. It all falls under legitimate business practices. There is open notification to all parties that this change is coming.

The questions always are:

What will the the customers (in this case the voice talents) say?

What will the customers do?

How will this all turn out?

And so the business study (the White Paper) begins.

5 Questions for a Professional Voice-Over Talent – Gabrielle Nistico

Today’s 5 Questions for a Professional Voice Over Talent are answered by Gabrielle Nistico, a professional voice-over talent based in Charlotte NC.

1. The beginning: When did you know you wanted to be a voiceover talent; how did your career begin (please include what year it started) and then when did your passion for voiceover develop into something professional?

It started in 1994. I was a kid working as an intern in a radio station on Long Island. Of all things I wanted to be in sales! We did something called “Call-Out Research” and all the interns did shifts calling local household at random and playing them song hooks in order to gather music research for the station. The PD like my voice and asked me to start doing some commercials. A few months later he asked me for an air-check and before I knew it I was hooked on the performance aspects of the industry. In 2000 there was a short commercial strike with SAG / AFTRA. Being a stone’s throw from NYC I started to get auditions for some pretty big names while that was going on. I didn’t really know or understand (at the time) what it all meant but I started to see rates of pay that were FAR beyond anything I was earning in radio. After that I became aggressive about leaving radio and making VO my full-time effort.

2. What is the one thing you know now that you wish someone had told you when you first started out in voiceover?

I guess I wish I’d had a VO business advisor. Someone to help me better understand marketing, sales and negotiations. That’s why I’m so passionate about those efforts today. I took a lot of things for granted early-on because I didn’t know. I see many talent make those same mistakes now and they have loads of help available. I got screwed big time on a few jobs where I agreed to a buy-out. Coming from radio I thought “hey it’s just a tag, how long could they use it for?” Up until a few years ago I’d go back to the NY metro area and hear myself on spots for a bedding company. The tag they used was recording over 10 years before!

3. What do you see as the biggest professional or personal obstacle you face that impacts your voiceover business and how are you working to overcome it?

Time. There’s never enough of it. There’s lots that I want to accomplish each week / month and not enough hours in each day. I’m learning to trust others more, hire help and delegate responsibilities where I can even to friends and family if they are willing to assist.

4. What personal trait or professional tool has helped you succeed the most in your career so far?

Whenever possible I subscribe to the “speak little, listen much” philosophy. I watch, glean, lurk, and soak up as much as I can from those I respect in the industry and I immediately apply their knowledge to whatever I’m doing. Ego will kill a voiceover career so I’m always trying to keep that nasty wench away. We stop learning and stop growing if we fail to listen and think we know everything and believe we have nothing to learn. I like to kick my own butt. So instead of a daily devotional – I will occasionally look myself in the mirror and say “you suck, now what are you doing to do to get better?”

5. In your development as a voice over performer, who has been the one particular individual or what has been the one piece of performance advice (maybe a key performance trick, etc.) that you felt has had the most impact on your actual voice over performance and why?

Physically play the role and your voice will follow. I’ve heard countless people say it but I think Bob Bergen explains it the best. In most cases the performances is not about how you sound but about how well you are playing the part. Make VO a whole body experience and everything about your career will change.