Okay, everybody, so we are live at MAVO 2018 with the incomparable Joe Cipriano.
Incomparable, thank you, Paul, I like that. Wait, hold on, I’m just gonna look that up. Wait a minute.
Thank you.
So thanks for joining us.
My pleasure.
My first question, and I’m thinking a lot of our listeners will have the same question. As much as I love Val, and she does a great job, when I saw you were on the schedule, I thought, wow, they got Joe Cipriano. So tell us, what brings you to a conference like this?
Right. Well, and when we all got together last night, it was a great night last night, first evening, and they had all of us get up, the presenters, to speak and the sponsors and things like that. And what I said last night is true, Val reached out to me over a year ago, you know, maybe it was a year and a half ago, you know, and to put it on the schedule, and the reason why, I love her energy, and I love what she’s doing, and I love the fact that it’s in this area in Washington, DC.,
and that it’s bringing kind of a big type of voiceover conference, although in a smaller package, to the DC area. And for me, it’s where I started my voiceover career, and that’s when I said to Val, listen, you got me from the, you know, the letter go, you know, the word go.
You had me at hello, excuse me.
Right, exactly, I, you know, started my career here in Washington, DC while working in radio. And so coming back here, I have so many great memories here. We come here often because my wife’s family lives here.
And I met my wife here, you know, in broadcasting at NBC. And we got married here. And then together, two years after we got married, we moved to Los Angeles to pursue our voiceover, our broadcast career, her in television as a news writer, and me in radio to pay the bills, but to really now go after the type of voiceover career that I had hoped to get, and that was in network programs.
So it’s great to be here because this is where it all started for me.
That’s fantastic. I knew some of those stories because I just got done listening to your fantastic audiobook.
Oh, thank you.
Living On Air. I highly recommend you download it because it’s done by Joe himself. Thank you.
And produced by the amazing AJ.
AJ. McKay did all of the audio design on it and it was directed by Maurice Tobias. And I asked Maurice to do it and she agreed to do it and I was so thrilled because I was concerned I’d never done a long form sort of thing before.
And I wanted her to be on me and so that I wouldn’t fall into older habits of promo type work. And I wanted to tell the story and I wanted it to be more of a radio play with sound effects and original music by Greg Chun who did some great original music. And so yeah, it was really fun to do that.
It was a thrill. By the way, I started on my… For those of you who are into microphones and things like that, and by the way, I always say it ain’t about the mic, but I started on the 416 doing the audio book and it was just a little too…
I wouldn’t say harsh, but it wasn’t warm enough for storytelling. So then I switched to a Neumann U87, which I’ve had forever. And I think it came out better and it helped.
I think it’s a warmer sound and it really lends itself to storytelling.
I agree. I’ve done some books on the 416 and sometimes it works, but I found, especially a long form book, it’s fatiguing as a listener.
I think so.
A book Bob Sauer did a couple of years ago and I’m so sorry to tell, I actually told him this and probably wasn’t the best choice of words, but I told him it was fatiguing on my ears and he said, oh, I’ve never had a problem with it before.
And he walked out in a huff.
No, he’s the second nicest guy in voiceover.
He is an awesome guy.
So did Maurice direct you in person or did you do it remotely?
Yeah, no, we did most of it in person and then some of it we did remotely, but most of the time she came to my home studio to do it. And then she was also on the line, AJ is in Kentucky, so she was on the line with AJ when they were doing the selects for that. I mean, it was really kind of a, it was a bigger production than it needed to be, but being the type of, coming from what I come from, radio and wanting to make it sound more like a radio play, I think I needed to do that.
And everybody did such a great job on it. AJ worked endless hours on it. And that was way back in 2013, and we’ve been very good friends ever since.
I’ve heard that.
Have you from AJ?
It never gets old.
We always give AJ a hard time.
I love AJ. I’ve worked with him myself. He did my last demo.
He’s a fantastic producer.
Oh, that’s great.
So back to the conference. Have you been to any sessions yet?
Yeah, I was in this morning for Hugh Edwards’ opening. And you know, I love… I always sit in on sessions.
In fact, as I walk by you, I was just gonna go in and sit.
Oh, I’m sorry.
That’s okay. But I always learn, you know, whenever I come to these conferences. And one of the things I picked up from him, and I’ve heard it before, but it just, you know, it reminded me of, and I was talking to my wife about it when I went back up to the room, in talking about negotiating with a buyer who wants to have something in perpetuity.
And the way that he tells, teaches how to negotiate that, it’s like, okay, you can have it forever, and it’s an evergreen. That’s gonna cost this amount. Let’s say that it’s $2,500.
But if you wanna do a one-year usage for it, it’s gonna cost you $750. If you want two years, it’ll be, you know, $1,500. And he says, I guarantee you, they’ll look at what the evergreen is and say, you know what, I’ll go for the one-year deal.
And that’s the way it should be. And then you calendar it, and after a year, check in with them, go, hey, you know, how’s that video going? And yeah, it’s going well.
Well, let’s talk about year two. Let’s re-up it, you know? Oftentimes they’ll say, you know what, we have new stuff, let’s redo it.
And I just think it’s those kind of things that are the business side of voiceover that is so necessary for people who are coming in and who are already working in voiceover, especially non-union, especially people who don’t have agents that are doing that for them. It’s so important to know the business side of that and how to negotiate.
Yeah, and he broke that down so perfectly. He did. And he gave the concrete example is that you can just walk away from and even just write down what he posted on the projector and be good to go with the negotiation.
Absolutely, yeah, yeah. So that’s the first one I sat in and I plan on doing more throughout the day and I’m doing my promo mini master class later this afternoon with 15 participants.
I’m one of them.
And you’re one of them. Want to get everybody up. I’d love to get everybody up twice.
We’re gonna read the picture. We’re gonna do it as if we’re at the network and actually seeing picture. We’ll do some like we’re on Source Connect, but we’re still reading to the video, which we can’t see the video now and how that changes the read.
And how important it is to have a good director there on site that can tell you what the visuals are. And not to be afraid to ask, by the way, what’s going on here when I say this? So that they can explain it to it.
We’ll do some radio promos, syndicated promos, just kind of an overall of what promo is.
I’m really looking forward to that. So as a conference overall, what do you look to get out of coming to an event like this?
Mostly it’s the interaction with the participants. I mean, it’s always fun to see the coaches, the mentors, the people who are presenting, who are my peers, and getting to see them and hang with them for the weekend. There’s that part of it.
But I think it’s really important to… I don’t want to be the type of person that gets together with the presenters and is like, hey, let’s go over here in the corner and have our own little chat. I want to be out where I encourage anybody who’s participating to come up and ask questions or just let’s have a laugh and get to know one another.
Again, I learned so much from just about every aspect of a conference. And I try to… I think that when people are coming to a conference like this, they’re making a commitment, they’re laying down a good deal of money and carving out time out of their lives, away from their family and all of that.
And I like to dress up a little bit. I like to show respect for the people that are here to learn, that are paying to be here. And that’s my way of showing my respect to them as well.
Well, you’ve always been completely affable, you and Anne both. Even though AJ introduced me to you, I think you would have talked to me anyway.
Of course I would, yes.
We appreciate your generosity of spirit.
Thank you very much.
I appreciate it. Thank you for talking to us today.
My pleasure, all right. I’ll see you in class.
Yes, I will be there, I will be there, Professor.