Vox Talk

VOX Talk PODCAST: EPISODE 2

Podcast Description:

VOX Talk is your connection to the voice industry covering news about voice-overs and voice actors, hot tips on how to grow your voice-over business, technology, and Q&A with the experts at Voices.com.

Salutation:

Welcome to VOX Talk, brought to you by Voices.com. My name is Stephanie Ciccarelli, co-founder of Voices.com and your host for today’s show. VOX Talk is about you! It’s a new podcast that helps you grow in your voiceover career. Each episode will begin with news and current voice-over events in a segment called “The Loop”. Then, we’ll explore business development and hot trends that will set you apart as a professional voice actor. Next on the list is Tech Talk, a segment where our team will review products and guide you through the technological landscape. Lastly, we’ll answer your questions in a segment called “VoxBox”.

Now that we’re ready to go, let’s move on to our first segment!

The Loop:

News #1

Radio is 100 years old

Once upon a time, someone had a brilliant idea. The date was Christmas Eve, 1906, the man was Reginald Fessenden, and his idea included transmitting his voice and the singing of a Christmas carol to ships in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. By doing so, he gave the world what is considered to be the first radio broadcast. Truth be known, Reginald, a Canadian citizen, had transmitted history's first wireless voice transmission in 1900 while he was under contract with the Weather Bureau. Later that year, he would go on his own, proving his theory on December 23rd from an island in the Potomac River.

At the time of his death, Reginald Fessenden, had over 500 patents to his credit.

News #2

In other news, Rodney Saulsberry, author of "You can bank on your voice" and the voice of television promos and numerous movie trailers such as, How Stella Got Her Groove Back, Finding Forrester, Tupac Resurrection, Friday and Dumb & Dumberer is teaching a 6-week Promo and Trailer teleclass on Thursday evenings starting on January 11th through February 15th 2007.
Seating for this teleclass is limited to 12 participants on a first come first served basis.

The VOX Daily Book Club will also be kicking off the New Year by reading and discussing Rodney’s best-selling book “You Can Bank on Your Voice”.

For more information about Rodney Saulsberry’s Promo and Trailer teleclass, visit VOX Daily at blogs.voices.com/voxdaily/

News #3

Our last story is about technological advancements at Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth the second is now a podcaster! In conjunction with the BBC, all of Queen Elizabeth’s speeches are now being podcasted as well as delivered through broadcast mediums. Queen Elizabeth recorded her official Christmas message earlier last December as a podcast, ensuring that avid listeners and royal admirers would be able to subscribe ahead of time to receive the MP3 message as it happened in tandem with the live broadcast scheduled for Christmas Day.

If you have any news or a voice-over related event that you would like to submit, send them to media@voices.com.

The Biz:

This week in The Biz, we’ll be looking at how you can turn a non-union voiceover job into a union voiceover job, courtesy of Avi Melman and Pat Fraley.

In his holiday podcast, Avi Melman interviewed the illustrious Pat Fraley, voice actor, author, guru and all-around great guy.

While I was listening to the podcast, something struck me. I'd never heard of this before, but upon closer examination, it makes absolutely perfect sense.

If someone offers you a job and states that it is 'non-union', you as a union talent can still take that job by following a simple formula deemed kosher by the union.

For instance, Pat is a union player. A client offered him a job to voice a talking parrot. The job itself looked like it could cost about $500 to do, perhaps less.

Pat quoted $1000 and the client was quite agreeable, but insisted that the job he was offering to Pat was still non-union. No problem, says Mr. Fraley. And why was it not a problem for Pat?

Because Pat knows how to turn a non-union job into a union job.

Here's how you can do it too:

By union ruling, you can turn a non-union job into a union job by taking the fee appropriate to a payroll company who tells you how much it's going to cost. This payroll company acts as a union signator, doing all of the paperwork for you, which in turn greatly simplifies matters for your client. The job is thus unionized. The union gets paid, the agent gets paid, medicare gets paid, and so forth.

Rule of thumb: The fee needs to be 40% more than the AFTRA or SAG minimum for this formula to work. In other words, non-union jobs that pay lower may not qualify to be 'turned' into union jobs.

For links to the article and to the AFTRA and SAG rates, visit blogs.voices.com/voxtalk.

Tech Talk:

This week in Tech Talk, we’ll talk about watermarks.

A watermark is essentially a snippet of sound used to protect custom voice recordings in an audition situation or when asked directly to record a custom sample of a script.

It could be a recorded beep, bell, or tone that briefly overlaps with your voice, for instance occurring in the middle of a word or name in an audio recording.

At Voices.com we advocate the use of watermarks and strongly encourage you to use them to protect your voice samples from theft or misuse to avoid theft or misuse of audition material.

To quote a conversation at VoiceOverTimes, this is how David Houston uses watermarks:

If I decide to add a watermark, I just use a 0.5 second, 1kHz tone placed every few seconds.

A music bed (at a low level) is another option; just make sure you note in your proposal that the audition has, in fact, been watermarked. You can download some sample watermarks here at Voices.com.

What's even more exciting is that we’re currently developing a bank of tried, tested, and true watermarks used by your colleagues in the audio biz. This collection will be a communal bank of royalty-free watermarks, absolutely safe and free for you to use to protect your work.

If you would like to donate a watermark, send me an email, including your MP3 watermark to media@voices.com.

VoxBox:

Welcome to VoxBox! As this is the first show, I’d like to invite you to submit your audio feedback to be included on future VoxBox segments. How do you do that? Simply record your comments or questions and email your MP3 recording to media@voices.com.

Farewell:

Thank you for joining us today. If you just can’t get enough, log on to Voices.com for more information about how our service works and how we can serve you.