What you want versus what you need as a student of voice-over.

A discussion took place recently on the vo-bb.com about VOICE2007, a conference that took place in Las Vegas last month, ostensibly as a networking and teaching/learning event for voice artists. About 200 people participated and from all accounts it was a great success. There has been much talk about making it an annual event and considerable enthusiasm has been expressed by those members of vo-bb who attended. Several of us who did not attend questioned the goals for the conference, and the response was a laundry list of reasons why such a conference is extremely valuable. Since my reasons for questioning the goals had nothing to do with the value of holding such a conference, and not wanting to beat the horse too severely in that forum, I thought I would continue my thoughts here, since after all, nobody will read them anyway.

My own reasons for not attending: it cost $500 to register, plus travel and lodging in expensive hotels, which could add up to $1000. That was the main reason. But if I had had the money in my travel & training budget to spend, I would not have spent it on a large group seminar. When my husband and I used to teach ballroom dance, we would always advise prospective students that they should take an inexpensive group class before spending money on private lessons, because there is no reason to pay a private instructor to teach the basic steps. The first group dance class I took was at a community college and cost all of $29 for a full semester (about 12 classes). Later, when I was training for competitions, I paid $45/hour for private instruction, and occasionally $100 an hour for a top-level instructor who was also a judge for international competitions. My advice for a voice-over beginner would be the opposite – private coaching is usually the more economical way to go. $340 got me 6 intensive hours of voice-over coaching with Charles Michel, another $400 got me my first demo including direction, recording and production. I got work from that demo pretty quickly and kept using it for over a year, at which point I felt it no longer represented the range of performance of which I was capable (I would hope that, after a year in the business, one’s range would expand! So that was all good). I currently produce my own commercial and narration demos.

Goals evolve. The longer you’re in the voice-over business, the more you start to focus on a niche and your marketing approach inevitably changes along with your goals. You may start to feel the need for additional training of a specialised nature such as training that addresses animation, ADR, audio books, movie trailer work – and some of this training may be as much about “getting connected” in your area of specialty as it is about skill acquisition. A lot of work can be done without paying somebody to teach you, if you have the discipline. But as Pat Fraley often says, “experience is the slowest teacher”, and it may be more economical to hire help. Targeted help that is directly related to what you have decided you want to accomplish. There are lots of qualified instructors offering weekend intensive workshops, even vacation voice-over cruises. What fun it would be to take them all. You might very well want to and of course you would get a lot out of it. But what do you really need? If your budget is limited, you need to think very carefully about what you’re trying to accomplish, what your goals are and what is the most efficient route to making them a reality. I’m still not sure of my goals, because despite narrowing my focus considerably in the last year, there are so many aspects of this business that I love and I can think of several empty voice-over niches that I could fill – I still can’t decide among them. So spending money on conferences that offer an overview of the entire business would be extremely unwise, and until I’m making so much money that I’m looking for tax deductions, I will not be attending these conferences, even though I might want to.

Another vote for getting out of the house - Dialect Paradise!.

I wrote last week, and not for the first time, about the importance of getting out and doing things. Like going to a climbing wall (and by the way, yes I did go again, and yes I did try the more challenging route again and this time was successful!). But sometimes it’s far more routine things that turn out to be immensely rewarding.

We’ve gone to my brother’s family home for Easter dinner the last couple of years. This year they got an invitation from friends and those friends were kind enough to extend the invitation to us as well. We were touched and accepted gratefully. But as the day approached, we found ourselves wishing we could spend the day at home rather than make the 2+ hour drive each way. There was no question about not going, of course, and we made the journey. Thank goodness, because a fantastic surprise awaited us.

The other people at the gathering, besides my brother’s family, were terrifically interesting and funny. But that wasn’t the surprise. The astonishing thing was that four of them grew up in the Limerick region of Ireland, 3 were from south London and one was from Yorkshire!! A dialect student’s dream! This was my first opportunity since taking up an academic approach to the study of dialects for voice-over to hear some of this speech “live” rather than listening to recordings on the internet such as at IDEA or The Speech Accent Archive or NPR or films or the enormously valuable series of CDs produced by Gillian Lane-Plescia at The Dialect Resource. I was able to listen for and observe some of the patterns I had noticed in my academic work, along with the facial expressions and body language and all the rest that no mere voice recording can convey. I made no secret of my interest in their speech – I couldn’t if I had tried, and they in turn were fascinated by my voice work. In short, it was a wonderful day and we all parted great friends, with all sorts of plans and schemes for the future. Imagine if we had decided, “oh bother, let’s just laze the day away at home?”

Shudder.

Getting what you’re worth.

Last week we had a tree removed from our property. This tree was a once-majestic sugar maple and when we moved here 11 years ago, it was already declining. We put it on a schedule of biannual fertilization and kept up with pruning and had a few cables put in to stabilize it. But at long last we had to face the inevitable, since it was so diseased that large limbs were dying and threatening the safety of our house, vehicles, and persons. I called several local tree services and got estimates ranging from $700-$900. We put it off and put it off, thinking the whole time about how that dollar figure would seem like nothing in hindsight if a limb landed on one of us. Then last week our neighbor mentioned a tree guy she had used who was very reasonable, and a phone call to him got us an estimate of $325. We jumped at it. I wondered if we would experience the “you get what you pay for syndrome”, but this gentleman was professional and efficient. It took him about 6 hours, including time to lower the larger limbs with a rope. The tree is down and we have firewood for next year, although a lot of work lies ahead to get it all cut up (which would also be true if we had paid the higher price, which did not include cutting and splitting either). The higher estimates I got were from companies that were multi-person operations, so I can only guess that the price reflected the overhead (so to speak).

Still, I struggled with my conscience over that one. Should I pay the higher price to keep up standards in the tree-cutting business and discourage “low-balling”, or should I support the smaller company? Not that there was really any question of the outcome, since there are so many costly and necessary projects awaiting attention here that we can’t afford to choose a higher price on principle when we aren’t even sure what the principle is. I was particularly glad to have paid the lower price when, in the course of our moving cars around to protect them from falling limbs, an unknown driver went past and side-swiped the driver’s side mirror on our old minivan and zoomed up the street without stopping. This left us with a new expense (as well as a slightly dimmer view [so to speak] of humanity).

As in tree-cutting and any other fee-based service, in voice-over work one must take numerous factors into consideration in setting fees. It’s important that voice actors be able to survive on the fees they make, so that they can a) continue to do voice-over work full time and be at the top of their craft as a result of their continuous work and 2) still be in business the next time the client needs their services. That’s pretty much it. Even if “all we do is talk” (and of course that isn’t all we do), it requires equipment, and utilities to run the equipment, and of course the housing of the voice (us!) needs to be fed and clothed. We also need respect, because there is nothing like feeling unappreciated to make someone not work to their potential. You tell someone often enough that they are terrific and they will be terrific. You tell them they’re not worth much and they will perform poorly. Paying someone below what they’re worth is another way of telling them you don’t think much of them. Accepting less than you’re worth is a way of telling the client that you don’t think much of yourself, and long before the job is complete you’ll be resenting the client and kicking yourself.

All this is not to say that I think poorly of our tree man. I’m grateful to him for taking our tree down at a price we could afford. And I have to assume that he is setting his rates based on what he believes the job is worth. He’s taking responsibility for his rates and does not assume that his clients are going to argue with him that he’s charging too little. Voice artists should do the same. Don’t give your clients that responsibility.

You should know what the “going rate” is in your market. When I’m in discussion about rates with clients outside my market, I ask the rate in their market. I know that I won’t get my own rate in a rural area and if I don’t want to work below that, I don’t have any business trying to get work there. Every path not taken has opportunities that we will never discover, though, and I don’t always limit my inquiries to the highest-paying markets. A few weeks ago I came across a company website that spoke to me. Despite their location in a very small market I knew I had to try to work with them. Fortunately the feeling was mutual and they offered me a fee above their usual rate, without my even asking. I love working with them and am so glad I didn’t pass them over because their location suggested a lower rate.

How to sum it all up? I try to aim for a certain place, but I also try to be flexible so that I don’t neglect the opportunity to have fun nor the opportunity (within reason) to provide a service to someone who needs it but might not be able to afford the higher rate. As for our tree man – we got a bargain and I’m grateful for it. I hope his business is flourishing so he’s there the next time we need his help. But despite my professed struggle with my conscience, I really don’t think it’s my job to worry about it excessively, and I sure don’t want my clients worrying about me!

Challenging the mind.

In some way I have always been somewhat jealous of people with routine - people who have the discipline to run a few miles every morning, who always read the newspaper and take the dog for three daily walks. Some of the people who do this can do it because they don’t have a lot going on in their lives, while many others are able to do it precisely because they have so much going on. Their life’s framework may be provided by their careers, and although they don’t do the same things every day, they have very disciplined ways of organising their lives, sometimes even making themselves do their required reading while on an exercise bike to ensure they take care of two necessary things at once, like Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts and MacArthur Award recipient.

I can’t seem to get into a routine at all, and in some way, I think I can’t do it because I want every day to be different. One of the things I love about voice-over work is that I usually have no idea what the day will bring, and whether it’s a big job or a small one, it’s almost always interesting and challenging. Last week I had two commercial spots to do for a new client in rural Michigan. The ads were for local businesses and had the potential to be quite ordinary, but they were far from it – one called for switching attitude several times within sixty seconds and included a quote from Micky Mantle, which gave me the opportunity to do a bit of research on Mantle and find a videotaped interview so I could hear what he sounded like. The other one required me to be the Easter Bunny! My client told me to get the recordings to him “whenever”, so I took a leisurely approach so that I could wait for the right Easter Bunny voice to come to me. The next day the producer emailed in a panic that the spot was airing after the weekend and did I need another copy of the script? So that Easter Bunny voice came to me in a flash and the job was quickly dispatched (you can hear the finished spot here). It was kind of a wild day, a lot of stuff going on. If I needed a lot of structure to my day I would probably be very frustrated. I did manage to get to my karate class but had to leave audio files uploading – something I don’t like to walk away from in case a problem occurs but I really needed the karate to help me unwind!

This weekend I tried climbing at a climbing wall. I’ve taken my kids to do this a number of times but had never tried it myself. Heights make me very nervous so I had to push away thoughts of fear and focus on the benefits and the physical challenge of it and was at the top of the wall in short order, ready to try a more difficult route. I couldn’t manage the harder route despite trying three times (I got to the top but had to use one or two footholds that weren’t on the route – of course the metaphor this offers for one's career path is obvious!) but am looking forward to going back next weekend and trying again. The people doing the belaying were college students and one of them has created her own major: wilderness studies, which I found simply fascinating. Now there is someone who is focussing her life on the unexpected and challenging. She will be leading wilderness trips and helping other people to achieve challenging goals, and I imagine this will require the ability to create structure and follow routine while being prepared for anything to happen. The ultimate in discipline! Something I don’t think I could ever do. In my life, being prepared for anything to happen is more about voice-over right now. This means having the discipline to follow a routine in certain areas, like making sure I am always contacting new people every week and following up. It includes challenging the mind with stuff directly related to voice-over, such as taking workshops or private training when finances allow or, something I’m doing right now, taking a dialects course in the university’s theatre department or (later in the year) more German, Spanish and French classes. I’m teaching myself to play the piano, which is not only great for exercising the mind but it’s wonderfully relaxing (and the dog loves it). And finally, pushing myself out of the house and into the world to try new things keeps me flexible and increases my ability to meet the unexpected and make the most of it.

Oh, and I almost forgot – it’s fun! See you at the top of the wall!