The Armed Forces Network in Iraq recruited audio’connell Voice Over Talent to help with their July 4th weekend production of “The Firecracker 500” countdown. You may recall we were enlisted originally via the VO-BB for their Memorial Day countdown…so I guess we all did such a good job we got invited back.

Appreciating the enormous response from the voice talents of VO-BB but realizing such a large team was becoming unmanageable, AFN kept the team small using five voice talents (audio’connell’s DB, Diane Maggipinto, Bill Elder, Frank Frederick and Bob Souer) and two producers (Todd Ellis and your gentle author). Pairing up producers and voice talents made the production work flow smoother and it was great from my prospective cause it was one less job for me. I was paired with Deirdre and Frank.

It was during this process I had an idea (always a bad thing because my ideas are always complicated to execute and usually involve bothering others). Since the efforts in the Middle East are international in nature, why not craft a more international station promo (one that could be used all the time, not just during the “500”). So I chatted with Frank Frederick via Skype about my idea, he had some great ideas, and I put the call out on VO-BB for multi-lingual voice talents.

The response was overwhelming and amazing (thank you all) and final product sounds pretty good if I do say so myself (oh, the client liked it too).

Tags: blogs, commentary, media, radio, voice actors, voice casting, voiceover by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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Although we’ve got something like 500+ days left before the next United States Presidential election, candidates from the Republican and Democratic parties are already having debates on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. The debates are summarily ignored by the majority of the voting public even though they are covered ad-nauseum by the networks. It’s a vicious cycle.

This Presidential election has gotten the earliest campaign start in history I have been told and yet I’m convinced more people vote for singers on American Idol than for a President. I’ve nothing to back this up, research-wise, it’s more of a “gut” thing. Yet what choice do candidates have, especially those running for president?

The branding and marketing of a political candidate, public referendum or issue has become a real art or a fascinating battle depending on your perspective. How would YOU create a brand (and hopefully buzz…positive buzz) about a candidate or policy while competing for the attention of an ever more diversified and distracted voting public? Oh yeah, and you have to do it on a budget based solely on how well your candidate can fund raise…assuming he/she can get enough people who know him/her as well as who thehave money to even contribute to a campaign. That is why I guess we’re starting so early on each party’s “horse race” for the presidential brass ring. In politics as in life: follow the money.

And with the election season comes the political ads…some good, some questionable (again, trying to gain attention) but always thought provoking. Political consultants will again do their level best to map out a salient strategy for their candidate clients. These strategies will include a “theme” or “message” that consultants and candidates hope will resonate with the voters. Likely, TV and radio political ad campaigns will remain the mediums of choice to spread that political message to the widest audience.

Voice over scripts for political commercials are a great deal of fun for most voice talents (for me I refer to some of these political spots as requiring “vocal summersaults“). But overall today’s political spots are really not that different than commercials for any other brand. Political advertisers need to gain the public’s attention, summarize a key message and elicit an emotion in anywhere from thirty to sixty seconds. Sometimes the audience is uplifted by the message (“It’s morning, again, in America,)” and sometimes some mud is slung (politics didn’t invent attack ads; a quick example: wasn’t “The Pepsi Challenge” mud slinging at some of its most famous?).

I’m looking forward to the coming political advertising season whether from a presidential, congressional, state, regional or local election level. It gets citizens more involved in the democratic process for a while and I just don’t see how that can ever be a bad thing.

Tags: advertising, commentary, commercials, marketing, media, narrations, radio, tv, voice actors, voice casting, voiceover by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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I try to avoid the “holiday-themed” blogs just cause they seem trite to me (people often mean well enough but…). This is a unique Memorial Day, however, for two reasons, the first of which is the United States is at war (though we also have standing at the ready military personnel all around the world even when we’re not involved at war, whom we should also not forgot).

The second reason this is a unique Memorial Day is because an international voice over effort was undertaken a few weeks ago to support our troops in the Middle East via the Armed Forces Network and their group of music radio stations in Baghdad, Balad, Mosul, Ali Base, Kirkuk, Sinjar and Tikrit.

Like many commercial radio stations in the U.S., Freedom Radio was planning to run a Memorial Day Countdown of the greatest rock songs of all time. Through his network of voice over friends (which is plentiful) voice talent and blogger extraordinaire Bob Souer was asked to lend his voice. Bob then asked Air Force Sergeant Chris Eder, who oversees these stations, if he needed other professional voiceover help to support the station’s announcers, providing, sweepers, bumpers and ID’s for the channel and its network. Maybe, they’d also wanted some voices to provide intros for songs on the countdown? Chris said sure but he’d asked for help like this before and usually if four people said they’d help, maybe one actually sent something. Chris had not yet heard of VO-BB.

Bob Souer posted the notice of what they needed on VO-BB and Chris nearly drowned is a sea of amazing voice talent who not only said they’d help but made fast work of providing great audio….lots of it! At last count 24 professional voice over talents from around the world, including yours truly cranked out everything Freedom Radio needed for a successful countdown, organizing ourselves as only former and current radio professionals can do…with fast, quality audio.

I fell back into my old production manager role from radio days gone by, voicing and producing some of my own stuff (which you heard in the second paragraph) and then producing for some other great voices including audio’connell female voice over talent D.B. and Kara, the aforementioned Bob Souerand a wonderful voice talent by the name of Diane Maggipinto.

My lesson that I took out of this experience (aside from getting to work with or be teamed with some terrific voice talents) is that my DJ talents, limited as they were even back in the day, have long since abandoned me. Fortunately for the soldiers, my contribution to this part of the project was fairly limited.

The donation of our collective time and talent was clearly something all the voices in the project wanted to do because it was the very least we could do to show our support to the men and women who leave the safety of their families and homes to follow orders around the world all the while putting themselves in harms way on our behalf. And such life and death stuff is never trite.

Our family’s thanks to all the men and women serving on our behalf all over the world (especially the two from our family). God bless you all and we hope you all come home soon and safe.

Tags: commentary, media, radio, voice actors, voice casting, voiceover by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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The point was to have a vacation with just Mrs. audio’connell and me while baby audio’connell played with the grandparents (baby, btw, seems not even to have noticed the parents had gone missing because of all the fun provided from the grandparents). The destination was New York City, where the missus is originally from.

Early flight out Friday morning with an incredibly long line at security out of BNIA (made even more interesting by some young, strong dude who may have come straight from the bars to the airport and promptly fainted while in line causing a tremor (“thud”) when he hit the airport’s marble floor; “the bigger they are…”) then straight in to JFK, SOHO and the sister-in-law’s apartment.

It was decided naps were in order and it was from that nap that I was awakened by a call from one of my agent’s advising that Shell wanted to use me for a VO. Groggily I replied in the affirmative inquiring only how much and when (though I’m not sure in which order). Numbers came first and since they were in the “proper sequential order” ($), I went on to the “date” which was to be the following Monday. I would still be in NYC, would they do ISDN? Sure, where would I like to record from? Give me an hour, I said, and I’ll price out a couple of studios.

Like a fireman answering the bell I was fully awake now, knowing I had to work fast to find facilities, availabilities and rates. Remember, this is NYC, many studios are not as available as other studios in other cities on short notice. I had made one brief attempt pre-trip to ensure I had available VO facilities in the area, only to find my contact had moved to Australia…I decided that might not work for me.

The sister in law had a video production friend who had a lead on an ISDN studio and I had the internet. I gave the client’s agency three choices, they picked one and all was booked. This job would pay for the vacation!

Monday comes and I show up at the studio off 5th Avenue in mid-town early to review the script (ha!). There were voice actors (or more likely actors looking for voice work) auditioning for a group of spots; unfortunately they were union spots, so I didn’t get a shot at them. The studio was also having some technical problems with the client’s ISDN hookup so we got started about a ½ hour late. I walked in, was handed the script, set up in the booth (Neumann U87) did four takes of the main read, about nine takes of the tag and I was outta there in about 15 minutes. The clients were very happy and I made some nice new business contacts.

Post script: as the plane was landing, coming back home today, I got an email and a call from the client: they screwed up the script and need to me to record again. That means I get paid again!

I’ll post a few other New York notes a little later.

Tags: commentary, commercials, narrations, technology, voice actors, voice casting, voiceover by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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Editor’s Note: In the daily observation of life around him, the author occasionally feels the need to point out ridiculously inane behavior and general thoughtlessness. These are called “Rants” and this is one of those times.

As it’s kind of a quiet Saturday afternoon with folks sleeping or running errands from the house, I took the opportunity to visit Voice 123 and submit some auditions.  As I’ve mentioned before here, my bookings, auditions from agents and production schedule offer me less and less time to fiddle with the cattle call that Voice 123 has really become. But I still have months left on my paid subscription so I figured I better get to it. 

It has been awhile since I sent in some auditions.  I threw out the ones I didn’t think I’d be the right voice for and the ever present low ball audition (especially those folks requesting custom auditions for message on hold…who are they kidding?)  I was reading one audition that had a low price for the amount of work required and the usage of the voice and was about to delete it when I read down a little further and notice an addition to the usually inane Voice 123 disclaimer on price which read: 

“Voice123 Team Note: We recognize that this project may be below Voice123 pricing recommendations. We have become more flexible with budgets as it was brought to our attention that we could be violating United States federal anti-trust laws by limiting the participation of voice seekers in our marketplace when they don’t met our budget recommendations. It seems that, legally speaking, it is up to the providers (the talents and voice producers) and not the marketplace (Voice123) to determine to exclude the voice seekers they don’t want to work with.

Right after the release of the new Voice123, we will be working on several improvements that will help talents and voice producers filter the types of projects they want and better match projects with talent and voice producers depending on the budget and experience of the talent. On (sic) the meantime we are trying to be flexible to keep everybody happy.”

 “It seems that, legally speaking,…” Wow, what impressive attorney filed that hard hitting legal brief? 

As you might guess, I find this disclaimer highly suspect.  But I am also not an attorney. I am however a big David Letterman fan (not the stalking kind, I just like the show) and I thought of a Dave quote when he interviewed Bill O’Reilly from Fox News as I read the Voice 123 disclaimer. To paraphrase, it went along the lines of “I’m probably not as smart as you are but my gut tells me 60% of what comes out of your mouth is crap.” 

If Voice 123 is going to be “filtering” projects and pricing in their “next” version (which it seems they’ve been working on since 1950 and which might be ready by 2010) why can’t they filter now? Likely, they can.  In my opinion, the real answer is Voice 123 will take any voice job that comes through, slap it up on the board and let all the $50 announcers quote that price on a $2000 job just so Voice 123 can jack up the number of leads they provide VO subscribers and thereby justify the company’s existence.  

As always….I could be wrong.

Tags: advertising, character voices, commentary, commercials, internet, marketing, message on-hold, narrations, podcasting, radio, rants, technology, voice 123, voice actors, voice casting, voiceover, voiceover advice by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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Have you ever been to an event, not really knowing what to expect only to be blown away from the collective knowledge in the room?

That’s what Podcamp Toronto was like. They took a simple audio process and outlined the future of it and the possibilities for it. Commercially, it’s an impressive future.

No one was profiting from it except to share their knowledge and gain new insight. I learned so much and still have to figure out how to process the stuff I heard but haven’t yet committed to memory.

I would highly suggest you all take a look at these seminars and take notes.

For some months now, a fellow voice over talent by the name of Elaine Singer has been corresponding with me on VO topics. Elaine is in Toronto and I’m in Buffalo (2 hours away) and we’re both in the internet business networking groups, Ryze and Linked In. Yet we never got a chance to meet. (Voice talents love to get together to share industry stories and insights we each other…they’re like war stories only funnier). Well we met at Podcamp Toronto and she was just as charming and smart as you’d guess from her posts on VO-BB. A great new friend!

And in my perspective on the voice lead companies, my attitude has changed a bit having now met David and Stephanie from Voices.com. My read is that they really are as customer centric as their site appears (as has been mentioned by others, their site seems more service oriented than V123 and now I believe I know why). They are sincere in both word and deed; they want everybody to succeed: voice talents to get quality leads and clients to be exposed to quality voice talents.

If you have a podcamp coming to your town, try and get to it. The Torontonians / Canadians / podcasters / bloggers who I met impressed the heck out of me. It would be worth risking your time at a podcamp in your area to see if the local knowledge bank in your area is as impressive as the folks I met with in Toronto.

Tags: commentary, peter o'connell, podcamptoronto, podcasting, technology, voice actors, voice casting, voiceover advice, voices.com by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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