The business of talk: Voice-over industry takes lots of patience, work

by Jimmy Tomlin

1 day 15 hrs ago | 164 views | 0  |  | 1  |  | 

DON DAVIS JR. | HPE Shirazi Hunter, owner of VoiceTracs studio in High Point, admits he’s in a competitive field.

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Practically overnight, Ted Williams – the Ohio street person with the golden voice – went from homeless and hopeless to limitless. Within days of being discovered, he was showcasing his impressive voice on national networks and recording a commercial for Kraft macaroni and cheese.

But generally, in the voice-over industry, there’s no such thing as an overnight success.

“I think for most people, it’s a long journey,” says Bill Jurney, a former High Pointer who spent four years doing voice-overs for CNN – where he won the industry’s coveted Gold ADDY Award – and now maintains a steady voice-over business in Los Angeles. “It’s building your skills as an actor. It’s reading thousands of audition scripts. You learn something every time, and over time you can develop your craft.”

Shirazi Hunter, owner of VoiceTracs studio in High Point, agrees that it typically takes time to break into the voice-over industry.

“My business has been developing for a few years now,” says Hunter, whose credits include voice-overs for Open Door Ministries and the Triad Health Project. “It’s a very competitive market, so it takes a while to develop some business.”

And contrary to common belief, it takes more than a golden voice to strike gold in voice-overs.

“I think the primary thing is acting,” says Jurney, whose 20-year career in voice-overs has included everything from movie trailers, audio books and commercials to infomercials, corporate videos and even telephone system recordings. “The voice is really secondary. What’s important is being able to convey what the writer of the script wants you to convey. The trend is not toward big voices – the trend is toward acting. Real is what’s really in.”

Again, Hunter agrees.

“As far as voice talent is concerned, you’re more than just an announcer – you’re an actor,” he says. “You have to do different characters. You may be working on a script that requires you to be funny, and if you had to read that script a hundred times, it wouldn’t be funny anymore, but you, the voice talent, still need to make the listeners find it funny.

“Then you may be reading a script the next day that calls for a very serious delivery – say, if you’re doing something for a funeral home – and you need to be very cool and calm and serious. It’s all about being able to interpret the copy and deliver a believable character.”

Jurney, who grew up in High Point, got interested in radio when he was about 14. He used to call football games with local broadcasting legend Max Meeks at A.J. Simeon Stadium, and he worked a number of radio-station jobs as he moved toward what would eventually become a career in voice-overs. Like many voice-over talents, Jurney works primarily from his home, where he has his own studio.

Hunter, who also has a home studio in his attic, got into the business about five years ago, when an instructor at Guilford Technical Community College encouraged him to think about a career in radio.

“I could wake up to your voice in the morning,” Hunter says the woman told him, alluding to his deep, mellow voice.

He’ll graduate this month from the Carolina School of Broadcasting in Charlotte.

“I’m ridiculously passionate about (the voice-over industry) – it’s a thing that consumes you,” Hunter says. “My wife will tell me ‘You need to come to bed,’ because I’ll be up late at night working on a script or reading. That’s how much I love it.”

While Jurney and Hunter are both complimentary of Ted Williams’ golden voice, they were less enthusiastic about his future in the voice-over industry, because he hasn’t paid his dues.

“It takes persistence, acting ability and business skills, too,” Jurney says. “It’s not just about the voice.”

Hunter, alluding to Williams’ substance abuse problems – he just checked into rehab – points out that he’ll need to work through those issues first.

“I’ve been through my own personal experiences, and the only way I’m able to do what I do today is by dealing with those demons,” he says. “We all have to pay our dues. There’s no leapfrogging over it or around it.”

jtomlin@hpe.com | 888-3579

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INTERESTED?

For more information about voice-over artists Bill Jurney and Shirazi Hunter, visit their websites.

Jurney’s website is www.jurneyvoice.com.

Hunter’s website is www.voicetracs.com.

Read more: High Point Enterprise – The business of talk Voice over industry takes lots of patience work

It’s never too late for miracles!!

#12)  Start building a list of places to market your first demo to and add their emails to your database. You are not ready for a voice-over agent until you have booked some work on your own. Unless you have a really unique voice, then maybe an agent will represent you. Hit the pavement with your new demo. Visit production companies, recording studios, casting houses, etc and meet them face-to face. Mailing things will not get you much. In the beginning people will hire you because they met you and because you kept following up by phone, email and hand-written notes.

#13) Don’t join the unions quite yet. You want to do every kind of job you can find to get some experience and build your reel, so for now resist joining the unions. Once you’ve got your voice-over chops you can make that decision.

and #14) Don’t quit your day job! Hmmm, maybe this should have been #1.

#1) Read some good books about the voice-over industry. The website everythingvo.com is a good resource. (If you’re still on-fire about the business then continue)

#2) Decide the voice-over genre you are most excited about. Consider the different genres of voice-overs: (Commercials, Narration, Animation, Video Games, Characters, Talking Toys, Promo, Trailer, Game Show Announcer, Award Show Announcer, Phone Systems, Audio books, etc.) then determine which genre(s) are you most excited about? I believe that “commercials” are a good place for most aspiring voice actors to start. Commercials teach some fundamentals that can be used in every other genre of voice-overs. Narration is a good second choice because most of the work available for beginners is narration. Industrials, e-learning, etc. However if you have always practiced character voices ever since childhood and that is all you want to do then I advise starting your training in animation. Two of the best animation coaches are Pat Fraley (patfraley.com) and Bob Bergen (bobbergen.com).

#3) Listen to professional demos. Go to videovoicebank.net and listen to voice-over artist demos from LA, New York and Chicago talent agencies. Don’t be intimidated. These are the signed voice-over actors at the various talent agencies around the country. But get an idea of how the different demos in each particular voice-over genre sound.

#4) On-line research different voice-over coaches. Now if you still haven’t wimped out and still want to be in this business then you must have a thick skin and eat rejection for breakfast, then you just might be cut out to be a professional voice actor. So the next step is to compare different voiceover training coaches. A good resource for LA and New York is the website: voiceoverresourceguide.com. Review the names and rates. Look at any display ads and go to their websites. Narrow your search and call the coaches. See what they have to say. See if they take the time to talk with you a little. See if you feel a connection with one of them.

#5) Audit a group class or book one private lesson with each of the coaches you really like. Private sessions can be done in person, by phone or Skype. They should have you read and determine your potential and next course of action. Note: If you have a strong accent or speech impediment I recommend you correct these before voice-over training. There are specialists in accent reduction and speech pathology.

#6) Take a beginner’s group class (from the coach you like the best). The cost should be fairly affordable and this way you get to see what the other actors are doing and you learn by watching and listening to others as well as having your own turn at the mic.

#7) Take an intermediate group class; Preferably with the same coach.

#8) Take some private classes with the same coach.

# 9) Resist making your demo until you are competitive. If and only if your coaches and other people you trust are telling you that you are ready to make your first demo, then find a demo producer that you like. Use the same process you used to find a coach. (A great coach is not necessarily a great demo producer). Listen to samples of demos that they have produced. Compare prices. I think for your first demo you should be in the studio with your demo producer and not recording with them remotely. That might be ok for future demos.

#10) Begin the demo process. This should include some private sessions with your demo producer to help find the type of scripts that will work for you. The demo producer may choose different scripts and probably will not have you see them before the day of recording your demo. Get some good sleep the night before your demo day. Bring a green apple to your session. That will help remove stickiness that causes mouth noises.

My High School principal Mr. Andrews got me to be the PA announcer for basketball games and introduced me to the town’s popular morning radio host Max Meeks. Max invited me to be his sidekick PA announcer for all the high school football games. I spent the next year studying and taking my FCC 3^rd Class radio-telephone license and making my first reel to reel air check tapes with Scott McCarthy, a local music and radio deejay who had befriended me. I sent dubs of those tapes out with a cover letter to the stations in my area and got a call from WKZL FM 107 in Winston-Salem. They needed an overnight board operator and I was extremely excited! The first night came and I did well on my mixing records and playing the commercials, but I had missed one very important thing; to change the commercial carts at midnight. So I finished my shift and the lady who had hired me came in and yelled at me and fired me on the spot! My dream of being on the radio was dashed. I drove home that morning crying my eyes out. Later that year in the summer I attended the North Carolina High School Radio-Television Institute for two weeks at UNC-Chapel Hill. It was a great experience and I’m grateful to my parents for supporting my interests. That Fall I landed an overnight radio job in my hometown of High Point at WGLD FM, a beautiful music format station. I would play these large reel to reel tapes of music and in between liners like “WGLD, Golden Music for the Triad. WGLD.” I left my hometown for college at East Carolina University and got a job on a local AM station as a music announcer and recording some of the station’s commercials. That Summer I took a job selling books in Minnesota. The next year got a job at The Elbow Room mixing records. That summer I landed a job back at WKZL at the station that had fired me that first night. I was getting better and I had lost my southern accent. I had a wonderful speech and broadcasting professor at ECU named James Rees. He made a big impact on me in my choice to keep pursuing voice-overs and radio. I continued working for WKZL in the summers and got to attend cool promotional events and concerts. The next year I got an on-camera sportscaster job at the local NBC television station. I did fine but my love was still radio and voice-overs  so and I left the TV station and took a weekend job at WSFL FM in New Bern, NC. At that time the proposed Communications Degree at ECU was not in place by my senior year so I had to transfer to UNC- Greensboro to graduate with a BA in Communications. WMAG (Magic 99.5 FM) hired me as a part-time copywriter and weekend announcer. Their creative director Stan Bernstein helped me learn to write commercial radio copy and I found myself in the production room voicing and creating radio spots. I just loved it! Nido Qubein, a family friend, public speaker and now president of High Point University had me build him a voice-over room and install a reel to reel machine. My first job after college was at a radio station in Georgetown, SC as operations manager and mid-day announcer for WMXX. That lasted about a year and a half and when all the tourists left for the winter I got blown out of the job and ended up back in Raleigh, NC where I took a radio advertising sales job for WLTW Lite FM. My heart was just not in it. I wanted to be back on the on-air and production side of radio so later I was hired at WTRG oldies FM as their continuity director. The creative director there was Rowell Gorman; a whiz in production and voice-overs. There I wrote a lot of the radio copy and assigned production to the announcers. I spent lots of time in the production room voicing commercials and honing my audio engineering and producing skills on the 8 track reel to reel machine. In time some of the local ad agencies asked if they could run automobile commercials that I had voiced on other radio stations in the market. Management was ok with that and I started making my first voice-over talent fees. Then I heard that Michael David McGuire, a Hollywood voice-over coach was coming to Asheville to give a weekend voiceover class. I attended and immediately fell in love with the VO business. This was exactly what I wanted to do! Before I left Raleigh, I acted in some plays at the Raleigh Little Theater and did some on-camera industrial and commercial acting.

I wanted to do voice-overs and radio in a bigger market. My friend and former program director at WKZL Doug Paul had moved to Atlanta to start his own production company and I decided to move to there. I hit the ground running. I landed a part-time radio job at B 98.5FM and started taking my voice-over demo cassettes to everyone I could meet. I got several VO agents and started booking a lot of work. Commercials, narrations, phone systems, etc. One of my agents Donna Summers sent my tape to CNN and they invited me to CNN Center for an audition for a promo. They hired me and that promo won their department a Gold Addy Award. They soon hired me for a daily booth announcer position for CNN Headline News. I made a decent salary and only had to work a few hours each day. I spent the rest of the time marketing myself and doing voice-overs and radio around Atlanta. Around that time the Baha’i National Center in Wilmette, IL started producing a  quarterly video called “The Baha’i Newsreel” and they asked me to be the narrator. After 18 years I still work on their projects. I’m still active in the Baha’i Faith. My parents were Baha’i. My mother was from Iran (actually born near Haifa Israel) and my father was from North Carolina. Scotch-Irish and Persian. I guess that’s where I get my voice from.

I worked at CNN for nearly five years until 1992. One day CNN called me in and said they had decided to make a creative change in announcers and they gave me a two week notice and that was that. They were great to me and I am very fortunate to have worked there. I met Ted Turner and Jane Fonda and was there when the Berlin Wall fell, for Tiananmen Square and the first Gulf War.

I moved to New York City next. I worked as a sales rep for Susan Berkley’s voiceover school, which was downtown on Broadway near where I lived on East 11th Street . I got a handshake deal with TRH voice-over agent Martha Robertson. I also worked with The Peter Beilin Agency, Fifi Oscard and Special Artists Agency. I landed some nice accounts with Ovaltine and Reader’s Digest. I did live sound engineering at the Baha’i Center Auditorium and I joined the unions, both AFTRA and SAG. The voice-over business requires a particular skill set; acting, timing and microphone technique, audio engineering (especially with the advent of home studios), sales and marketing. So everything I had experienced from high school electronics class, to radio and music deejaying, copywriting, producing and selling have all helped me with my voice-over business. I repped audio post production houses in NYC; East Side Audio and later Pomann Sound where I met some of the best audio mixers in the business like Tom Jucarone and Bob Pomann. At these studios I met many top voice talents who were there to record and sometimes I would drink coffee in the lounge and pick their brains about the voice-over business. Jackson Beck was one of them. At that time he was a man old enough to be in a nursing home and still earning a nice living at voice-overs! Why ever retire? My studio manager Jackie Sparks taught me a lot about being professional and working in the studio business. And many of my lunches were spent doing voice-over auditions. In those days most of the Madison Avenue advertising agencies had their own casting departments and I met many of the top voices including legendary voice actor Peter Thomas. He would always walk to his different studio sessions and once I  tagged along. One day when I had a session at RMR Recording he was there and listened to my cassette demo in his portable machine and said “You got a good tape kid.” I was a Toastmaster and gave all the speeches. That helped too; especially with combating stage fright. I think just living in New York is a great experience for any young person, and especially someone in the arts. You learn how to be tough and take rejection. I studied voice-overs with Wendy Dillon; an excellent coach and voice actor herself. She produced one of my commercial demo reels. I also coached voice-over students and produced demos for some of them. My friend Nick Tate was doing very well at that time in Hollywood voicing movie trailers. He is also a Baha’i as is my friend Steve Boergadine. So I eventually followed them to California. Now Nick lives in Australia and Steve lives in China. When I was in New York I took all of the Landmark Education courses which I highly recommend to voice actors, especially “The Landmark Forum.”

In 2001 I followed some of my friends to California. Steve Boergadine and Nick Tate, the voice actors. And my friend Christie Ryan, in San Diego. My first place was in North Hollywood and a good friend came out and helped build me a recording booth. My voice-over buddy Steve was represented by TGI (Talent Group) and he got me in at his agency. Luckily I still had clients from back East that income kept me floating. Then came 9/11. Voice work slowed and the economy started to take a downturn. My agent laid off a bunch of talent including yours truly. I ended up on a friend’s couch and eventually moved to Glendale. Later I moved to Valencia and bought a new 416 microphone and a vocal booth.

I saw Don La Fontaine at a Promax convention and at SAG events and asked him to mentor me. The days of rides in his limo had long passed and he did the brunt of his work from home via ISDN. He passed in 2009 and I got to attend his memorial in Beverly Hills. He was a true talent, a generous mentor and voice-over genius!

Things moved forward. I landed new agents and booked more voice jobs, including a national radio for Farmer’s Insurance that netted me $23,000.00. Wow, when you book national union commercials, you never know what they can become.

While in LA I have studied with Marice Tobias, Joyce Castellanos, Lori Tritel and Marc Cashman and am currently in a weekly workout group. There are many more classes that I want to take. I want to work with Marice more and take an audio book class with Pat Fraley, Peter Rofe and Nancy Wolfson. Eventualy I’d like to study animation with Pat Fraley and Bob Bergen and take some of Jim Alburger and Penny Abshire’s weekend classes in San Diego. I have bread and butter clients (Local Cable TV) that I get on my own from referrals all the way up to national TV and radio spots and Theatrical Trailers and Promos. I run all these through my agents. (And I love my agents!) I have a great home studio with a Sennheiser mkh 416 microphone which suites my voice perfectly. I have relationships with local and out of town studios that I can book whenever I need them. Soon I’ll have portable recording gear to do bookings and auditions when I am on the road. I will be working with new coaches and demo producers in the months to come. I have a written business plan and have an accountant, lawyer and other advisers and vendors. I attend voice-over conferences (Voice 2008, 2010) whenever I can and read daily blogs from friends and new contacts in the business. I hope to volunteer some time at the Don LaFontaine Voice-over Lab here in LA. I’ve started recording audio books for the Baha’is. I keep learning new areas of voice-over even after 20 years in the business. So my advice is, don’t ever stop growing. Even when life isn’t perfect you can still achieve victories for your career. I can’t wait to see what the future will bring!

With Don's mic

With fellow VO actors

In a world...

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