As if you needed another reason to go to FaffCon, here ’tis: I used to travel pretty regularly to Grand Rapids, MI but I don’t as much any more. However, at a recent FaffCon I met voice-over talent Anthony Gettig who lives in nearby Kalamazoo and who said “next time your in Grand Rapids….”

So guess where I had lunch today with Anthony, and fellow voice talents Kim Elliott and Dave Bisson? All are a part of Voice-Over meet-up group that Anthony put together after hearing about such groups in other parts of the country during FaffCon.

My thanks to all of them for spending their lunch hour with me.

Tags: commentary, voice actors, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover meet-ups by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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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.

Tags: commentary, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover meet-ups by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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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.)

Tags: commentary, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover meet-ups by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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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.

Tags: commentary, voice talent, voiceover, voices.com by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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So I don’t ‘just post links’ too often on this blog because usually I’m too interested in what I have to say about something.

But enough about me, what do you think about me.

Ego, moi?!

Seriously though, the point of this post is that Voice-Over Talent Karen Commins wrote another blog post that I found helpful and if you haven’t yet subscribed to her blog you should.

Tags: audio books, commentary, voice talent, voiceover, voiceover advice by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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Sometimes I get a little behind in my blog ideas.

Often, I sift through my web browsing and my google reader and I note so many wonderful ideas for a blog post that I just don’t have time (at that very moment) to write about. So I click “save” or “unread” so I’ll have them in my file.

And then I keep them there and I never get around to them. Then comes a day like today where I am hell-bent on getting these ideas out but there are too many to write up individual blogs posts about and yet I am NOT going let them stay in my blog reader one minute more.

So this post will feature a link to all of them with maybe some notes from me on why I thought this was cool and you can decide for yourself.

Pintrest? WTH?: If you were to look for a pintrest board from me you wouldn’t find squat cause I don’t see a use for it yet, but remember, I am a famously late adopter in Social Media. You know how Courvo gets to everything first? I’m nearer to the opposite end of that spectrum. BUT for those in advertising and marketing (which almost every voice-over talent is, whether they like it or not) I saw that my friends at the logo critique web site, Brand New, have a new Pintrest board. It’s loaded with pins to their favorite logos and logo related stories. I enjoyed it.

Comic-Con: I’ve never been but I hope someday to actually go.

Peter O’Toole is one of my favorite actors, mostly because he was the star of one of my favorite movies, My Favorite Year. This week he announced his retirement from acting. I understand it but I’m still a little sad about it. All his amazing talent, multiple Oscar nominations but he never won an Oscar. That confirms for me what I’ve recently surmised: the Oscars are really nothing more than a 4 hour string of commercials occasionally interrupted by some trophy toting circus performers. Sorry Mercedes.

Evidently, a long talked about movie about voice-over is closer to production. Here’s a link to the trailer and no I’m not in the movie.

Someone who IS in the movie is the great voice actress June Foray. The big news here is June recently won her FIRST Emmy Award at age 94 for her work as Mrs. Cauldron on “The Garfield Show” on Cartoon Network. It’s about damn time!

Also under the about damn time category, George Whittam decries that its about damn time somebody found a decent audio interface for the iPad and iPhone. The winner at this point is the Studio Six Digital IAudioInterface2 as blogged by George via a report from voice-over talent Beau Weaver. The Beau/George report (not be confused with the Huntley/Brinkley report) can be found here.

Benztown Voiceover grabbed a very nice interview Voice Talent and WPLJ Creative Services Director Dan Kelly that I think is worth the read.

Finally, it might have been back in 1957 that Unnouncer Doug Turkel gave me the heads up that Twitter changed it branding, the Floridian knowing well how much I like logo news. And I do/did except I didn’t get on this in a very timely manner. But in case you’re one of the 12 that did NOT hear about the change, here’s a quick summary.

There’s probably more but my laptop battery is dying and I don’t feel like plugging in.

Best always,
-Me

Tags: commentary, social media, technology, voice actors, voice talent, voiceover by peter k. o'connell, your friendly, neighborhood voice-over talent
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