Join Voice Over Expert Nancy Wolfson in her lecture "I am Enough". Find out how training and self-discovery will help you to realize that you are enough. Be empowered and banish that fear voice that holds you back! Get some game on, be true to your sound and remain authentic to achieve success.

Download Podcast Episode 68 »

Tags:

Nancy Wolfson, Anna Vocino, Voice Over Demos, Work, Break Into VoiceOver, Voice Overs, Voice Acting

Transcript of I Am Enough : Be Empowered and Banish Fear

[Opening Music]

Julie-Ann Dean: Welcome to Voiceover Experts brought to you by Voices.com, the number one voiceover marketplace. Voiceover Experts brings you tips, pearls of wisdom and techniques from top instructors, authors and performers in the field of voiceover. Join us each week to discover tricks of the trade that will help you to develop your craft and prosper as a career voiceover talent. It's never been easier to learn, perform, and succeed from the privacy of your own home and your own pace. This is truly an education you won't find anywhere else.

This week, Voices.com is pleased to present Nancy Wolfson.

Nancy Wolfson: Today's way of (attacking announcer) and it has to do with attacking that fear voice from the back of your head that had been saying you're not good enough. And that maybe there's somebody who's found that's nicer than yours or whatever.

I have to credit my friend, Richard with helping bring this to so many people. You know, it's this whole notion of "I'm enough". Training and good course of study really helps you feel this if you can't pretend your way into it because sometimes really diligent people really need to feel like they've earned being enough and so not only is there substance in the course of study but really diligent people oftentimes feel that they're only enough when they've really done their homework and they're not comfortable being fakers.

So it is on going to a proper course of study and accomplishing that, sometimes empowers people who really respect academic pursuits to credit themselves with feeling like they're enough. But I would if I could tell your fear voice could get out of there because you are enough. It's more than a pep talk. Although, you know, as long as you're in a state or a process of acting here, anyway, I mean, whether you're acting as a narrator or as the person on the spot, you might have well pretend to act as if you feel confident. That man couldn't hurt but it's more than just a pep talk. It's actually also logical and it comes back to branding.

You see, if you change your branding to be as cool as you think somebody else sounds, that insecurity bleeds through. But also, what if they would have liked your true sound? You know, what a missed opportunity that would have been. It's you and you have to be the one who can do you the best. Nobody else can bring your styling, your sound to the party as well as you can.

So why move the target? You have to stay authentic and when you're being authentic, you have to pretend to feel confident about that without worrying that you're not enough or that somebody else's sound or style might be more interesting than yours and you've done your homework, you've deconstructed the copy, you've asked yourself the questions that you know you need to ask yourself in the flow chart of deconstructing the script.

Get some game on and bring some confidence to the party.

Julie-Ann Dean: To learn more about the special guest featured in this Voices.com podcast, visit the Voiceover Experts show notes at Podcasts.Voices.com/VoiceoverExperts. Remember to stay subscribed.

If you're a first time listener, you can subscribe for free to this podcast in the Apple iTunes Podcast Directory or by visiting Podcasts.Voices.com. To start your voiceover career online, go to Voices.com and register for a voice talent membership today.

[Closing Music]

Links from today's show:

Braintracks Audio
Break Into Voiceover

Your Instructor this week:

Voice Over Expert Nancy Wolfson

Nancy Wolfson

Based in Los Angeles, CA Nancy Wolfson is a private voice over consultant and freelance casting director for commercials, animation, narration, and audio books. She writes, produces, and directs demos for her clients and has been the leading coach in the top market(s) over a decade. Her coursework has been accredited at the university level in private and group classes throughout North America and Europe. For over 15 years, she has worked with beginners, working pros, and celebrities as a producer and talent agent.

This podcast is a mini excerpt from Nancy and Anna's Break Into Voice Overs series of MP3s featuring Nancy Wolfson.

Student Testimonial For this Lesson

We often hear the words, "Be yourself."

That is sometimes the most difficult thing to do.

In your ACTING FOR ADVERTISING pt. 3 Teleseminar, you talked about this concept in a way I'd never heard before.

When Nancy asked the question, "What if the REAL you is what the client actually would have wanted... and you were trying to be something else? You'd have missed that opportunity." You've got to realize that 'I am enough.'"

WOW. I think about this every time I hit record.

During those two to three minutes of the teleseminar, I was tearing up.

Don't know if you had anyone specific in mind, but you may as well have been just speaking to me.

That seminar woke ME up again.

Did you enjoy Nancy's episode? Leave a comment with your thoughts!

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Join Voice Over Experts Nancy Wolfson and Anna Vocino from Break Into VoiceOver with discussion from Nancy on the topic of "Top Market Agent: The Platinum (but not the only!) Piston in Your VO Engine". Nancy relates that professional voice talent should aspire to have agency representation at every level in addition to a presence on voice over marketplaces.

Download Podcast Episode 58 »

Tags:

Nancy Wolfson, Anna Vocino, Voice Over Work, Agents, Marketplaces, Break Into VoiceOver, Voice Overs, Voice Acting

Transcript of Top Market Voice Over Agent : The Piston in Your Engine

[Opening Music]

Julie-Ann Dean: Welcome to Voiceover Experts brought to you by Voices.com, the number one voiceover marketplace. Voiceover Experts brings you tips, pearls of wisdom and techniques from top instructors, authors and performers in the field of voiceover. Join us each week to discover tricks of the trade that will help you to develop your craft and prosper as a career voiceover talent. It's never been easier to learn, perform, and succeed from the privacy of your own home and your own pace. This is truly an education you won't find anywhere else.

This week, Voices.com is pleased to present Nancy Wolfson and Anna Vocino.

Nancy Wolfson: It used to be that this engine of your career ran not only in one piston. And that required moving to a major market in getting the LA or the New York or the Chicago talent agent to sign you.

And now, that has become but one piston in the engine. It is the platinum piston in the engine but there are other pistons that you need to have working for you. So ultimately the aggregate is that you've got a major market agent, a small market agent or two or three possibly, I mean, I'm in a sort of a rare situation and then I'm a coach who can actually also send you auditions.

You want to be on Voices.com and the aggregate of all of that is what we'll really constitute in active opportunity center for your career. And possibly the last pursuit of all of that is the major market agent. It is still and will be for quite a long time the platinum piston in your engine but actually, that last piston in the engine, that platinum piston, that major market agent is best and only pursued when you've got a whole lot of work that you've procured for yourself to show them that you're a good person to do business with.

Julie-Ann Dean: To learn more about the special guest featured in this Voices.com podcast, visit the Voiceover Experts show notes at Podcasts.Voices.com/VoiceoverExperts. Remember to stay subscribed.

If you're a first time listener, you can subscribe for free to this podcast in the Apple iTunes Podcast Directory or by visiting Podcasts.Voices.com. To start your voiceover career online, go to Voices.com and register for a voice talent membership today.

[Closing Music]

Links from today's show:

Braintracks Audio
Break Into Voiceover

Your Instructor this week:

Voice Over Experts Nancy Wolfson and Anna Vocino

Nancy Wolfson

Based in Los Angeles, CA Nancy Wolfson is a private voice over consultant and freelance casting director for commercials, animation, narration, and audio books. She writes, produces, and directs demos for her clients and has been the leading coach in the top market(s) over a decade. Her coursework has been accredited at the university level in private and group classes throughout North America and Europe. For over 15 years, she has worked with beginners, working pros, and celebrities as a producer and talent agent.

Anna Vocino

Anna Vocino is an on-camera and voice over actress based in Los Angeles. You can see her work as a series regular on Vh1's improvised comedy series "Free Radio." Anna's voice over work can be heard in "Dawn of War 2," "Splinter Cell: Double Agent," "MTV's Celebrity Death Match," "The Young and The Restless," recent campaigns for Canada Dry, Ford, AT&T, Southern Linc Wireless, and hundreds of narrations for Toyota, Capital One, Saks Fifth Avenue, Adobe, GotVMail, Disney DVDs, and numerous others. Check out Anna's website at www.annavocino.com.

Did you enjoy Nancy and Anna's episode? Leave a comment with your thoughts!

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Join Voice Over Experts Nancy Wolfson and Anna Vocino as they discuss "Voice Over Demo Don'ts", a podcast that identifies common mistakes made in voice over demo production and how you can avoid them. Your demo plays a significant role on game day so make sure your demo is polished and presents a clear portrait of yourself.

Download Podcast Episode 49 »

Tags:

Nancy Wolfson, Anna Vocino, Voice Over Demos, Work, Break Into VoiceOver, Voice Overs, Voice Acting

Transcript of Voice Over Demo Don'ts

[Opening Music]

Julie-Ann Dean: Welcome to Voiceover Experts brought to you by Voices.com, the number one voiceover marketplace. Voiceover Experts brings you tips, pearls of wisdom and techniques from top instructors, authors and performers in the field of voiceover. Join us each week to discover tricks of the trade that will help you to develop your craft and prosper as a career voiceover talent. It's never been easier to learn, perform, and succeed from the privacy of your own home and your own pace. This is truly an education you won't find anywhere else.

This week, Voices.com is pleased to present Nancy Wolfson.

Nancy Wolfson: There are three sources of problem. When I'm hearing problem on a demo, one, problem is not your fault and I say your when I'm talking to talent, not your fault. Poor production quality, you have to have a production team, a writer, producer - I can only speak for myself but in the Braintrack scenario, that would be me. And an engineer who together really know the reality for what real spot sound like.

A lot of times when we produce spots, if it's a TV spot, the music level was kind of high and I often times have my students coming back at me going, "You know, I feel like my voice is a little obscured on that spot. You know, I was listening to the spot with my cousin, mother, husband, boyfriend and they said I can't quite hear you on that spot?" You know what? Ironically, that's not a bad production problem. That actually sounds like a real spot. You don't want to have your voice too far forward underneath the TV spot because that's not how a real TV spot sounds so I can go on for a few days but I'm going to shut up on that about now.

Female: What about - I want to hear some other like dos and don'ts.

Nancy Wolfson: The two other - well, the two other thing ...

Female: A lot of the other, yes ...

Nancy Wolfson: So one possible source of a problem on a bad demo is things that are not your fault, production issues basically written and produced improperly. Another - and it needs to be narrowly branded, a commercial demo that's too versatile, it doesn't paint a clear portrait of who you are and that's not useful. That's not your fault either. That's a producer-writer's issue.

Second issue is kind of rolled in with the third but it's a performance thing. When I hear poor performance things popping up on a demo, I can tell when I'm listening to a demo of somebody who hasn't had proper training because they're doing things that are chapters 4 and 11 in my notebook that I teach people to never do and then I hear it on your demo like which is game day and I think, "Oh my goodness, that person never learned not to do that in their education, the thing above you on the flow chart?"

Solid education should make sure that that stuff is not showing up like in bad performances on your demo. However, everybody gets nervous on game day and things happen but that's why you've got a director there so - oh, I'm at lost but it's one of the things that drives me nuts in terms of performance that's a very elementary thing and it really makes somebody look like a beginner is when I hear the nervousness of their primary reality bleeding through on how they deliver lines in their secondary reality. It's a little obscure and that's sort of something I cover in the education but it's a matter of chuckling on your own lines, once, twice, repeatedly - it's like the biggest thing that makes me cringe because when you're nervous, a lot of times you chuckle self-consciously or sometimes people try to make their performance non-announcery by kind of chuckling their way through a line. All I hear as a former agent and as a judge of performances is, "Wow, that person is nervous." I don't think the girl who is supposed to be talking about 7/11 is nervous. She's confident about her experience at 7/11, this girl you're pretending to be. But I'm hearing Mary-Anne chuckling as she does each line repeatedly and oh my gosh, I hear it over and over like a broken record. That's an acting example. That's an example of some - of an acting mistake that just screams, "I haven't finished all my skills yet because I'm still nervous when I perform."

So that's something that's an acting mistake that should have been fixed back up in education or it should have been cut by the director during the performance because I don't mean to be mean. People get nervous on game day but that's what your director is there to catch.

So usually the problems I hear on demos source out of one of those three bins.

Female: But - and I have to say two, yes, when you're in game day or demo day, it is really important to have a good director. I mean, it's important no matter when you're acting to have a good director. However where - once you do have your own home studio equipment, you are sending auditions from home. You also need to be able to self-direct and you can't self-direct without having learned it correctly in the first place because you're not going to book jobs and again, I come back to that's the point. We all want to book jobs to make money.

Julie-Ann Dean: Thank you for joining us. To learn more about the special guest featured in this Voices.com podcast, visit the Voiceover Experts show notes at Podcasts.Voices.com/VoiceoverExperts. Remember to stay subscribed.

If you're a first time listener, you can subscribe for free to this podcast in the Apple iTunes Podcast Directory or by visiting Podcasts.Voices.com. To start your voiceover career online, go to Voices.com and register for a voice talent membership today.

[Closing Music]

Links from today's show:

Braintracks Audio
Break Into Voiceover

Your Instructor this week:

Voice Over Experts Nancy Wolfson and Anna Vocino

Nancy Wolfson

Based in Los Angeles, CA Nancy Wolfson is a private voice over consultant and freelance casting director for commercials, animation, narration, and audio books. She writes, produces, and directs demos for her clients and has been the leading coach in the top market(s) over a decade. Her coursework has been accredited at the university level in private and group classes throughout North America and Europe. For over 15 years, she has worked with beginners, working pros, and celebrities as a producer and talent agent.

Anna Vocino

Anna Vocino is an on-camera and voice over actress based in Los Angeles. You can see her work as a series regular on Vh1's improvised comedy series "Free Radio." Anna's voice over work can be heard in "Dawn of War 2," "Splinter Cell: Double Agent," "MTV's Celebrity Death Match," "The Young and The Restless," recent campaigns for Canada Dry, Ford, AT&T, Southern Linc Wireless, and hundreds of narrations for Toyota, Capital One, Saks Fifth Avenue, Adobe, GotVMail, Disney DVDs, and numerous others. Check out Anna's website at www.annavocino.com.

This podcast is a mini excerpt from Nancy and Anna's best selling mp3, "YOUR VOICE OVER BUSINESS."

Student Testimonials

The full Your Voiceover Business teleseminar is a gem and a must-have for anyone approaching VO at this moment in history.

Just the hard fact up front that you should be prepared to invest $3,000 to $5,000 is sobering and puts it all into the right context.

Your timeline/flowchart is priceless and keeps a student on course.

Being told that "getting an agent" is not the be-all, end-all goal is enlightening.

And the whole concept of branding and how you casting people think was a real "a ha" for me as an actor.
Your Meryl Streep example is one I always quote -- she can DO or ACT anything, but you wouldn't just automatically CHOOSE her as "Little Miss Annoying" in the animated series you just cast; instead you'd cast the person who IS Little Miss Annoying in her sleep and not the person who CAN do it.

--J.G.

When you talk about how you need to create a business plan and how you need to invest in your business to be able to reap the benefits of your business...that whole thing was really eye opening...

--A. K.

The first teleseminar I listened in on was the first time I realized how important branding and overall image are to a business such as voice over. You both critiqued my demo as well as a few others, and it really opened my eyes!

That was the teleseminar that made me want to study with you, Nancy. I just had to learn more after that!

--K. E.

I recommend every student buy the teleseminar before their private lesson!

--M. W.

Did you enjoy Nancy and Anna's episode? Leave a comment with your thoughts!

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