Getting things done: Voice-over Edition

This is a follow-up to my previous post on success in voice-over. In order to be successful, we have to get things done. I think many of us become paralysed when a task seems too big and we just can’t find a way to get started on it. How can we overcome the obstacles of our own making that stand in the way of success?

A gazillion books have been written on productivity and we all have our individual approaches to it. I tend to clean my house as a sort of displacement activity and hope that a clean and uncluttered environment will set the stage for a serious look at what I’m trying to accomplish at higher levels. After a big project such as writing a paper and submitting it for publication, I always cleaned and organised my office and lab – lots of tasks of all sizes are neglected while one is working on something big, so that phase of regrouping was important for me and although I used to wish I could just jump right into the next big project, I came to accept this tidying behavior as inevitable and even necessary.

Recently, as I have gotten more and more busy with voice-over work and have been thinking of more and more projects I would like to do – some of which simply are not getting done – I’ve started looking at more systematic ways of organising both the creative and the mundane tasks of life. About a month ago I had a stack of reading material next to my bed that I was trying to get through. Much of this consisted of library books and most of them were overdue. Among them: “Getting Things Done: the Art of Stress-free Productivity” by David Allen. Well, color me pink but I never did make it all the way through the book. I did get the gist of it though - Allen’s system requires that you get all your projects and tasks out of your head and onto paper or some other organisational venue (an electronic list). This is the basic premise, so that while you’re tackling one project you aren’t distracted by all the other ones that are still floating around in your mind. Get them all out, and focus on one at a time.

Now, one at a time does not mean, take one project, and do whatever it takes to complete it before moving on to the next. No, grasshopper!! It means, while you are focussed on that one project, you should not be thinking about all the other things you have to do. Getting everything out of your head and on paper (or in electrons) means your mind is free. You know you aren't going to forget all the other stuff, because you have captured it! So while you're working on one thing, you aren't distracted by the rest. More important than that, for me, is his recommendation that you think about each of your projects, and figure out what is needed to move that project forward. Sort of a this-is-the-house-that-Jack-built type of exercise, since the action that is needed to move it forward might well have its own thing that is required to move it forward.

For a whole detailed explanation of this productivity system you’ll have to read the book, and to help you decide if you want to read it, try this excellent summary by Trent at The Simple Dollar. You might also want to look into Kristine Oller’s Feeding Your Focus: How creative people can move forward faster and achieve sustained success – which might turn out to be a better bet for many of us since Allen’s system, however wonderful, is not for all personality types. Bobbin Beam has summarised Oller’s new book at her voice-over blog.

If you’re in the early stages of your voice-over career, one of your obstacles might be that you’re just not sure how to approach the whole thing. In my case, I was teaching molecular biology and doing research and suddenly started to think I needed to try something else. I was browsing books at Amazon and mentally auditioning careers, focussing initially on books about acting. A book about voice-acting popped up and I was transfixed. This was perfect because I was very interested in acting but too shy to be able to consider being on stage. Vocal mimicry was a tremendous interest since childhood, as was reading aloud.

I kept going at my academic job, continued to research voice-acting and discovered a voice-acting school in San Francisco. Well, I was just out of luck, wasn’t I? How could I attend a San Francisco school if I lived in New England? I finally stumbled upon Edge Studios in Connecticut and New York, then discovered The Learning Annex in New York and that led me to Charles Michel, the coach with whom I ultimately did my pivotal training and recorded my first demo. So it was at least a year between the time I first thought of voice acting and the time I officially hung out my shingle. If I had approached this a bit more systematically, asking, what do I need to do to move this project (of becoming a voice actor) forward, I might have proceeded with questions like these:

What is the first thing I need to do to get started?

Answers: read books on voice acting and see what they say about getting started, or, find an actual voice-over actor and ask them.

The books and the voice actor consultants will tell you that the quick answer to this question is: find a coach. You could also read aloud daily, watch TV and listen to all the commercials, record the ones you like, play them over and over, copy the styles you like, write down the script, and if you have a tape recorder or better yet, a Zoom H2 recorder, record it and then play it back and listen to what you’ve done. And although you should do all that anyway, the quickest way to launch your training is to find a good coach.

So, how do you find a good coach?

Again, you can ask other voice actors, if you have access to them – “ask” them indirectly by listening to demos at voicebank and identifying your favorites and finding out who coached that actor. You can visit Harlan Hogan’s wonderful resource and look at the list of coaches in your area and start looking them up and doing background research on them to see what other people have to say about them (because you certainly want to find out if the coach you have in mind can deliver the goods, give you seriously good training and direct you in the recording of your voice demo, and not just grab your money and leave you with dreck or nothing).

Later, after the demo has been recorded and reviewed and tweaked and you finally like it, a new obstacle will arise – how do you physically get it into the ears of those who need to hear it? Do you make CDs? People do still ask for them, especially in the big cities. So how do you make them into CDs? You need art work for the cover. Where do you get art work? You can design it yourself or hire a graphic designer – and so on.

The point here is not to tell you how to proceed each step of the way, but to suggest breaking everything into steps, especially if you find you are not moving forward with something that you really want to do. If you find yourself with a great demo and then months pass and you haven’t done anything with it - what’s the delay? What will it take to move ahead and how do you make that happen? Obstacles are by no means limited to people just getting started – all of us will come up against them as we proceed down the voice-over path, or any other path in life. That’s why it can be so helpful to do a brain dump and get all our goals and projects onto paper and examine what we need to do to make them happen. Maybe we decide we want to make a “niche” demo, one that showcases voice-over work in one sector of the business, such as eLearning - but for some reason, we aren’t doing anything to make that happen. What will it take? Get it on paper or in a Word document or a sticky – it might look like this:

To Make eLearning Demo
list clients for whom I’ve done eLearning jobs
find the audio files for those jobs and put them in one folder
review the files and choose ones that represent a variety of subject matter and styles
identify the scripts I like but for which I might see room for improvement in my delivery
re-record those scripts
select a 10-second segment from each of the chosen files/scripts
order the segments in a way that shows them to their best advantage
produce the demo (do it myself, or barter with a friend who can do it for me – whatever)
seek a critique from someone I trust, or trust my own judgement

Once it’s broken down into actionable steps, it just isn’t as daunting as it might have seemed when it was only floating around as “I should really make a new demo”. And most of the steps are no big deal! Even for bigger projects like, learn Spanish, or, get a role on a TV series, all of this can be broken down into small steps for which there is an action (some steps admittedly more challenging than others, but nevertheless, do-able!). It’s just so important to do this exercise because without it we may just have this vague unrest about the whole thing and become convinced that there is something beyond our control that is preventing us from achieving our goals. In most cases, that ‘something” is completely within our grasp, after all.

Now remember, all of this is part of success in voice-over. If you start doing this and discover you’re getting all kinds of stuff accomplished, just make sure you give some thought to how you’re going to deal with the success when it comes! Are you ready for it?

Success in Voice-over: What are you afraid of?

This week my friend and colleague Liz Solar and I each drove to the center of the state to meet for lunch (she from eastern Massachusetts and I from the west). I met Liz two years ago at the amazing Women in Animation workshop run by Pat Fraley and Hillary Huber, with guest Candi Milo, and we’ve kept in touch ever since.

Liz and I talked over our lunch about everything under the sun, but heavy on the voice-over of course. She mentioned she had read an article in that day’s Boston Globe about Scott Chapin, who voices promos from his New Mexico studio 10 hours a day. We talked about what kinds of sacrifices a voice talent might have to make in order to sustain that kind of schedule, and it made me wonder, how many of us in this business are ready for that level of success?

Many of us believe we would like to be so successful as voice talent that the jobs are coming in all day, every day. Or that we would like to have a regular role on an animated series, or land roles in feature films. Are you one of those people? If you aren’t there yet, are you actively engaged in bringing your dreams to reality? If not, what is holding you back? Children at home? Caring for a relative? Civic duties? Are you waiting until you “get organised”? Or until you get a killer character demo made or until you save up enough to build a better studio? If you achieve this success, what impact will it have on life as you know it?

Do you know where you want to be? Have you sat down to think seriously about how to get from where you are now, to that place? What will it take?

Creating Your Own Voice-over Career

Among the things I love about a career in voice-over: the endless opportunities to create. But I think life offers opportunities to create no matter what you do. In my previous career as a biologist, I wrote a lot of papers based on rather dry data. When I wasn’t generating dry data and writing about them, I wrote papers that weren’t based on data at all. In a paper on homology and the ontological relationship of parts, I compared historical pathways in evolutionary biology to the transformation of the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz from an all-flesh person to an all-tin person, or to the complete turnover of members in a baseball team that nevertheless does not change “the Yankees” into some other, separate historical entity. A paper on phylogenetic constraint was my favorite project ever, because it released me from the bonds of data and let me play with ideas to my heart’s content. Later, as a program director at the National Science Foundation, it was more challenging to find ways to have fun and create, but when I needed to give a presentation to discuss the history of funding in my program and the distribution of dollars across taxonomic groups, I made a huge “tree of life” that filled the conference room, with “apples” on the tree to represent grants awarded (it was quite effective, by the way, and paved the way for a major funding initiative at the foundation).

Tree of Life project, National Science Foundation

And whenever a poster or flyer was needed, I volunteered. So the panelists we invited to help us make the final decisions about funding grant proposals found their way to the conference room with this:

or this:

The point is, you can create your own opportunities for both work and fullfilment no matter what else is going on in your life. Whether your voice-over career is keeping you hopping, or whether you sometimes find yourself with down time, you can be creating something.

Casting director Bonnie Gillespie wrote yet another excellent article this week for The Actor's Voice called Back to Basics, covering the latest thinking on headshots, resumés, and the other tools of the actor’s trade. In it is a section entitled Put Yourself Out There – a call to action if you’re looking for ways to get yourself on the map. How do you get on the map? You put yourself there!! She writes about a talented actor-writer comedy team who produced their own short film, Girl's Night Out, to showcase their skills, which became a featured video on Youtube (thanks to additional legwork on the part of the creators – you don’t have to wait for that to happen either) and has led to some great opportunities for them. Bonnie is so right about the importance of creating your own work.

Ideas and opportunities come when you least expect them. A lot of the auditions and scripts I get are interesting, a lot are, well…. not. Last fall I got an audition script for Ariat boots that I really loved, and although I didn’t expect anything to come of this audition, I wanted to do something with it. I got my friend, voice-over talent & production wizard Ben Wilson to work on it with me and we came up with a piece we’re both very proud of. No, we didn’t get the gig (yes of course they were nuts not to hire us – thanks for mentioning it!) but we got a wonderful showpiece that we thoroughly enjoyed creating, and it has brought us other work. Sometimes I get nutty ideas for commercials. I know nobody is going to produce them, so I do it myself. Or I just stick stuff into projects I’ve been hired to do, just because. A long-standing client wrote me yesterday that he has left AuctionPal, the company he founded three years ago and for which he hired me to create the young and energetic, British-accented Piper as their spokesperson. AuctionPal is doing great, and he's still closely associated with them, but he needs new outlets for his own energy and creativity so he’s starting a new internet marketing company, Double Vision. He’s interested in hiring me to do the telephone answering system and wanted me to try out some voices, so this is what I sent him.

The next time you find work slowing down (not that you would ever admit to anybody that that happens – cuz that would be putting negative energy out there and it gets in your way and trips you), don’t wring your hands over it – do something about it! Send out more postcards, make more calls, write more emails, do more networking – but also, create something. Don’t know how to make Flash animations? Find a friend who does or take a class. Lack production skillz? Collaborate. Get busy. If people aren’t hiring, hire yourself to create a showpiece. It will keep you in tip-top creative shape, you’ll have a blast, and you never know where it might take you.

100 + Industry Resources for Voice Over Talent

Stephanie Ciccarelli at Voices.com maintains a very active blog with tons (tonnes) of useful information for voice talent. Her recent post on industry resources lists voice-over discussion boards, books, VO coaches, podcasts, marketing and rate information, and blogs about voice-over, including blogs by many of my colleagues & friends. And of course, no list of voice-over blogs would be complete without the MCM Voices Voiceover Blog (pssst, in case you've forgotten- that's where you are now)! Thank-you Stephanie, for the link and for your untiring efforts on behalf of the voice-over industry. Your work is truly appreciated.

Source Connect at MCM Voices

As of today I am able to offer Source Connect to my clients. My studio has a Lawson L47 FET microphone running into a John Hardy M-1 preamp, and thence to an Echo MiaMidi soundcard into Adobe Audition – a very clean signal chain.

The story of how I prepared to get Source Connect might be of interest to others who are considering how to get studio quality audio to their clients in real time, without the expense of installing and maintaining ISDN. Source Connect can be used with any recording software that supports VST plugins, not just Pro Tools – the Source Elements Desktop allows you to record audio, transmit it to a client as you’re recording, and store the audio on your own system to be opened up in any recording program you have. You pay only for the Source Connect program, there are no monthly fees, and you can bridge to ISDN if your client has ISDN but not Source Connect, although there is a fee for that service using bridge providers such as Out of Hear or Digifone. The basic SC package costs $395 and you can try it free for 15 days. ElDorado Recording Services sells Source Connect Standard for $395 including 1 hour of setup time by phone.

My first hurdle was to get my computer back on the Internet. I had taken it off nearly two years ago in order to protect my audio recording empire from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and got a second computer to use for everything but audio. All the audio files have thus had to be transferred to the second computer for uploading to clients, which I do with a jump drive – slightly tedious but I got used to it quickly and it’s very fast. Nothing at all has gone wrong with the dedicated audio workstation in all of that time, although the Internet-connected computer has crashed a couple of times – so I was not very keen on exposing that workstation to the world again. Nevertheless, it had to be done if I was going to use Source Connect. So the first thing I needed to buy was a new 25-ft ethernet cable. Once I connected that cable to my computer, I went to the Microsoft website to get all the downloads my cloistered computer had missed out on over the last two years – a couple of screens’ worth. It didn’t take very long for all the upgrades to be installed, and so far nothing bad has happened to my machine. I will continue to use it only for audio - no email or other downloads.

Since I’m not in the habit of using headphones while recording, I needed to buy a pair so that I would be able to hear the client during recording sessions, and I needed a headphone extension cable. I got a pair of Sennheiser HD 280’s from Amazon Marketplace. I do use headphones for editing, plugging them into the computer’s other soundcard (a Soundblaster Audigy 2). Since the Echo soundcard does not have a headphone jack, I bought a Samson C-Control which plugs into the Echo card and the headphones plug into the C-Control (which also has a talkback feature if I ever need to play engineer while somebody else is on the mic). So now I’m monitoring playback via the Echo card instead of the Soundblaster. I needed two patch cables for plugging the C-Control into the Echo card, a headphone splitter so I could plug two sets of headphones into the C-Control’s headphone jack, and a couple of ¼” stereo adapter plugs for the headphones (which have mini-plugs). The one other item I needed was an iLok dongle, which is required for the Source Elements license.

Prior to setting up Source Connect, I needed to check my upload speed to make sure the audio would be transferring from my system to my clients’ at a speed adequate for good sound quality. This is something I actually didn’t check until the Source Elements Desktop was installed, and I was testing Source Connect and discovered my audio was “jittery”. I had to postpone further testing until I could check with my Internet Service Provider (Verizon) and learn that I needed to upgrade my service. Verizon offered this upgrade to me for less than what I had been paying for my DSL (let’s not even go there). My download speed had been around 1500 kilobits per second, which was fine, but my upload speed was only around 125 kbs. It needs to be between 300 and 400 kbs for Source Connect to work properly. With the upgrade, my download speed is now closer to 3000 kbs and upload is over 700 kbs. You can Google “check upload speed” and you’ll have a number of choices to see how fast your data are coming from and going out to the internet. I used speedtest several times to check on the status of my upgrade, and was pleased to discover that it was in place a full 8 hours earlier than promised. By the way, for anyone interested in calling their ISP to inquire about upgrading service – do not go anywhere near tech support, go right to the billing department.

So, once my hardware was all in place, the next step was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done – I got an expert to help me with the rest. George Whittam of ElDorado Recording Services in Los Angeles is an audio engineer and an authorized Source Connect re-seller. George has helped many voice-over artists with audio workstation installations and maintenance and with Source Connect installations - including Don LaFontaine - and I decided to let him handle this. At a time convenient for both of us we talked on the telephone and he used LogMeIn to enable him to see my desktop and control my mouse. I watched and took notes while he downloaded Source Elements Desktop and synchronised it with my iLok. The appearance of the SC control panel wasn’t right and he got Source Connect on the telephone in no time and learned that I needed to have Quicktime installed on my computer for Source Elements Desktop to operate properly. If you're using a Windows computer and have never used Quicktime, you would need to download the Quicktime software from Apple. Mac users are all set as Quicktime comes pre-installed on a Mac. That was soon accomplished and the SC installation was done. We tested it, which is when we discovered the problem with the upload speed, so the completion of the testing was postponed until after that was resolved.

Now all the pieces are in place and Source Connect works great. I’m so glad I had George Whittam to help me – keeping up with all the moving parts of the voice-over business can be quite challlenging and there are times when it just makes sense to get help, especially since George’s help with installation is included when you buy Source Connect from him! The math was pretty easy on that one. George understands the voice-over world and knows what we need; furthermore he’s just a great guy to work with. I had decided last month that my goal was to have this project completed by the time I sent out my March newsletter, and since that was today, I made it! Setting goals is an excellent thing. Now, it remains to be seen whether Source Connect will change the landscape of my client base - I think that part is up to me. So if you will excuse me, I have some marketing to do!