So, remember how I once vowed to put up or shut up when it came to doing voiceover work? Well, I finally got my chance. Thumbing through the recent Raleigh Parks’ Leisure Ledger, I found an upcoming class that taught voiceovers. With a small price tag and professional trainers in town, I knew I couldn’t let another chance slip away. I signed up for the September 28th class and counted down the days until it arrived.
In the meantime, though, the peculiar, breathless phrasing of the class description caught my eye so I plugged it into The Google. It didn’t take me long to trace the class to its trainers: a group in Vermont called Such A Voice. On their website I watched free online videos which explained the whole process. Soon I felt as if I had taken the class already.
And you know what? I was pretty much right. Almost everything covered in the actual class was covered in the online video, only the business owner didn’t make the trip. Instead, a friendly Venezuelan did by the name of JB. He essentially followed the whole script used in the videos while his bored partner fiddled with his Blackberry at the back of the class. At least, I think it was his partner as our trainer seemed to call him multiple names during the evening.
Included in the class was a subtle sales pitch for the need to have a demo professionally done. The company sells demos for a hefty fee, you see, although for many wannabe voiceover artists this is more money than they’ll ever see from their voiceover work. I kept wondering about how lucrative this field could be if our trainer was meeting with us. After all, if he could be out earning $1000 an hour doing voice work, why did he feel the need to schlep to Raleigh for $350 in class fees? And why did he have to use his daughter’s laptop for the class? I’d expect a high-rolling voiceover guy to be living a little . . . well, larger, personally. Of course, no one was promised the moon and our trainer brought down the starry-eyed with the realization that the odds of anyone in the class striking it big were extremely low.
Part of the pitch warned us against making our own demos. “You don’t ever want to make your own demo,” he emphasized. Well, the main reason we don’t want to do that is because that’s how Such A Voice makes it money. In spite of these warnings, the trainer and his pal proceeded to do just that, mixing our voices in with some simple background music using ProTools. In 10 seconds they had whipped up a decent-sounding commercial: something I could easily replicate with my audio background and software. Is this what my hefty fee would buy, I wondered?
I’ve already told the story of how disappointed I was when I was a fresh high-school graduate and sat for a demo at a radio school. The moral to that story is the same as this one: these places can’t really give me what I don’t already have. There’s no reason I can’t do this for myself, by myself, and cut out the middleman. The barrier to entry in this field is shockingly low. In fact, its so low that there’s little money to be made in it anymore. My friends who do occasional voiceover work bemoan how flooded the market has become, driving down wages. Does this mean I’m giving it up? Not at all, but boy does it seem crowded.
Still, the “flooded market” comment got me thinking. Perhaps outfits like Such A Voice do offer some value. While nearly everyone has a voice, few know how to properly use it. Just because anyone with a microphone can create voiceovers doesn’t mean that anyone can find work doing it. It takes a certain je ne suis quoi. While I have a “friendly guy next door with a nice energy” voice according to the trainer, I still need to find my niche. I don’t know if Such A Voice can do that for me. I think that’s still something I have to do on my own.
Even if things don’t work out the way you expect you can always learn something from the experience. The voice class was a good lesson in that regard, and it was fun, too. It showed me that there’s much more to this than I first anticipated. Whether I’m willing to do what it takes is the question I have to ask myself.