First, a small list of things that are distinctly not voiceover.\u00a0 Toastmasters.\u00a0 City Council.\u00a0 Zoom Conferences.\u00a0 Folk Festival.\u00a0 These are all opportunities – pandemic aside for some – to get out there and speak or perform in front of an audience. All great things!\u00a0 For some folks, there is nothing like the rush and exhilaration of connecting with a crowd\/audience\/group by means of saying something relevant.\u00a0 Tell a joke, relate a story, teach a small room full of people how to use a sump pump, whatever it happens to be.\u00a0 These are all great opportunities to get the “talk in front of people” fix that so many crave.<\/p>\n
Then there are the rest of us.\u00a0 Those of us who think the idea of public speaking, public performance, and any other means of grabbing attention in real time is horrifying.\u00a0 On a scale of one to utter terror, it’s way up there in the terror category.\u00a0 The heart starts to beat a bit faster, you hear your pulse in every word you speak, your palms start to condensate.<\/p>\n
No joke: all three of those things just occurred at the THOUGHT of having to get up in front of a crowd and do something where I am the singular focus.<\/p>\n
Enter: The Voiceover Continuum.<\/p>\n
This is where Voiceover comes in.\u00a0 In the “olden days,” voice actors would enter a studio in a recording facility or agent’s office.\u00a0 They would receive the script of the day.\u00a0 They would then enter the sound treated confines of a small cell and begin to speak.\u00a0 The sheen of the Neumann U87 or the odd shape of the Sennheiser 416 were the only company.\u00a0 Instructions received via headphones.\u00a0 The liberal use of a talkback mic.\u00a0 An A B C take, a few touch-ups, all done.\u00a0 The end.\u00a0 Exit the booth, thank the producer, collect your nickel, and off you go.<\/p>\n
More often than not now, the voiceovering is done in the comfort of a small facility in the home.\u00a0 The “Personal Professional Recording Studio,” if you will.\u00a0 There may be fewer mics, preamps, and racks of outboard gear, but the end result is still the same: high quality recordings sent to someone to use to advertise or instruct. Bonus: without all the extra stuff, less wasted electricity.\u00a0 Same job, smaller carbon footprint!\u00a0 Your ecological heart is swelling with pride.<\/p>\n
The beauty of it all?\u00a0 The voice is then used to reach audiences of anywhere from twenty to twenty-million.\u00a0 You, as the voiceover artist, never saw a single face.\u00a0 Those faces all get to hear you, though!\u00a0 The introvert’s dream job: do stuff alone and revel in a job well done.\u00a0 Also alone.<\/p>\n
(we’ll ignore the imposter syndrome symptoms for the moment and just live in this utopian dream for the time being)<\/p>\n
All of the above is a very short answer to an even shorter question.\u00a0 Why voiceover?\u00a0 Because you like to talk but you don’t want to know anybody is listening in the moment.\u00a0 Bingo!<\/p>\n
Old time radio wove the commercial advertisements of paying sponsors into its programming with great creativity.\u00a0 Sponsors continue to benefit from airwave advertisements on radio and television, even if much of the advertising world is drifting to online platforms.\u00a0 Let’s stick with radio since that’s still my current obsession (see previous blog post for details, subject to availability, all rights reserved).<\/p>\n
As this post is written, it is currently the Holiday Season.\u00a0 This means several contemporary hit radio stations have converted their entire playlist to tributes of December holidays.\u00a0 Whammageddon has begun.\u00a0 With the holiday music season also comes the holiday SHOPPING season.\u00a0 Black Friday is over and now it’s the mad dash to rush people to stores – online and off – to acquire this year’s Tickle-Me-Elmo before supplies run out.\u00a0 Or whatever the product happens to be.<\/p>\n
This single month frequently shapes the budgets and operating plans of a business for its entire next fiscal year.\u00a0 The premium is paid to terrestrial radio stations, and in exchange their commercial words are aired with great frequency.\u00a0 Greater frequency, it seems, this month than any other month.\u00a0 Commercial breaks are longer, and some advertisers are present once or even twice per break.\u00a0 If you’re in the Seattle area and listening to 106.9, all I have to say is “You’ll be sorry” and you know precisely what I’m talking about.<\/p>\n
Someone – or several someones – is the representative voice of that advertising entity.\u00a0 Many of the are little 30-second skits or some form of attention-grabbing mechanism.\u00a0 The bottom line of all of them is to convince you, the listener, that your needs are not met and the advertiser is the only entity that can fulfill those needs.\u00a0 Your vehicle is neglected, you have too much stuff, you smell terrible, children are in need of\u00a0 your neglected vehicle, and so on.\u00a0 You are a shambles of a human being and your salvation is in the form of the lifeline your credit card’s tenuous link to an advertiser.\u00a0 Voiceovers!\u00a0 They help convince you to turn over your Earth Dollars in exchange for a more fulfilling life, as defined by products and services.\u00a0 It’s a dirty job, but everyone wants to do it.<\/p>\n
While commercial voiceover is lucrative beyond measure, there are other industries in need of those services.\u00a0 Video training, large function announcements, explanations, audio books, and many others have need of that service.<\/p>\n
We’ll save animation and video games for another day because wow is that a mighty topic!<\/p>\n
This is the category that I fit in for the most part.\u00a0 Outside of a few characters in some video games and a movie, my focus is on corporate and medical narration.\u00a0 My start came in high school radio and shifted to being the guy who records all the prompts for phone systems at a large company.\u00a0 Fast forward to later, having a background in large companies as well as working in medical equipment has made those types of narration extremely comfortable.\u00a0 Promoting products is also fun, but taking the path less traveled and creating engaging audio is where my center of joy is.\u00a0 Knowing that someone is going to learn all about a new LVAD technology and be able to get it the first time without having to rewind because the voice conveyed it effectively?\u00a0 Massive fulfillment!<\/p>\n
Everyone wants Morgan Freeman and Sam Elliott to be the voice of their <insert thing here>.\u00a0 Shoot, -I- want them to be my voice for anything that I say and be able to sound like them because OI could listen to them talk all day.\u00a0 Given that high profile celebrities are generally really, really busy with …. celebrity things … it’s not always feasible for them to commit to being the consistent voice of a product or service.\u00a0 Sam Elliott and his run with Dodge Ram is an example of how it can sound and it sounds AMAZING.\u00a0 Since Sam Elliott can’t be in every commercial, that leaves folks like me.<\/p>\n
Every single narration project is a passion project.\u00a0 The bottom line in any of this: voicing scripts and bring them to life brings me incalculable joy.\u00a0 I will keep doing this for so long as the unvierse lets me.\u00a0 For so long as I have a voice to utilize, that is!<\/p>\n
It isn’t for everybody, but it comes out real good from the people for whom it IS that thing.\u00a0 Love what you do and you’ll never ‘work’ a day in your life.<\/p>\n
Oh how I love it!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
– There are less painful ways (like voiceover!) to enjoy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[10,30,26,27,29,28,25,31,32,8],"class_list":["post-251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-voiceover","tag-audio","tag-audiobooks","tag-commercial","tag-corporate","tag-elearning","tag-medical","tag-radio","tag-recording-studio","tag-vocal-booth","tag-voiceover"],"yoast_head":"\n