Voice over Sydney jobs are a great way to make some extra cash. The work is not tremendously labour intensive, and the scheduling is often very flexible. In addition to earning some extra cash, providing voice over services can also put you in a better position to catapult into acting jobs. Finding voice over Sydney studios are offering, however, can be a frustrating process.
Voice Over Sydney: Record a Demo
Any potential voice over jobs that you find will definitely ask you for a demo recording. This is a voice over industry standard practice, so make sure to record one before you go looking for work. If an interested agent asks for your demo, you don’t want to come up empty handed. To record your own demo, try to record yourself reading advertisements that are currently playing on TV or the radio. It is a good idea to pay a voice over sydney recording studio to record the demo for you. It is of critical importance to have your demo sound as professional as possible. If you do a particular dialect well, make sure to include a track on your demo that showcases this unique talent.
Voice Over Sydney: Work through an agency
Work through an agency. Almost all companies fill their open positions for voice over sydney through talent agencies. If you go directly to any large company and request voice over work, they will almost surely turn you away. Send your demos to agents, attend talent fairs with plenty of your demo USBs to hand out, or ask your friends to introduce you to agents that they have connections to.
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Be persistent. Voice over sydney work doesn’t necessarily come easy, but all it takes is one break to hit it big. Keep working to improve your demo and impress talent agencies. Even if you don’t get accepted by a talent agency at first, ask why your demo didn’t fit their needs and if they have any suggestions for improving it. These questions can be embarrassing to ask at first, but you will get used to it after a few times and the input they give will be invaluable.
Professional versus Amateur Voice over demos
A common question we get is what separates a professional voice over from one that is recorded at home? There are a few basic aspects to this question. Firstly, the equipment that is used in a high-end recording studio is extremely expensive and just sounds much better than home recording gear. Secondly, the recording space is very quiet and acoustically inactive. This means that no unwanted sounds get on the voice over recording. No reverberation occurs in the booth. So the vocal sound that is recorded is very focused and clean. Experience! Professional voice over studios record the voice often and they get very good at capturing the highest quality sound. It takes skill!
What are clients looking for in a voice over demo?
It doesn’t take clients long to decide if the voice is going to be right for them or not. It’s important to nail the first 15 seconds of a voice over recording. This is largely done during the post production process of creating the demo. We suggest starting with a greeting to the listener that doesn’t have anything but the vocal. It might be as simple as “Hi, my name is James and this is my voice over demo. Enjoy!”
Immediately follow this introduction into the produced ads that have the music included. These are the ads that are produced to sound like real TVCs and radio ads. It’s a good idea to move through these very quickly and smoothly. This requires crossfades between the ads. It doesn’t take too long for the listener to get bored so we try and move fast between ads. These are the key points to getting a good demo.
Variation in Demo Approach
There are some different kinds of voice over demos that are worth considering. Firstly, character actors will actively move through a series of ads that all have different sounding ads. These demos demonstrate the various personalities that the voice actor can imitate. Think Robin Williams. Secondly, narrator demos. These are very consistent in the tone and the quality of the voices but just moves through various ads to reiterate the voice tone and style. Lastly, general voice demos. These will vary slightly more than a narrator demo, but nowhere near that of a character actor demo.
Sight Reading ability
People don’t realise that the biggest challenge in doing a voice over job is actually reading the script well. This is something that can’t be auditioned through a voice demo. Some people have incredible sounding voices but they just can’t read a script and make it sound authentic and believable. A professional voice actor has the ability to read a script for the first time and make no mistakes and make it sound like it’s coming from them and from the heart. This is the true test of a voice over artist. It’s worth asking yourself if you can do this before entering the voice over game. It’s important to get it right quickly when a client is paying a lot of money per hour to have the voice recorded.
