A VO's Journey: Voiceover and more voice over

Send us Fan Mail Do voice actors need a talent agent? Gabby Nistico and I dig into it on this Monday live at VO Journey Academy. It started with some news. Gabby got word over the weekend that Cast Voices, a casting site that agents used to manage their rosters, is shutting its doors on 30 October. If most of your work comes through one website or one company, a closing like that can wipe out your business overnight. So we talk about spreading yourself across many places, the same way you'd s...

Send us Fan Mail How do you give more than one take that actually works? Gabby Nistico and I talk about the tool that helps most, improv, on this Open Forum Friday at VO Journey Academy. You won't be improvising the words. The script is the script. What you improvise is your reaction to the words, and that's what keeps a read from sounding like you've done it a hundred times. We go through the improv games we use with voice actors, like the boat scene and the question game. Gabby's favorite i...

Send us Fan Mail Is the voice over industry starting to correct itself? Gabby Nistico and I talk about the push back toward human work. A Washington Post piece puts acting in the group of jobs AI will reorganize rather than wipe out. Distributors are limiting how many books one account can upload because of the flood of AI books. And authors are calling us because they want a real person reading their book. Gabby asks the question the AI audiobook sellers don't answer: if a human still has to...

Send us Fan Mail Should a new voice actor pay for Voice123 or Voices.com? I used to say wait a couple of years. I've changed my mind, because I've seen people join in their first month and start getting work. So the question isn't when to join. It's whether you're going to use it. These are audition sites. If you pay and then don't audition, you really have wasted your money. Gabby Nistico adds the other half: treat it like a business investment. Fill every audio category, write your profile ...

Send us Fan Mail Someone asked how to keep going with voice over during a hard stretch, and it turned into the whole episode. When you start building a VO business, the people closest to you often don't get it. You're spending nights in a closet or a blanket fort with nothing to show for it yet, and it costs money. They get worried, and worry usually comes out as frustration. I talk about what I learned the hard way: shoulder that worry instead of fighting it, keep going, and prove two things...