VOICEOVER WORKSHOP: Taking Direction – The Time You *Might* Know You’re Ready for a Voiceover Career
Like all of us in our everyday lives, people new to voiceover are in an all-fired hurry to get behind the mic and start recording.
The advice these rush-rush-rush folks get from voiceover pros never sits well with them:
• Take group voiceover lessons
• Take individual voiceover lessons
• It can easily take at least six months before you’re ready to perform
Like Veruca Salt in Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, they want a voiceover career to start NOW!
From a technology standpoint, they can start now…buy a cheap mic, plug it in to a computer (or worse yet just use your phone), sign up at a crappy pay-to-play voiceover site and start auditioning.
Enjoy the crickets of those new jobs more than likely NOT coming in.
So if these new voice acting folks do take the more prudent, thoughtful approach to their new career, if they do take the advice, how will they know when they are ready for their voiceover debut?
The answer varies with every person.
But I was reminded of a good milestone to know when you’re on the right path to a voiceover career the other night when I was teaching a group voiceover lesson.
Simply put,
that milestone is an actor’s ability to “take and execute successfully voiceover direction on the fly”.
What that phrase means is a bit more involved but it’s something every professional voice talent does every day in their job.
What? Lemme ‘splain…
Most scripts come with some written direction on how a producer or client wants a voiceover read to sound. The direction can be as simple as a word or a sentence OR it can be as detailed as a full on creative brief that goes on for a page and sometimes has audio and video examples with it.
But what I refer to as “on the fly direction” is usually direction you get during a voiceover session (or in a voiceover class), usually in-person or in a connected session (like Source-Connect), where you start getting direction outside of the direction listed on the script.
Why would you be getting additional direction? Many reasons but a few might be:
• The director got the takes (sound) they wanted based on the script specs at the start of the recording session but now wants to be creative and have other options to share with the client or hold in reserve in case the client doesn’t like the sound of what they originally agreed to (which happens more than you think)
• The director doesn’t like the read given…it’s not the sound he/she was hearing in his/her head (it has happened to everyone at least once in their career)
• The client doesn’t like the way the audio is turning out even though you did exactly what they asked
The reason for the change in direction doesn’t matter — but what DOES matter is the voice talent’s ability to deliver on the new, unplanned direction.
A trained voice talent, one who has studied voice acting, is not really thrown by such a request but is prepared for it (or at the very least can adapt to it), doesn’t take the changes personally, listens closely to the direction (asking questions for clarification), jumps on the creative band wagon and can usually execute the changes to the producer’s satisfaction.
Attitude for the voice talent in such a situation is almost as important as their line delivery – as that attitude (and their adaptability) can be the difference in ever being hired again by the studio or client.
A pro talent is open to change, accepts tweaks, critiques and even criticism for what it is…part of the journey to satisfy the client and get the job done. Some one who does NOT react or respond well to such changes (most because they weren’t trained in how to deal with it) is going to have immediate and long term reputation problems (cause producers and engineers talk).
Some new voice talents need practice at on the fly direction and some students – like the one I had last week – took the direction and really upped their read. There were still some rough spots but the improvement was amazing. There is a bright VO future there.
So please do the training, get prepared.
In conjunction with the above advice, please consider the pitfalls of voiceover demo mills.
Wait, you may be saying to yourself, what does one have to do with the other. Lemme ‘splain some more.
These demo mills are companies many voiceover newbies find (among other spots) via “free” voiceover classes at places like Community Colleges. You attend the free class, you’re told you have ‘a bright future in voiceover’, you are offered a program (that you ultimately pay plenty for) where you take a few classes and they make you a commercial voiceover demo in a pretty short amount of time.
So exciting, right? No.
Most of the time, the untrained student gets a demo and not much else to show for it. Rarely any real training.
What I think these demo mills do, besides give somebody rushed lessons, fake praise, false hope and a “demo”, is take a person’s money and leave them with barely passable VO demo.
In some cases, some of the untrained students that fall for these demo mills don’t have the basic talent to be a voice actor (they as performers are just not good) — even if they studied with James Earl Jones every day for 10 years. Other folks in these classes could be but still get no viable training.
In either of the above cases, the demo mills cash in on someone’s dreams, do not help the individual and that’s crappy.
Here’s the nasty secret to demo mills and how I think they REALLY hurt a potential talent – they direct an untrained student “talent” on a few lines of script among seven or eight scripts that gives the producer just enough content to produce the demo.
In the demo production, demo mill producers just focus on getting a mostly untrained student to deliver a close to average or acceptable read on a line or two of copy. They will then edit a bunch of those not great reads into a demo.
But even if the student gives on OK read on those lines (likely after MANY attempts in the demo studio) the untrained student is very unlikely to be able to deliver a FULL PERFORMANCE of that read in a FULL SCRIPT in a studio with a professional producer if the untrained student talent gets hired off the demo mill produced voiceover demo.
The demo mills aren’t teaching script interpretation (which is not at all the same as reading comprehension), they aren’t teaching acting techniques, or anything about breathe control, or versions or you….I could go on and on.
In reality, a producer at a voiceover demo mill (and sometimes the “mill” is just a company of 1) is not teaching an untrained student talent anything except how to voice 1-2 lines of copy well enough to create a read that “sounds” professional…and then collect the demo money.
But…and this is a painful but…should the voice talent get hired off the demo, they are completely ill-trained, ill-equipped to reproduce the demo sound or heaven forbid tweak that sound in an actual recording session. The talent doesn’t know how to really do it because they do not have the training.
Whether the producer fires the talent on the spot or muddles through the session…the talent has made a first impression that is likely unrecoverable.
If you’re looking to get into voiceover, reading this and thinking “I would never make that mistake,” please know that’s what all the people who have worked with demo mills in the past thought too.
Now go back up at read my original advice:
• Take group voiceover lessons
• Take individual voiceover lessons
• It can easily take at least six months before you’re ready to perform
Working quickly can often result in sloppy (read: unprofessional) work.
Nobody’s perfect but be smart and do not start off on the wrong foot.
Please be careful and good luck.
