Listen to that inner voice.

You know what your voice-over services are worth, and you know there is a minimum fee below which you are not comfortable. Sometimes you do a job for less because you just feel like it, and sometimes you accept an assignment against your better judgement. Last week I went part way down that path, and got off before things went too far, but it left an unpleasant taste.

I responded to a notice for a low budget job. I have no idea what possessed me – maybe I thought it would be a quick bolus of cash to pay for a few tanks full of gas for our vacation trip. The first sign that it was a mistake was when the client (she turned out to be a talent agent of some kind, and the fact that she was posting online for voice talent indicates that she doesn’t deal with voice-over very often) wrote me to request an audition of a few paragraphs of the script and said that, if chosen, I would be paid after the audio was delivered along with any changes the client requested. I usually require a 50% deposit. I went ahead and auditioned anyway. Just before our trip I got another email from the agent, stating that her client was trying to choose between me and one other talent, and could I please audition the whole script. It was a short script, and probably my ego got in the way, telling me I had made the cut and wasn’t that nice. As it happens, I had removed a piece of Sonex from my booth since I needed it for my mobile recording studio, and that little change livened up my room a bit and the audio sounded particularly nice. I sent the audio off with confidence that the client would be impressed. I was so taken with the sound that I sent the file to my friend George Whittam, since we had been talking about such things recently and I wanted him to hear the change. He was impressed too.

While away I received an email from the agent, forwarding comments from her client:

“We need Mary to read the script straight through, it sounds a little choppy and edited. Have her send you 3 different read throughs un-edited, with different inflections. Have Mary include two more lines at the end of the read [the additional lines were included in the email].”

We are still talking about an audition here! I finally came to my full senses and wrote back:

“I'm very sorry, but I'm not going to be able to help you. For a low budget project like this, it simply is not possible for me to do 4 different complete reads for an audition. And if your client is this demanding in the audition phase it's only going to get worse.

Best wishes &c”

The agent wrote me back an incoherent email, the gist of which was, “don’t ever darken my door again”.

I felt rather bad about it, because I don’t like conflict. If it had gone the way I initially envisioned, it would have been nice to get gasoline money out of it. But it went the way many low budget projects go – the way of completely unreasonable expectations. It just isn’t worth it, unless it’s for a client you already know and like and they need a favor and you trust them not to go overboard. Otherwise, you are in effect saying, "my time and talent are not worth much - go ahead and abuse me."

I make a lot of mistakes. That was one of them. I hope I have finally learned to resist the temptation to respond to such requests in the future. They always seem to bring me into contact with unpleasant people.

Ugh. You know?

Fortunately I got some nice new clients right after that who paid for my vacation. A reward for being sensible, undoubtedly.

Not getting that voice-over gig: You probably didn’t blow it.

You hear it all the time – do the audition and move on. If you keep track of all your auditions and how many days it has been since you did them and think necrotic thoughts like, “if I don’t hear by tomorrow then I’ll know I blew it” – you might find yourself with an ulcer.

Bonnie Gillespie wrote this week in both Actor’s Voice and Your Turn about the importance of not obsessing and about how you can be perfect for the role and still not get cast. And how it’s important to be process-oriented rather than results-oriented in this business in order to enjoy your life to the fullest and minimise stress. She tells the story of how she was hired to cast a film because of her relationship with her then-boyfriend, now husband, for whom the screenwriter had written a role in the film. After reading the script, Bonnie and her boyfriend agreed that he was not the best actor for that role! Examples like this are abundant in show business. It is even possible to get cast and end up not playing the role. Last weekend Bob Bergen told us the story of how Lily Tomlin was cast in the role of Edna Mode, the diminutive costume designer in The Incredibles. Brad Bird had a certain attitude in mind for that role and after attempting to get the read from Tomlin that he envisioned, Tomlin told Bird that he really should read the part himself, because he was perfect for it. And we all know how that turned out.

I’m waiting to hear the outcome of a number of recent auditions and submissions. Except that I’m not “waiting”. I’m working on the jobs I have right now, and continuing to work on my skills so that I’m prepared for whatever opportunities present themselves next. Not knowing what might come along is one of the most exciting things about my job as a voice actor. As Bonnie said in her column this week: “Staying prepared, focused, and available is all you really control.”

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.

When an audition just isn’t enough.

In the business of voice over, you have to “put it out there” every day, auditioning for potential clients and for people who sit on the far side of an agent. Often, you never hear anything back – not even a thank-you. You learn pretty quickly not to invest anything in the auditions other than giving it your best shot – after the recording leaves your outbox, you put it out of your mind as well.

Sometimes, though, an audition sticks with you. Maybe you stretched your range and found you liked the result, or the copy just grabbed you – and you think you’d really like to find a way to keep it in your life a little while longer. That happened to me this weekend. I received an audition request from an agent that included a part for a cowboy and a part for an "announcer". The cowboy was supposed to be male, and they said they would consider a female announcer if she had the right sound. Well sir, I just felt like being a cowgirl, and I really liked being a cowgirl. Since I was pretty sure I would never hear another word about this audition, I decided to see if I could get somebody else interested in having fun with it too, and sent it to my friend and colleague Ben Wilson, a terrifically talented voice artist with fantastic production skills.

You can listen to the result here. Ben, thank-you so much for humoring me and for contributing your amazing voice and production talents to this piece.

Oh, and there are even some desert birds in it!!

I Survived My Audition.

I received a call Thursday afternoon from a Manhattan media production house asking me to audition on Monday (today) for a web commercial for a major national product. The audition was to be held in Manhattan, no remote recording please (my friend Drew was also invited to audition but since he's in the Dallas area he was told he couldn't be considered after all). Over the next few days I did some serious market research, as the product is one about which I had preconceptions, and yet as soon as I was faced with the possibility of being its spokesperson I found my ideas changing dramatically. I went to a store that sells only that product and paraphernalia, and spoke over the weekend with a number of people whose lives are enriched, if not dominated by that product. The company website was also very informative and I didn’t even make it through half of their material. I learned a great deal and was looking forward to the audition very much.

It’s a 3 hour drive from my home to Manhattan and I left my house at about 8:00 this morning and headed for the interstate. Around 8:15 the car ahead of me suddenly braked and came to a stop. All my attention was focused on avoiding a collision and fortunately I did not hit anyone or anything. The driver of the light pickup behind me was less fortunate and crashed into my car, and in my rear-view mirror I saw another pick-up slam into his. I got my minivan off the road as quickly as possible and called 911 to report the location of the accident and that it looked pretty bad behind me. I saw a small sedan pull over and a man dressed for his job at UPS hopped out and ran full speed back down the road to the scene of the worst of the accident. The man whose vehicle had hit mine pulled over in front of me so I got out to see how he was; he thought he had probably suffered a mild concussion and his pickup looked pretty bad. Eventually the police and paramedics arrived, took our reports and checked us out. I started to see tow trucks arriving, and some miserably smashed-up cars being removed from the scene. Miraculously, nobody was seriously hurt. The police officer at the scene pronounced my van drivable, although he advised me to go to a garage to have it checked out if I planned to continue on my way to New York. After we were cleared to leave, I headed south. My car seemed fine (although it looks “butt-ugly” now) and I decided to go ahead with my plans. I never knew what caused the cars in front of me to stop, and it kind of boggles my mind that none of them waited around to offer information or assistance - surely one of them must have noticed the multi-car pile-up behind them?

I did not make the audition on time, but a call to the recording studio informed me that late was fine, and I arrived at 25 minutes past my scheduled audition time. I pulled into a parking garage and asked their rates for an hour – it was the same as for a day, $16.95. As a native New Yorker I couldn’t stomach that and drove on, and was fortunate to find street parking a few blocks away. The recording studio was in a lovely old building in Chelsea – I love visiting other studios, and present were – the recording engineer and myself. No client, no casting director, just the two of us. The RE was very nice and personable, but he told me, “it would be pointless for me to give you direction because I have no idea what the client wants.” So we “did the needful” and got the job done, and I was on my way in less than 15 minutes.

It was a bit of a let down, I gotta say – I don’t mind the drive – usually – but I’d like to have a bit more of a reason for the trip than just going to another microphone in another state. I talked with my friend, fellow voice artist Anthony Mendez on the phone afterwards, and he said that’s the way it is in New York: “face time” is considered very important, even if there’s nobody there but you and the engineer. Maybe I’ll understand that some day. At any rate, the overall experience was a good one, and the market research I did reminded me, I hope, to keep an open mind about everything and everybody. And, not least of all, I’m very glad to be alive. I’ve never been in a collision before and although I don’t yet know how much it’s going to cost me, at least I had the relief of knowing that my driving was not responsible for it and that I didn’t hit anybody, and that nobody was seriously injured. On the ride home, as I watched cars zipping in and out of traffic at high speed, I wished I could tell their drivers, “don’t be stupid!” The reminder I got this morning of how vulnerable we all are was an important one, and I plan to be, if possible, even more vigilant on the road.

And it would be very nice to get a gig out of it too ;)