voice-over

Do You Feel Like Giving Up?

16 April 2014

This Date In My History is an ongoing series of blog posts taken directly from my private journal entries written at least 10 years ago.

TDIMH — Friday 16 April 2004 1:20pm

Sometimes I just feel like giving up.

No, I don’t mean on my life — just on this whole voice-over dream. I allow myself to feel confidence and think that I am talented and a capable engineer until things happen that make me think I am deluding myself.

This week, I’ve had 2 incidents — one minor, one major — that have really made me question myself and make me wonder whether I should quit. Yes, I know that:

These stresses are temporary, a reaction, and something that will pass.
I don’t want to get to my later life and think “what if I had kept going with voice-over” or “I wish I had followed my dream”.
[I was reminded of] the story about the gold miner who sold his rights after years of fruitless search and frustration, only to discover the next day that the new owner found gold just 3 feet away from where he stopped. You never know how close you are to the gold.
And remember Mel Fisher and the Atocha — 17 years before he found it.

However, I also know that my life would be sooo much simpler if I just went to work, came home and watched TV like everyone else.

The minor thing that happened was that [Client A] at [Company A] had some unflattering comments about one of my reads for the commercials. He said it had an accent and asked “where ARE you from?” Since I’m in the speech class to improve, I could laugh at this exchange, especially when he told me that he knew it wasn’t a Southern accent. [My teacher] listened to the read and told me that any time someone hears something different that they label it as an accent.

The major thing that had me questioning this career choice occurred today. The girl at [Company B] called today and said that my files contained way too much sibilance. She said it was distracting to listen to for an hour, and she couldn’t use it the way it is. Great. I had only spent 7+ hours in creating it, and now it has a problem. I told her I’d try to experiment with software to reduce the sibilance.

I was somewhat relieved that she called back a short while later to say that someone has told her it was fine the way it was. On the first call, she said another person said they could hear the sibilance but didn’t find it troubling. She’s working with a contractor who had previous experience with TV, and apparently, the contractor is the one who said it was sibilance and caused by microphone placement.

Of course, these conversations made me feel extremely stressed. Not only am I being told about 2 problems — my incorrect placement when making S sounds and an hour-long presentation that is full of them — but I’m hearing about it while on my day job where I can do absolutely nothing about it.

I had already planned to take 3 hours of leave today so I could [run a bunch of errands] and then find some way to spend an enjoyable few hours…. I did NOT intend to rush home and start working on fixing this sibilance problem.

All the way home, I felt upset thinking about the situation and wondering if I should just forget my whole dream. I’m tired of struggling all the time. I know that it all should be a learning experience, but I’m tired of learning. When will I be considered the master? I love the voice-over part and wish I could leave the audio engineering to someone else. When will that happen?

I downloaded a de-esser plug-in for Cool Edit and experimented for over 2 hours with it. I forgot to say that when I turned on my computer, I got an email message that seemed to be a direct answer to my thoughts, today’s motivational quote of the day:

You are where you are today
because you’ve chosen to be there.

True, but I didn’t choose to have all these problems.

I sent her a couple of MP3s with the sibilance reduced. I’ve decided that I will send a CD of everything on Monday with the sibilance reduced, with another CD with the files in their original state since I have to record some slides over due to script changes.

I talked to Drew when he got home. Of course, I’m not going to give up. I truly believe that I am destined to be a star. I’m stressed, exhausted, frustrated, needing a vacation desperately, and depressed about Daddy [who had passed away 6 months before this entry], but I’m not willing to give up on my dream.

I think — no, I KNOW — that all of these other factors have made me feel so overwhelmed and cause me to react so negatively to a problem. I need to keep in mind that a problem is just an opportunity to learn something (even if I don’t want to).

Today’s Take-Aways

1. BREATHE. When you feel overwhelmed or stressed, take a moment to take some good, deep breaths. Chances are that your problem is not as big as it first seems.

2. At the time, I didn’t understand how much my grief over the loss of my much-beloved dad infiltrated every part of my life. I looked like I normally did. I acted like everything was normal. Inside, though, everything was NOT normal. If you’re grieving, go easy on yourself and postpone any life-changing decisions until you feel stronger.

3. You also don’t want to make life-changing decisions based on one bad day. Problems are inherent in any job. You have to take the bad with the good, and problems can steer you off course. However, with determination, you can make course corrections and get back on the path of your dream!

4. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t occasionally have doubts. It helps to talk to someone you trust and/or write in a journal to remind yourself of all your good qualities and capabilities that will lift you up when you feel like giving up.

5. The real take-away here is that I was much too critical of myself. I could’ve let the OPINION OF ONE PERSON keep me from my dream and my destiny! Don’t give away your power to another person. When it comes to your dream, yours is the only opinion that matters!

Bonus Round of Comments for Voice Talent

I was writing about a problem with sibilance. I actually went back and listened to that 10-year-old file. While I did hear some sibilance on a few words, I’ve heard much worse sibilance issues in new audiobooks from experienced talent! And when you consider the script was as overrun with S sounds as trees in Georgia are choking in kudzu, I’m amazed that I didn’t end up sounding like Sylvester the cat! 🙂

I added a sample here for your reading pleasure; you really need to read it aloud to get the full joy from it. Note that the full script had dozens and dozens of occurrences of Sarbanes-Oxley!

Sarbanes-Oxley aims to increase investor confidence by introducing a whole new level of accountability for senior corporate executives by holding them personally responsible for their company’s financial statements….The Sarbanes-Oxley Act is comprised of 11 distinct areas or titles. Each title contains additional sections which clearly outline responsibilities, requirements, and penalties.

2 Tips to Tame Your To-Do List

6 January 2014

Long before the word “smartphone” was coined, I had several iterations of PDAs, and I remember my to-do list application on each one was always ultra important to me. My need to keep track of all my actions and ideas didn’t end there. In looking back through my journals to find entries for my blog series This Date In My History, I realize how often I wrote a to-do list.

These to-dos were all related to some aspect of my voiceover business.

Oh, I had to-do lists on my day job, too. However, someone else usually set the priority of the projects on those to-do lists. As a network and email administrator, I often would be working on a project that would get sidelined by a user support call. I rarely wrote about those actions in my journals. I knew they would always be waiting for me the next day. Creative ideas that held the possibility of moving us forward couldn’t be implemented without committee meetings, testing, and managerial approval. They became a project.

Actions for my voice-over business could be individual tasks or pieces that form a major project. I’ve always had great ideas that I wanted to implement, as well as time-sensitive actions to take, like auditions, sessions, software updates, invoicing, correspondence…. You see how easy it is to get in list mode?

The problem with these to-do lists is that they quickly became unwieldy. I began to have paralysis by analysis. I would have so many things that I COULD DO competing with things I SHOULD DO that I would find it difficult to pick something to start on.

I tried labeling each action as A, B, or C in priority, with the As being the things that must be done and the Cs being the ideas I wanted to capture and do sometime. I found that I usually didn’t need to write the As because they tended to be in the time-sensitive, mission-critical category of things to do. It was hard to assign something as a B. The Cs ended up being things I never got to. My journals are littered with fantastic ideas that I didn’t pursue.

As an example, my 2006 journal starts with a collage I made about creating a podcast. The word podcast was added to the dictionary in 2005, and I intended to be one of the frontrunners in creating a show. I started by writing lists (yes, list mode again!) of topic ideas because I didn’t want to start a podcast and then run out of steam after 3 episodes.

For what it’s worth, I had the same sort of worry before starting this blog. I decided I wouldn’t put pressure on myself to post on any schedule or only on certain topics. What freedom to just write something when I have something to say!

Although I gave myself this permission to write when the muse spoke, I found that the muse would often speak to me at a time when I couldn’t do anything about it. What did I do? You guessed it — added the idea to my to-do list. Even today, I add ideas for blog posts to an Evernote notebook. Unfortunately, like my podcast idea, many of them go in the folder and are forgotten.

The podcast idea was actually a recurring one, so let’s fast forward to 2011 when I attended Faffcon2 in Atlanta. Five years had passed since I first had the idea about creating a podcast, yet I was no closer to creating one. I was completely thrilled when someone suggested we collaborate on a series that could have endless, easy-to-create episodes. This idea could be IT!

After we parted company at Faffcon, we had several calls to firm up the plan. I immediately bought some new equipment that I would need to accomplish my part. Due to other demands like my day job, some time passed before I could test the equipment. By the summer of 2011, my collaborator and I both had our plates overflowing with other, more pressing things. The idea that so completely captivated me when I heard it eventually fizzled out to nothing, and I’ve since sold that piece of equipment.

Eight years have passed since I first decided to create a podcast, yet I still haven’t done it.

Which brings me to my first tip…

Ideas Love Speed

I’ve always heard the old saying “the early bird gets the worm.” It was proven to me when I used to sell a lot of my Barry Manilow collectibles on eBay. I noticed that the first seller who posted a unique item was usually the one to get the most money for it. Nike’s slogan of Just Do It is based on the premise that ideas love speed.

I recently listened to a program from Dr. Joe Vitale in which he explained the reasons why ideas love speed:

1) The idea comes with passion and excitement. That energy is available to use only if you act THEN. Use that energy to help propel you to get it done. When I look at the podcast collaboration idea in 2011, I see the truth of this statement. The further away we got from the original idea, the less inclined we were to implement it.

2) The Divine gave you this idea as a gift. You are honoring the idea to take action. Doing so comes with a blessing. He even said, as I observed with my eBay listings, the first one to act on an idea is usually the one to profit from it the most.

3) The Divine gives the idea to more than 1 person at a time, knowing that most of them won’t act on it. How many times have you had and ignored an idea, only to later see it implemented by and making money for someone else?

4) The more you act on and honor ideas, the more ideas you get.

Take-away straight from Dr. Vitale:

Act on the next idea that comes to you. Write it down and take action on it.

Act on Ideas That Wake You Up

I’ve read Dr. Wayne Dyer’s books and watched and listened to his programs. One quote that he often repeated was from Rumi:

The morning breeze has secrets

Don’t go back to sleep

I started writing this post around 5AM on a winter morning where it’s 30 degrees outside. Believe me, I really wanted to stay in my warm bed and go back to sleep, but I kept thinking about this post. If I’m going to think about it, I might as well get up and write it, especially since I’m guaranteed to have no interruptions.

And now it’s done before sunrise! Anything else I do today is just a bonus! 🙂

Photo: iStockPhoto/Fourtheexposure

Golden Nugget From Pat Fraley’s Pick Up Your Oscar Webinar

28 July 2013

Pat Fraley recently taught a webinar called Pick Up Your Oscar: The Craft of Voice Over Acting. I sign up for just about everything Pat offers because I know I will learn great info that propels my career forward.

This webinar about acting was no exception. In fact, it was more useful to me than much of the voice-over training I have had! In publicizing the event, Pat wrote: “It’s not an MFA for 50 bucks, but it’s the only acting system created to meet the rapid rigors of the voice over world.” He further promised to teach how to:

“Play Actions” not present emotions
“Play the Subtext”
“Raise The Stakes”
Create “Motivated Contrast”

The big golden nugget for me was the fact that you can’t act an emotion. You have to think in terms of the ACTION VERB in order to bring the emotion to the text. You can “up the stakes” by finding a verb that has a different connotation or intensity.

After the webinar concluded, I found this fantastic book ACTIONS: The Actors’ Thesaurus at Amazon, and it already has been extremely useful in creating more evocative auditions.

The introduction offers this explanation:

If the actor plays a specific and real action on each sentence, then, even though the audience are unlikely to be able to identify the technique or the individual action, the work will be interesting and absolutely watchable because of its precision. Actioning enforces a specificity which can liberate the actor’s performance and ensure a cohesive integrated character with each moment leading naturally onto the next.

The book also provides an example of finding and using actions in analyzing a commercial script.

During the webinar, Pat coached several people through the process, and I could really hear the difference in their reads. You can order a copy of Pat’s webinar, along with a variety of other programs, at this link.

Karen Commins

Award Winning

Atlanta Audiobook Share-rator™