🎙️The Voice Actors calling card AKA the "Demo Reel".

In the pervious blog post from The VO Daddy, I shared my experience on getting started in Voice Acting such as taking acting lessons, workshops, purchasing online content from reputable industry pros, and lower cost alternatives like participating in workout groups or getting involved in some local theater.

That's how I did it, and yet it might not be how others have done it for themselves in the past but this is what worked for me.

Besides, the cliche "It's not what you know, it's who you know" is reasonably accurate.

Now, when it comes to learning how to do something you're passionate about, you'll explore creative ways to achieve the goals you set for yourself no matter what you choose to accomplish in life.

That said, let's imagine for a moment that you've taken your fair share of workshops, and the idea of participating in another scene study class isn't your idea of good way to kill a Tuesday evening.

Perhaps you've hit your saturation level with performing in local theater and the workout groups are booked out too far in advance for you to consider.

Maybe it's time for you to take a good old fashioned leap of faith and step up to the next level in your Voice Acting career like I did.

As I mentioned before, I attended the TVI Actors Studio many years ago.

My first introduction in the various genres of voiceover was a little lack luster.

I went in with all the confidence my former twenty-six-year-old self had at the time, and left feeling like this might not have been the right career path for me after all.

I mean what the hell, I've been told by my friends and family, as well as random people on the streets throughout my entire post pubescent life that "You should be on the radio" or "You sound like someone I've heard on a commercial" or "Hey, do you do audio books?".

Eventually things changed for me when I attended the TVI Actors Studio in Sherman Oaks California... for the second time.

The first instructor I had at TVI was a guy who had been a working voice actor for quite some time. I don't recall his name, and I don't think he was very impressed with me as I certainly didn't blow him away with any special performances behind the mic.

Many years later I began to consider the idea that perhaps he was an out of work voice actor who needed a gig for those "in between times". It happens.

But not impressing someone in the industry that I wanted to a part of was a struggle for me to deal with for a short while. I was used to random people commenting on how great my voice was/is and was starting to believe it myself.

So, I took a little hiatus.

That's professional VO actor speak for us professional VO actors which means to take a break.

In reality, it means you're unemployed until the next booking.

But since I wasn't making any money to begin with, we'll just simply call it a respite between knowledge deposits or something like that.

Now, my SECOND shot at trying to impress an industry someone about how "Amazing" I am, or how "great my voice is" or "Do you...", you get the idea, went better than I had anticipated because Laurel van der Linde, who lead the TVI voice acting workshop this time around, approached me after the six week course and asked me if I would be interested in becoming one of her regular students outside of the TVI Actor Studio.

The class sizes were smaller compared to the TVI Actor Studio classes, which meant more time behind the microphone, and I liked that idea.

I might have had doubts if it hadn't been for one little detail.

Laurel didn't ask or invite any one of the other 8 to 10 students at TVI that I'm aware of.

I certainly didn't recognize anyone of her regular students as being recruited from TVI either when we gathered for our first studio workshop session.

With Laurel, the classes were four to six students, and I don't think we ever went above eight students total for a single session at the recording studio on Gower St. in Los Angels.

The last part of that sentence sounds so fancy.

Anyway, this time, dammit, I'm gonne be a contender, I'm gonna be a somebody! (IYKYK) For the next two, six-week workshops we focused on Audio Book Narrations while the TVI sessions were more of a broad-spectrum approach to voiceovers which included commercial, animation, audio books and industrial voiceover genres to name a few.

By the time I took Laurel's fourth or fifth, six-week workshop, the focus had shifted to commercials.

If you recall from my first blog post, I mentioned that "Voiceover is a marathon, not a sprint." ~Marc Cashman.

I would say that my initial year or two in voiceover was focusing on workshops exclusively.

After reflecting on those sessions from long ago, I think that Laurels' guidance was to get the students acclimated to being in the booth for longer periods of time in addition to working on any pronunciations or diction issues and testing the individual talent's vocal range while our collective focus was on Audio Book Narrations.

If we could handle the long form stuff, a thirty to sixty second commercial would be a breeze.

Clients who pay for studio booking time like it when VO talent can give them what they want quickly because time is in fact money in this biz.

Once Laurel felt I could manage the time inside the booth without any difficulty, and there were no concerns over my acting ability, Laurel offered to produce my very first voiceover demo reel which I believe was done at The Famous Radio Ranch in Sherman Oaks California.

That was a pretty exciting day for sure. I reached a goal and was soon to be promoting my talent as a professional VO artist to agents and clients!

Now you might be asking yourself, after taking Audio Book and Commercial Voiceover workshops in between doing local theater gigs and working a full time "survival" job, what sort of demo reel would you produce first, the Audio Book or the Commercial demo?

At the time I was told that the most common voiceover demo to work on first is your commercial demo because it gives the Voice Actor the ability to showcase their vocal range with various ten, fifteen, and thirty second spots to fill the desired running time.

Commercial work was also the most common voiceover jobs to audition for when cutting your teeth in this industry. I'm not sure if that holds true for today's voice talent getting their start. I haven't had an in-person commercial audition in a long time now that home studios are more commonplace. That's entirely deep dive topic for another time.

Laurel produced my commercial voiceover demo which had an original running time of two minutes and sixteen seconds. Most of the feedback I received at the time was that the total running time of my commercial VO demo was too long.

The preferred length of run time for a commercial demo should be in the one minute and thirty second, or less, ballpark but not shorter than sixty seconds.

Over the years I've chopped up my demo and added new content to it once I learned how to edit audio. More on that in future blog post as well.

The studio session at The Famous Radio Ranch was approximately two hours long and we pulled commercial copy from Laurels' library of radio commercials that we had cherry picked during the workshop sessions.

I had some input as to what I enjoyed doing from a performers perspective and she pushed me even further with some new commercial sides, also referred to as copy, that I had not seen before the session. I even got to work opposite another voice actor in the vocal booth so that the finnished demo wasn't just me the entire time.

That session resulted in one of my favorite spots, a Wickes Furniture commercial in the style of the classic cartoon "The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show" reminicent of "Fractured Fairy Tails"!