Character voice acting is becoming very competitive if for no other reason than sheer quantity- if character voice actors had to each be processed through Ellis Island like many of our immigrating forefathers did years ago, the lines to get through the character voice acting doors would seem longer than ever before (“Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor…” that would be your average voice actor).

And as challenging as it now is for a voice actor to be heard over the other voices competing for a role, the challenge for casting directors must be even worse. There is no way a voice over casting director cannot become numb at some point to the hundreds of demos they get…and likely they are missing out on some great talent too.

So in my opinion it becomes even more important to find out what voice over directors are looking for (and listening for) when working with a voice actor. Nancy Cartwright (she of Bart Simpson fame) has conducted a variety of interviews for Animation World Magazine and in late June she published an interview she conducted with voice over director Ginny McSwain.

Pay special attention to Ginny’s criteria for animation voice over. Great stuff there.

Tags: character voices, commentary, tv, voice actors, voice casting, voiceover, voiceover advice by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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From the people that brought you the simply brilliant (and I use those two words specifically) “RSS” in Plain English” (which many of my IT friends are now sharing with their customers by way of easy explanation) and Wikis too comes a terrific new video from the CommonCraft folks on Social Networking web sites.

My thanks to my fellow social networker, marketer and professional speaker Mitch Joel for featuring this video on his Twist Image blog (to which I subscribe via RSS, by the way and you should too).

If you liked to join my network in Linked In, click here.

Tags: blogs, commentary, internet, marketing, media, technology, voiceover advice by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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My friend Stephanie from the voiceover service Voices.com sent me an email a few days ago about a new contest they are running through July 20, 2007. You can grab the full details on it here but as a brief summary for those who prefer such things, The 60 Second Pitch is based on the ever famous “elevator speech” in which you have from 30-60 seconds to tell/engage someone (with whom you would hypothetically be riding in an elevator) about your business…in this case, the voice over business.

It’s a great tool for voice talent who haven’t gone through this exercise and terrific for those who want to refine their speech. And the contest has over $4,000 in prizes.

I will NOT be participating.

Why?

I am not above contests or competitions, I think they are fun and can bring together some great creativity.

But I’ve got a business to run and I have sales goals to achieve and to be in the contest and win, one would have to share some of the secrets of one’s success, in this case the elevator speech.

I’ve got a pretty great one, one that has served me well and its worth a lot more than $4,000. Even if the prize money were higher (and there’s nothing wrong with $4K worth of stuff) I wouldn’t do it.

The voiceover community is a helpful and sharing community…we’re voice actors and the acting community has usually been a group that wants everyone to succeed. I do too and have helped many folks with my time, talent and treasure to improve their voice over talents.

But while I may teach some everything they know about voice over and running a business, I won’t teach them everything I know. It’s not practical and it doesn’t make good business sense. The contest is not bad for all….its just not right for me.

Tags: advertising, commentary, marketing, media, voice actors, voice casting, voiceover, voiceover advice, voices.com by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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While on business for the past week in Boston, I had the opportunity to visit with my voice over colleagues Deirdre Cooper and Mary McKitrick who live in the area. “Area” is a vague term because both were at least 90 minutes away from my location near Boston Harbor.

But bless them both, they took the time to travel and have dinner with me in the city and boy did we have a grand time. I’ve known them both “virtually” for some time on the VO-BB and through some voice projects that we’ve collaborated on.

It is said you can’t really know someone until you’ve spent some time with them and these two voice actors are great ladies in addition to being amazing voice talents. While one might imagine conversation coming easily to people who talk for a living, our conversations were the very definition of effortless, full of both professional insight and shared challenges. Social networking at its finest.

There is no 12-step program for voice over talents because we can call our shared addiction a profession, but it’s nice to be able to discuss similar trials and tribulations with people with whom you can both commiserate with and learn from. And I’m not sure who was the first to pull out the pictures of the family first (usually I’m guilty on that count) it was very funny to learn again how parenting challenges are universal.

My sincere thanks to them for taking the time to become my friends in addition to my colleagues and making Boston an even more hospitable place.

Tags: character voices, commentary, peter o'connell, silliness, voice actors, voiceover, voiceover advice, voiceover meet-ups by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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I will grant you that Dansville, New York is no Miami but sometimes you go places, not so much for the city as for the people (and I’m not sure Dansville is big enough to be a city anyway).

But such was my reason for visiting Dansville today as it was sort of a half way point between my studio and where voice talent and fellow blogger Bob Souer was visiting while he was handling some impressive audio production duties for a project in Binghamton, NY.

We had lunch at the world renowned Sunrise Restaurant (its where all the beautiful people in Dansville meet. Their rinforzi il tortino et broodje was to die for! Simply heavenly!)

For any of you who have had the chance to speak with or meet Bob, I have the same boring story to report about him: charming guy, smart guy, wonderful voice over career insights and selfless to a fault. In short (and I am much shorter than he) Bob is the exact opposite of me.

A great treat for me to connect with a great talent and even better man.

Tags: blogs, commentary, peter o'connell, voice actors, voiceover, voiceover advice, voiceover meet-ups 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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