Robin’s Ramblings

Your voiceover career is humming along.  You’re making a living…not a great living, but okay. You have your own web site and subscribe to a few voiceover sites and new jobs come along often enough to make the subscription worthwhile. Occasionally a job post will require an ISDN line or Source Connect. Ah, don’t have that–and you hit the delete button and go on to the next post. Did I just hear you hand that perfect job over to someone else???

If you’re not familiar with either ISDN or Source Connect, it’s time you spent a little time reading and researching. Maybe it isn’t something you want to dive into if you’re still fairly new to the voiceover world, but if the first paragraph describes you at all, you’re ready. These are just more tools to help you win those lucrative jobs you believe are eluding you. And what they do is allow you to be recorded remotely by large production houses in real time.

When I set up my production studio, I did my research for the equipment (and consulted with my good pal John Weeks, who seems to know about everything there is to know about audio equipment). While I was making those purchases, I thought that I just had to have that Musicam Roadrunner audio codec and an ISDN line, although at the time all of my clients were within an hour’s drive. For a non-techie like myself, setting up the machine was daunting. And expensive. Just putting a line into the house was about $400, and the codec at the time cost about $2600. Oh, and did I mention that you have you pay the phone company every month for the privilege of having that line hooked up? There’s another $90 a month. So there I sat with my ISDN line, my codec, and no clients who needed it.

Fast forward one year. Still no clients for the ISDN line (subscription web sites had yet to be “invented”).  You need the equipment to attract the clients, but you need the clients to pay for the equipment, and it just wasn’t happening. So I had the line disconnected (wonder if that’s a selling point if I sell my house–”Extra Feature: New, never used ISDN line!”) and sold the still new, never-used Roadrunner on Ebay at a huge loss.

I knew at the time I bought the ISDN equipment that something better and something less expensive that worked just as well was right around the corner. I was right! It’s Source Connect. It works with your existing high-speed Internet connection and is much less complicated. PLUS, it is becoming the new industry standard, so most likely the big production houses are going to have it also.

Yes, there is a learning curve. Yes, you will be forced to shell out another $400 bucks. But look at it as an investment in your career. You’re not giving anything up to have this tool at your fingertips in the studio. In fact, you will have access to so many more jobs and perhaps get to work with larger studios, directors and producers. And that, my dear voiceover artist, is pure gold.

Posted March 20, 2009 and tagged Job search, low pay. * Comments(1) Edit

I spent two weeks in February looking for a job. I am a full time voiceover talent, and this was the longest stretch without a job in eight years. It was scary. Finally, one of my regular clients came through with a hefty job, but everyone hits panic phase occasionally. You immediately start questioning your talents, your rates, your abilities, and finally, your decision to get into this crazy business and think that maybe it’s time to get out. Okay, so I never got that far, because I simply cannot imagine doing anything else.

What do you do when your regular clients are nowhere to be found? Most of us (maybe all of us) subscribe to one or more web sites for job leads. How can you be selective when you just need work? What’s the lowest you’ll take? $200? $100? Any amount??? Sometimes I feel as if clients on these sites are taking advantage of our desperation. Are you biting?

I remember one job lead recently where the posting stated that they were already on their third voiceover talent and still couldn’t find anyone who was competent. Read on a little farther and you’ll see that the job, which was something like 6 1/2 HOURS of finished work, was paying $1000. Do they not understand WHY they couldn’t find a competent voice talent for that kind of money?

When no work is coming in, do we sacrifice everything we’ve worked so hard to get? Maybe. Because if you were a top-level executive and got laid off and spent a few months looking for a job, you just might accept that construction job paying $12 an hour to have something coming in. So it is with voice work. If I didn’t take that $200 job, I’d be sitting here with my business principles intact and not working. I always use the example of being a newbie on one of the voiceover sites and finally auditioning for a job that paid what I considered to be chump change. I got the job, and the client turned out to be CitiMortgage, CitiBank’s real estate arm. The price for the job was the rate per minute, which suddenly looked a whole lot better. That was 2005, and I’ve been happily doing all of their online training since.

So how do you cope with the “I got no work” blues?

All the best to all of us who have the best jobs in the world!