Greetings,
It’s been a minute…Ick, I hate that phrase. I never understood it. A minute is supposed to be a small parcel of time right? So why use it to describe a long period between to occurrences of something? Being “meta” I guess? Nevermind. Anyway, its been a LONG frickin’ time!
I’ve decided to get back at this blogging thing, albeit in small pieces. My friend and tech genius George Whittam mentioned on facebook recently that he was going to stop responding on that platform to requests from new voice actors for information and instead take the answers to his own website. Why give free publicity to one specific platform when you can do it within a space you control? Brilliant right?
Well, never one to shy away from, let’s say “appropriating” a good idea, I’m doing the same thing. From here on out, if I have a good answer to the millions of questions from new voice actors I see on social media every…darn…day, I’m going to post it here.
So here goes. Today on FB, in a group called Voice Over Camp, run by Terry Daniel, an apparently brand new voice over person said “I’m just starting off with being a Voice actor, please be gentle”.
I, of course, wanted to post something incredibly snarky like “Don’t” or “Too Late”. It got me thinking, however, if I were just starting out now, would it be a good idea?
We seem to be almost at a crossroads for the industry. AI threats are EVERYWHERE. It seems like just about each day there is a new company trying to use speech synthesis to put voice actors out of business. Then there is the continuing lowering of cost for equipment. Even some USB mics are passable for pro work IMO. The Blue Yeti X is REALLY good. You may have seen the test I did comparing it to a Sennheiser 415. I fooled some people! At $199 from Best Buy, you can be up and recording the same day! Finally, there are more casting sites than ever. You can literally setup shop the same day and be auditioning for work.
Now the question remains, should you? All that competition and threats to technology make the voice over business more risky than ever in my opinion. When I started 7 years ago, there was no doubt in my mind this was what I was going to do for the rest of my life, come hell or high water. I dove straight in, worked my butt off and eventually became a full time voice actor. Could I still do that now? I’m honestly, not so sure.
I do think that over the long haul there will always be a place for good actors doing good HUMAN voice work. I’d like to think that after 7 years of hard work I fall into that “good” category. Can someone start today, take that same path and come out on in 2029? For the sake of our “just starting off” friend on FB, I certainly hope so.