Hello and Happy St. Jean Baptiste Day! Profitez de votre journée spéciale, Canada! (with apologies if Google Translate butchered what I was trying to say)
NEWS AND NOTES!
Thanks to everyone who attended my Edge Studio Business and Monday 201 webinar, “Cost/Benefit Analysis” last week. I’m sorry that I forgot to plug it on last week’s blog and I got an earful for it!
Last week I started narrating the batch of short stories I mentioned in my previous blog. I did “Sudden, Broken, and Unexpected” by Steven Popkes. It’s about a musician whose ex-girlfriend convinces him to collaborate with a pop star who happens to be an AI (Artificial Intelligence). It’s a good story and was fun to narrate! If all goes well, this week I’ll narrate “The Stars Do Not Lie” by Jay Lake and “The Boolean Gate” by Walter Jon Williams.
The Miami Heat suck.
One of the things I taught in my webinar last week was how to breakdown your gigs by genre & revenue and compare it to your marketing efforts to see what worked or didn’t work. I looked at my Commercial work and found it lacking, at least compared to other genres that I book regularly (e-learning, industrials, Explainer Videos). In all fairness, this year I haven’t done any specific marketing in relation to commercials. However, the numbers once again showed that you get the most bang for your buck doing commercials. In other words; ergonomics vs. revenue, it’s the most cost-effective type of voice over there is.
For the first time in I-don’t-remember-how-long, I got some commercial coaching last week.
It was 90% us just talking, 10% actual practice with copy. As it turns out, the talking was FAR more helpful than the copy practice. We needed to figure out why I’m not booking more. It turns out that my commercial reads have a tendency to sound like my e-learning and industrial reads, probably because I do so much of those kinds of gigs and it’s a muscle-memory thing. That read does work sometimes (I have booked local, regional, national, and international spots this year so yay for me) but not all the time.
I took some notes which I’m gonna hang up in my booth above my monitor so I can read them over before I do my commercial auditions. I’ll let you know how it goes!
TIP OF THE WEEK: This is for both aspiring and veteran voice talent; now matter how long you’ve been doing this, you will always need coaching! Tiger Woods is one of the greatest golfers of all time and he has a coach that he works with almost daily. Not only do you need to keep your instrument in shape, you need to know what’s trending so you’re not reading copy in such a way that is “out of style”.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK: Life is what happens when you’re making other plans. John Lennon
STUFF!: I saw World War Z over the weekend. Now, I don’t like horror movies and I think zombie flicks are, well, silly, but this was good! If you are a hard-core zombie fan you’ll probably hate it. Why? It has an actual story, good acting, and no gore!
From Tom Dheere’s apartment, this is Tom Dheere, GKN News…
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