Entries Tagged as 'announcers'

faux-ditions for Late Night With Jimmy Fallon announcer will close Friday, January 9th at 5:00 p.m. ET

jimmy_fallon_late_night_nbc

1/9/09 UPDATE: The faux-ditions are now CLOSED!

All credit to Jim Feldman who coined the phrase “faux-dition”.

The unofficial Late Night With Jimmy Fallon announcer auditions will remain open for submissions until Friday, January 9, 2009 at 5:00 p.m. eastern U.S. time.

The judges will then hunker down in an undisclosed safe room (or cell) somewhere on Earth.

There, they will secretly agree who are the top 10 nominees either by consensus or best 3 out of 5 falls.

Their ballots will be burned to preserve the judges’ picks. When white smoke appears, the votes are unanimous and we’ll have our ten nominees.

When I announce the 10 nominees, you can cast your vote at that time in that post.

One vote per person on the honor system. My decision, like always, will be final.

For any voice talents who do not submit by the deadline, you are free to publicly call them “scaredy cat” or “chicken” afterwords when you see them in public.

open casting call for Late Night With Jimmy Fallon announcer (very unofficial)

jimmy_fallon_late_night_nbc

Whether this becomes an out and out holiday tradition here at audio’connell’s voxmarketising remains to be seen but suffice it to say I’m at it again.

Based on the enormously popular Unofficial Casting Call for the NBC Nightly News announcer, I am today kicking off the Unofficial Casting Call for the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon announcer job.

Some points of difference between the two casting calls:

1. The Nightly News audition was in response to what I (and many others) felt/feel was a poor performance by a certain actor (who otherwise is very talented). For the Fallon casting call, I have no knowledge of the new announcer’s (Steve Higgins) ability (which I’m sure is great) nor should this thingy we’re doing here be seen as an indictment of his talents…I wish him great success. This is just for fun and nobody here will be getting the Fallon show job.

2. NBC Nightly News had a well known theme. Late Night with Jimmy Fallon has a house band, The Roots, but no theme song that I know of yet so I grabbed a Roots song (“Here I Come” all rights reserved etc.) and edited into a strictly demo theme sample. The music should open up some creative voice imaging opportunities for participants.

The directions to participate are simple and straight forward:

A. Download HERE the demo only theme song (complete with cheering audience to get you into the late night feel)

B. Here is a script (again demo only):

From NBC Studios in New York, It’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.

Tonight Amy Adams (slight pause) Eddie Izzard (slight pause) and musical guest John Legend

With The Roots

Now here’s your host: Jimmy Fallon!

C. Record your version mixed with the demo theme (note: you should have your audition finish at about :30 seconds into the theme as you’ll note I brought the audience cheering up. If you hit it right it will sound like he just walked out after you said his name. Also remember there would be graphics and likely some animation as part of the intro too.

D. Email it to peter at audio’connell dot com. MP3 file only. File name: YOURLASTNAME_Unofficial_Fallon_Audition

E. I’ll allow submissions until it becomes tedious or boring. Only one entry per voice talent, please.

>>> HERE is where you can LISTEN (but NO voting yet) to all the entrants <<<

Here’s my example to give you a general sense of timing but PLEASE do it with whatever pace and vocal performance style you’d like. Mine is just one way, not necessarily the perfect way.

DEMO EXAMPLE

[audio:http://www.audioconnell.com/clientuploads/mp3/Late_Night_Fallon/OConnell_Unofficial_Fallon_Audition.mp3]

How a winner will be chosen:

i. I’ll get between 3-5 people to serve as judges to pick the top 10 entries
ii. From there I will open up the voting. Don’t vote until I open the voting….I’ll delete any voting posts until I write the “voting is open” post
iii. As for prizes, I got bumpkus. Maybe we’ll get an angel gift giver or someone who wants to re-gift some holiday present, we’ll see.

Anyway, have fun and Merry Christmas. Let’s hear your best stuff!

If you just want to listen to the audition “bed” here it is:

back at it

NBC News Announcer Howard Reig & Anchor Tom Brokaw_CourtesyNBC

Sorry to have been off line a bit. Much west coast travel to Seattle last week and Pittsburgh and San Francisco this week. Last week in SEA I also came down with food poisoning which forced me to switch from a dinner meeting with Jeffrey Kafer to an evening at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle (nice place if you happen to be sick in Seattle). Again my sincere apologies to Jeff…I would have much rather spent time with you and will again on my next trip.

Alls well now and the travel load shall lighten for a bit.

I came across a recently posted video of the late, great NBC announcer Howard Reig’s retirement that I very much enjoyed watching. This type of thing is NOT the norm for announcers unless they’ve been around as long as Howard. Clearly he was beloved.

P.S. The NBC News team also held a memorial for Howard inside their main news studio on Friday which Brian Williams noted on his blog here.

how does your studio sound?

auralex_acoustics

Sound absorption and even sound proofing (a bit more expensive and more tricky) are usually on the front or back of most voice talents’ minds. Why?

Because in spite of the authority and brilliance we convey on a daily basis with our magnificent voices we collectively are not all the audio technology experts you might assume us to be.

Well of course I am but that’s also because I am also a grotesquely rich, tall, good looking, male model.

But since you are not me and thereby not flying on the same mind foggy ego wave that I do you might be interested in this piece of news.

Auralex Acoustics has conceived a new way to help a voice talent part with their hard earned money to be both consulted about and then one has to assume a consumer for their acoustic products.

They have a plan to do off-site room acoustics analysis and on-site (way more expensive).

Depending on your circumstance, it might be of benefit to you to check it out here.

If you use the service, let me know how it went. If you decided against it, tell me why also, if you would. Thanks.

help wanted – new international voice talents needed

help_wanted

What’s the fun of having a blog if you can’t put out a classified ad every now and again.

International Voice Talents, the foreign language division of audio’connell Voice Over Talent, has some new projects simmering that will require some additional voice talents.

We need professional male and female voice talents who speak any of the following languages:

* Chinese (Standard Mandarin)
* Hindi
* Portuguese

If you are an experienced, professional voice talent who also speaks English and one or more of these languages fluently and also has your own professional recording studio, please send me your demo and contact information (in English) to peter at audio’connell dot com.

Please note: these are the only demos we are soliciting for so do not under any circumstances send me a demo for any other reason. I don’t care how good you think you are or if you have some fantasy that we’ll discover your talent in another category if your demo just gets listened to “accidentally”… don’t send anything other than the ones we are requesting, please.

Thanks very much!

new narration demo

Peter O\'Connell headshot

One of my new agents emailed me to get my updated voice over demos (thank you Pastorini-Bosby). While I was attaching the cuts to an email, it occurred to me that I never properly finished my narration demo update that I had started in May (hey, don’t laugh, paying jobs come first!)

So I spent another two hours to fix some parts and voila (that’s a word my friend Mary McKitrick taught me) here is the finished product:

[audio:http://www.audioconnell.com/clientuploads/mp3/Peter_OConnell_Narration_Demo_081001.mp3]
Click here to download Peter O’Connell’s narration demo!

In it, you will hear that I am:
* tall
* short
* happy
* sad
* confident
* unsure
* serious
* jovial
* thoughtful
* scatter-brained
* newsy
* conversational
* and most of all available for hire as the perfect choice for your awesome narration voice.