The VO Meter Episode 35, Gravy For the Brain

The VO Meter, Measuring Your Voice Over Progress. The VO Meter is brought to you by voiceactorwebsites.com, VocalBoot2Go, podcastdemos.com, Global Voice Acting Academy, and IPDTL. And now, your hosts, Paul Stefano and Sean Daeley.
Hi, everybody, and welcome to Episode 35 of the VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
So today, we’re talking about VO education. We’ve got some excellent gentlemen from Gravy For The Brain joining us in just a few minutes, and that’s going to be Hugh Edwards, Peter Dickson, and J. Michael Collins to talk about some exciting developments that they have over at Gravy For The Brain.
But before that, we’re going to talk about our current events and questionable gear purchases.
Yeah, it’s going to be a great episode. Can’t wait.
Awesome. So first off, as we always do, current events. So what’s going on in your VO world, Paul?
Couple of cool things. My latest audio book is out. It’s called Falls, and it’s a supernatural thriller where Samuel Branch tries to figure out who abducted his friend’s sister and how he can help rescue her with the help of some supernatural friends.
So that was a lot of fun to do. It’s the first in a series, and I’m looking forward to the next. You can find that on Audible or Scribd or Downpour.
Is that how you pronounce that? Scribd. Scribd.
Oh, Scribd? That makes more sense. Scribd.
Or Downpour. Anywhere you can download audio books. Please give that a listen.
I was pretty happy with a coaching session. I did last night, actually, that you hosted with Carol Monda at the GVAA, one of our fine sponsors. I actually did an excerpt from this book, and I wanted to see if the performance that was already out there was a good one based on Carol’s opinion.
She gave me the stamp of approval on my one character voice, so that was pretty cool to hear. And then another thing that’s going on is my youngest son has been on fire lately. He’s had several auditions, and tomorrow he has a live directed session with a client in New York.
About a podcast that he’s doing. So that’s going to be ridiculous. He’s actually done it once before, but it wasn’t this long.
The PC did before. It was a little like 30 second explainer. Now he’s doing sort of an episodic read where he plays a character, and it’s going to be interesting to see how he pulls it off.
So I’m going to be outside the booth with the headphones on and helping to direct him while he’s also being directed via phone patch by the director in New York. So I’m pretty excited to see how that turns out.
Man, that’s incredible. You must be super proud.
Yeah, well, not yet. We’ll see how it goes tomorrow.
Not yet, yeah. Well, super nervous, and then hopefully super proud.
Yeah, I’m super proud of him for at least getting the job booked, and it’s going to be fun to have that happen tomorrow. And the last thing I want to mention is a couple of e-learning gigs I picked up. So we talked about this before, but there’s definitely peaks and valleys in this industry.
I got to tell you, I was feeling pretty down in the beginning of this year because there wasn’t a whole lot going on. Just weeks on end with me finding no work at all coming in the inbox. And this past couple of weeks, I’ve started to pick up the e-learning again, which is a welcome surprise.
So some are repeat clients, some are new, and some are clients I have talked to over a year ago that have contacted me again for another job. So it just goes to show if you’re patient and you’re good and you know what you’re doing and you’ve done your marketing, those things will come back to you in spades if you look out for it. So that pretty much wraps up what’s going on with me.
What’s happening with you, Mr. Daeley?
Well, the same monthly grind, keeping my repeat e-learning clients happy. Got some lucrative auditions, no major projects that I can talk about yet, but I’m still staying positive. We’ve got some huge changes coming over to GVAA, to Global Voice Acting Academy right now.
We’re actually kind of doing a bit of an overhaul over our membership program. We’re kind of changing the benefits that are offered with each tier because we realized we didn’t have sort of a recorded content package for people who might not have either the budget or the schedule to get regular coaching. So we wanted to provide a membership called our VO Basic membership.
It’s going to be released sometime next month in March, where it’s all of our recorded content, like everything from… because we record all of our coach-led workouts, our peer-led workouts, our elevation Q&A webinars. So literally hundreds and hundreds of hours of just performance feedback, of industry questions being answered by industry professionals.
And I’m really excited about that. And on top of that, we kind of just honed our other membership tiers and tried to make them a little bit more affordable and kind of pack as much value into each one as we can. So we’re really excited about that.
Like I said, it should be launched sometime during mid-March around that time. Definitely before VO Atlanta. And if you guys are actually going to be at VO Atlanta, we will be presenting in the exhibit hall.
So you should definitely come and say hi. And if you’ve never heard of us or you want to learn more about us, come bring us your questions. We’d love to talk with you.
All right, cool. Excellent stuff. Looking forward to that.
Anything else going on?
Yeah, actually, I’m really excited because every March in Seattle, it’s our Emerald City Comic Con. And this is actually the first year that I got a pro badge as a professional voice talent to actually spend some time interviewing some of the guests that they have there. So they have a huge number of voice acting guests.
I have no idea how I’m going to fit it all in. But they have the entire, or almost the entire cast of Critical Role. Their tagline is basically a bunch of nerdy-ass voice actors playing Dungeons and Dragons.
And so it’s got great people like Matt Mercer, Marisha Ray, Laura Bailey, and Travis Willingham, Taliesin Jaffe, Sam Riegel, and Liam O’Brien are all going to be over in Seattle talking about Critical Role and their individual careers. But on top of that, they also have even more voice talent coming from Will Friedle. He was Terry McGinnis in the Batman Beyond cartoon, as well as Lion-O in the revamped Thundercats cartoon.
Lion-O! Not the original one, but the remake. And then who else do they have?
They have James Arnold Taylor, one of my all-time favorite voice actors, as well as Vanessa Marshall. And they’re going to be talking about some of the recent Star Wars cartoons that have come out. I mean, Rebels, Clone Wars, all that stuff.
So I’m curious. I have some of my own questions planned, but if there are any that you guys are interested in, let me know, and I will definitely try and field those questions for you. So I’m really looking forward to it.
I’m going to take lots of pictures and video and photos and should be a lot of fun.
Cool. We’ll have to play back some of that on the podcast when you get back.
Most definitely.
What are the dates on that?
So that’s going to be March 14th through 17th.
Oh, wow. So you’re backing that. You’re going to that and then going right into Vio Atlanta.
And then Vio Atlanta two weeks later. It’s going to be a crazy month.
Okay. I hope you have a lot of frequent flyer miles. Well, I guess you’ll be driving to Emerald Comic Con, right?
Yeah, that’s not going to be an issue. My girlfriend and I actually got a nice little vacation home just like 10 minutes from the event. So we’re just going to like Uber over there and back.
Wait, got a vacation home? Like an Airbnb or you bought a house? Oh, I…
It’d be nice to buy a house, but no. We just… We rented a vacation home.
Oh, okay. For a second there, I was like, wait a minute. When did you buy a house and move in together?
I should have said that in current events, I guess, but…
Yeah, exactly. Well, cool. We’ll look forward to that in the next couple of months.
Thank you. Yeah.
So we have a brief discussion on questionable gear purchases, right after these words from sponsor Global Voice Acting Academy.
How many times does this happen to you?
You’re listening to the radio when this commercial comes on. Not unlike this one, and this guy starts talking.
Not unlike myself.
Or maybe it’s a woman that starts talking. Not unlike myself. And you think to yourself, geez, I could do that.
Well, mister, well, missy, you just got one step closer to realizing your dream as a voice over artist. Because now there’s Global Voice Acting Academy. All the tools and straight from the hip, honest information you need to get on a fast track to doing this commercial yourself.
Well, not this one exactly. Classes, private coaching, webinars, home studio setup, marketing and branding help, members only benefits like workouts, rate and negotiation advice, practice scripts and more. All without the kind of hype you’re listening to right now.
Go ahead, take our jobs from us. We dare you.
Speak for yourself, buddy.
I like what I do. And you will too when you’re learning your craft at Global Voice Acting Academy. Find us at globalvoiceacademy.com.
Because you like to have fun.
So thank you so much to Global Voice Acting Academy for being a sponsor of this podcast and my employer.
So up next, we have Questionable Gear Purchase.
Yes, and what would the show be without one of us doing something stupid? So I’ll start this time. I bought an Apogee Duet Firewire.
And if you’re a fan of the show, you’ll know this is not the first time I’ve bought this. But I found a good deal on Facebook Marketplace, which I never used before. But I’m actually kind of liking it.
I bought a desk for my son on there, too. And I found this Apogee Duet Firewire, the original, the silver one with the white breakout cable, for 60 bucks. And I just couldn’t resist.
I wanted a backup interface anyway, something that could plug multiple things into, maybe to do the podcast on the road. I had been using the Yamaha AGO6, but I now was using that for my main interface. So I wanted something where I could plug in multiple inputs for the podcast.
So I bought this, and I’m liking it a lot. I’m using it now, and it sounds pretty good. I can’t really complain about the sound at all.
And it has the other added feature, which is the remote monitoring and remote control of the mixer, the Maestro software. So as some of you know, my editing area is outside the booth, and I don’t have control of the interface when I have it out there. So I actually moved the AGO6 in here for a little while.
I swapped the mic cables all out, and then I spilled water all over the booth. Oh no. I managed to avoid the interface, but it scared the bejesus out of me enough that I said, okay, I’m gonna get this out of here because I know I’m gonna spill something else in here.
And that’s probably a good idea. But then I couldn’t control the headphone monitoring, I couldn’t control the mic inputs when I was doing that. So I swapped it back out and put the duet back out at the editing bay, and I can control the volume inside the booth.
So that was my crazy reason for doing it. But like I said, it sounds good. And in the process, I actually may have stumbled on a new way to find work because I inquired with…
Buying stuff from engineers.
Right, so I inquired with the person I bought it from. I saw that he had a website that had the word studio in it. I can’t remember what it was called now, and I probably shouldn’t give out anyway because then you all bother the poor guy.
But I noticed it had the word studio in it, and I said, hey, what do you do for a living? And he said, I run an audio production studio. And I was like, oh my goodness, do you know what I do?
And I told him, and he said, awesome, so maybe we can do something. So I found a new way to search for leads. Just buy stuff and then contact the person you’re buying stuff from.
So that’s my story for this episode. Have you done anything crazy, Sean?
Well, I don’t have any questionable gear purchases, but I did want to talk a little bit about travel rigs because I know a lot of voice actors are traveling at this time of year. So mine is, it’s changed over the years, but now it’s fairly simple. So I use the VOMO as my acoustic solution.
I know it is pretty large. I wouldn’t recommend traveling or flying with it because unfortunately most planes have changed like the sizing requirements for true carry ons. And after a few, after checking it a few times, I can tell that as durable as it is, it wasn’t necessarily meant for that.
So, but if you’re just traveling, driving around those kind of trips, it’s absolutely perfect for that. Just leave it in the trunk. But anyways, so on top of that, I have my new mixer face and my 416 and a little desktop stand that I have in that.
And I absolutely love the mixer face because of all the different ways that I can connect it inside the vocal booth if I want to. So I can either have it plugged directly into the 416, I can have it going into a cable if I’m trying to separate it from my computer or something like that. And on top of that, I can either save, or like I can either record directly to the mixer face because it’s got a little SD card in it.
I can even do that in addition to recording to my iPhone or my iPad or my laptop. So I absolutely love how versatile the unit is and as long as it’s charged, I have a whole bunch of different options that I can use it with. So like I said, I often say that my travel rig is probably more sophisticated than most people need, but it gives me the confidence to pretty much record anywhere.
And I don’t have to worry about having a consistent sound. I myself was traveling, I was house sitting for a friend of mine and I was comparing the tracks with my stuff at home. I didn’t notice a difference at all.
It was pretty amazing. And so hopefully that says good things about the VOMO rather than bad things about my studio. But it was really nice knowing that I had that kind of consistent sound that I could rely on.
That’s awesome. Incidentally, I was at the vocal booth to go warehouse yesterday in their offices and they told me they’re coming out with a new version of the VOMO, some new and improved features. I don’t know what they are yet, but Steven Coghill, who I spoke to out there, is pretty excited.
Very, very cool. And the interesting thing about my previous VOMO, so when I got it, it was like their 2.0 version and at one point they actually sent me their updated model, the 3.0 with the acoustic hood and all that, and I didn’t realize, but they didn’t really give me any instruction, so I didn’t know how to attach the acoustic hood to it. But I found out that even my previous model had the appropriate loops and stuff like that on the unit to connect the acoustic hood.
So I thought that was some very forward thinking on Jeff’s part on creating that product. He had a very clear idea of where he wanted to take it. So I thought that was a little bit of added value.
It was cool to know that they were still compatible.
So speaking of Vocal Booth 2 Go, they are one of our fabulous sponsors, and if you’re not familiar with the company, they create patented acoustic blankets that are an effective alternative to expensive soundproofing. They’re often used by vocal and voiceover professionals, engineers and studios as an affordable soundproofing and absorption solution. They make your environment quieter for less.
So thank you very much Vocal Booth 2 Go for being one of our glorious sponsors and one of my favorite portable acoustic solutions. So up next, we have our interview with Gravy For The Brain founder, Hugh Edwards.
Okay, everybody, welcome to the interview portion of The VO Meter. Today, we are pleased to welcome an award-winning voice director and casting director. He has worked on over 200 games, films and television shows, including Harry Potter for Connect, Fallout 3, Elder Scrolls 4 and Oblivion.
He’s also a BAFTA judge, and you know what? He’s also a mean drummer. So please join me in welcoming CEO and founder of Gravy For The Brain and High Score Productions, Hugh Edwards.
Welcome, Hugh.
Hello, how are you all doing?
I’m great. I’m fired up on tons of coffee. How are you?
I’m pretty good. I’m on the diet coke, so I’m getting there as well.
Good.
Wonderful. Well, we wanted to start off, Hugh, by telling us a little bit about how you got to where you are now in being the CEO for Gravy For The Brain and how that got started.
Sure, yeah. Okay, so originally, I mean, my main kind of, I suppose my job title originally is that I’m a voice director, and that’s kind of how I got into this caper. I always had an artistic and theatrical flair when I was younger.
And then I ended up, funnily enough, starting a company with my best friend, a guy called Jeremy Paul Carroll, back in 2002, I believe it was, which was doing music for computer games. And that became very successful, and we did pretty well there. And then this games company came to me, and they said, listen, you do dialogue, right?
And we went, yes. And so we then got given this first dialogue game, which was a snooker game with a UK snooker world champion called Steve Davis. So I went and got some more directorial training and went back to sort of theatrical roots.
And the rest in terms of my voice production and voice direction is kind of history. I did a lot of games in a very short time. I mean, at one point, we were doing sort of 40, 45 games a year, something like that.
It was just a massive, yeah. And on top of that, promos, theater and radio clips, and all the kind of things that go along with voice production, and then moving into corporate, of course, as well. But at the time, my love was gaming.
And then one day, I was actually a producer on a film, a film called Little Big Men. And it was quite a cool film because it was about these five kind of… It was for kids, right?
And it was about these five kind of gangsters who, in a sort of caper-ish, mutley kind of way, ended up getting caught by the Karma police and then shrunk into children. And the funny thing was is that the children kept the voices of the adults. And their kind of goal throughout the film was to get, you know, put back to real size, and the Karma police didn’t want to let them do it.
The long and the short of it is, it was a very low-budget film. And when I say low-budget, I’m not talking kind of Hollywood low-budget like a million. You know, we’re talking sort of five grand.
You know, it was really low. So, we ran out of budget very quickly, and we finally needed to get a voice over done, and we had no money left. So, I called up one of my friends, one of the UK’s best radio drama producers, a guy called Neil Gardner.
And I said, listen, I needed a voice over. Can you help me out? And he said, well, there’s always Peter Dickson, and he’ll kind of do anything.
So, I rang up Peter, and Peter agreed to come and do it. And in actual fact, he paid to work on the project, because he paid his own petrol to our studio. And this was…
I mean, this kind of goes to show Peter’s temperament, that this was at the height of his X Factor career. It was prime time. He was working on absolutely everything, and he seriously didn’t need to do this at all.
But he just came and did it out of the love of doing things like this. So, he came and did the film, and then maybe a month later, I got a game, which was a National Geographic game, and I then kind of gave Peter a role in it as a thank you for doing the other thing for free. And on the way up to that thing, my girlfriend at the time was saying, oh, why don’t you get him to record us a telephone answering machine message, because he’s got such a distinctive voice that…
I mean, your US counterparts may not know it, but in the UK., it’s like a household sort of voice, you know? So we got him to do that, and I thought to myself, well, if I want it and if she wants it, then someone else is going to want it.
So we started up this business, which was called My Ready Voice, which effectively was like a concatenated… I mean, it was like early TTS, I suppose, but it was creating things where it would say, you know, Paul, it’s your birthday, in that kind of way, and the Pauls would all be recorded. Yeah.
That’s a pretty good impersonation, actually.
Yeah.
So, and that kicked off and was amazing, and then within two or three weeks, totally flopped as we realized that the world didn’t want ringtones anymore. But it led us to a liquid lunch, and this liquid lunch was when we were talking about games and game voice and all that kind of stuff. From that lunch, we basically worked out that, at least in the UK at the time, and remember, this is back in now, sort of 2005 or something like that, there were very, very few people doing voice work in gaming.
And, you know, two or three pints later, we set the world to rights about why that was, which was basically that all the people who knew how to do it knew how to do it. And everybody else who didn’t, I was having to train in front of Electronic Arts and Sega and Square Enix and all these people. And so we decided to do something about it, because it was a bit embarrassing, you know, but embarrassing not only for us of having to train people, but also for the voice artists who should know how to do all that work.
But it was in the infancy of gaming, and so we started this workshop. I think the first one was 2006. And that was, although we didn’t know it, that was the beginning of Gravy For The Brain.
So we then decided to do an online version of that in 2008, and that exploded around the world with the Voice Over for Beginners course. And we kind of didn’t really look back from there. And then in 2013, we thought, this has just grown to be a monster.
We’re actually going to have to create a formal business around this. So that’s when we incorporated. And we incorporated then with version one.
And we’ve just released our version five platform a few days ago.
Well, congratulations. It sounds like a well-deserved rise to the top.
Yeah, it’s fantastic. I love that story about Peter, and we’re going to actually talk to him in a future interview. And his attitude is just so down to earth and so great that you’ve probably seen those auditions.
You mentioned people may not know his voice as well in the US., but he’s the equivalent of the audition request or the voice match for Morgan Freeman or Sam Elliott. Every audition I get says, we’d like it to sound like Sam Elliott and Morgan Freeman or some combination thereof.
In the UK., it’s Peter. So I had this audition that I had from an overseas client where it actually was a marketplace, and they said, we’re looking for a Peter Dickson-like voice.
And I actually got on there sort of tongue in cheek and said, why don’t you just ask Peter? And I said, if you like, I’ll ask him. So I did, and he said, sure, I’d be happy to help.
Just give me the details. And that’s just the kind of attitude he has. It’s really fantastic.
Yeah. And I’ve said this in a few courses as well, that there are some people who think that, you know, that’s the kind of people who say, you know, I’m not getting out of bed for less than $300 an hour, you know. But Peter’s a living proof of the fact that putting yourself in the position where luck can happen to you is really important.
And he didn’t need to do it. He had easily enough money. He had the fame.
He had the big Saturday night TV shows. But he came and did that thing just for the fun of it. And it led to something else.
And I often think that people say to me, God, you’re so lucky being in the position you’re in. It’s like, well, yes, we are. But we’ve also put a lot of hard work into it.
And we’ve also put ourselves into the position where luck can happen. And it’s a nice trait for people to have.
Right. So you talked about the beginner course on Gravy For The Brain that was so successful to begin with. Talk about some of the specialties you have now in helping people train to be a voice actor.
Yeah. I mean, our aim, really, with Gravy For The Brain has always been to provide everything. Now, I know a lot of people say that, but we’ve really kind of done our level best to make it happen.
So we have 16 different voice over courses, ranging from the core ones, like Voice Over For Beginners, Advanced Voice Over to Professional Standard, all the way through to things like creating your own amazing demo reels, or at least prepping for working with a good director, improving your casting chances, how to do commercials, how to do gaming. The list is up to 16, and there’s a lot in there. We still have more to do.
There are still four topics that we’re going to be working on this year. But the main courses are there. And then we do webinars, which are effectively kind of like, I suppose, lecture-based webinars with a Q&A on them.
And the idea of Gravy For The Brain is that… And this is not to be negative about any other training companies, but what we wanted to do was bring the cost right down so that it’s affordable to everybody. So rather than have the model where you pay for one course and then you go and pay for another course and then you pay for another course, the idea was that whilst you’re a member, you get everything and nothing is upsold and nothing is charged.
And I suppose one of the main reasons that was happening is that we also have a mentoring area. And one of the things I found very early on was that people would have a specific problem and I knew that Webinar X or Course Y would solve that for them and was a 15-hour course and so I wasn’t going to tell them everything in that 15 hours. So I would kind of say to them, well, you can fix this by going and take Course Y or whatever it may be, but I always felt uncomfortable with it, the upselling thing, it never sat with me.
So making it all accessible to everybody was a good thing. So then, as I said, we have the mentoring area, and that comes twofold. We have a day-to-day forum-based mentoring, and we employ mentors and ourselves to stay on top of that.
So whether that’s for voice artist clips or whether it’s for home studio or business marketing and branding, there’s always someone there to come and talk to you about that. And then we have a live mentoring-based thing where we all jump on Zoom once a week and we do various different things. Sometimes we’ll go through home studio and tech stuff.
Sometimes we’ll go through a general Q&A. Sometimes we’ll get a load of scripts and everyone will go and read through them. So it’s very kind of empowering for people and it also helps them in public and with their confidence and that kind of thing.
And then we have just a huge array of tools. I mean, really a lot of tools. Things like we’ve just released an escrow service, which would hopefully help people be able to charge clients they’re either not sure of or for high-paying jobs or non-paying clients or whatever.
We have the VOID, which stands for Voice Over Internet Database. And I should say one of the things…
Also describes my career.
One of the things that the degree of success that Gravy For The Brain has had is that it allows us to go and do cool things for the community and not charge them. So the VOID is completely free. It’s void.gravyforthebrain.com.
And it’s basically a completely open online database of all production companies, agents, conferences, resource companies, software companies. Anything that’s to do with Voice Over, it’s all in there. And what we don’t have in there…
I think we’ve got like 1800 companies in there so far. And anyone can add companies to it, and we then moderate them. Which means the database is going to grow, and it’s all free.
So if you want to go and look up agents in Australia, and go and get yourself all the agents in Australia, you can go and do that. Or if you want to narrow it down to agents in Iowa, then you can go and do that. And it’s all completely free for everybody.
So we have all that. We’ve got all these resources. And then the main thing that happened with Version 5 is that we’ve decided that…
Well, I think we’ve seen since more than decided that actually we as a UK-based company… I know a lot about casting and direction and Peter about voicing, but it is, to be fair, UK-centric. So there were some people in America who have been very gracious to us and who’ve really accepted us.
And there are some who perhaps rightly think, well, there are things you don’t know about the USA. And that goes all the way around the world. You know, France, for example, has a completely different structure and setup and rates and unions than anywhere else in the world.
In fact, they actually have university courses designed for voiceover. So all the regions around the world are totally different, and we’ve decided basically to go and localize into all of these countries. So J.
Michael Collins is our territory controller for the USA. Then for Spanish-speaking Latin America, we have Sophia Cruz and Rona Fletcher. And for France, we have a guy called Stephane Cournacard.
And basically, the content is going to be completely localized into each area, but the great bit about it is that anyone who’s a member can go and access any part of content from anywhere around the world, and that’s all included in the same membership price. Plus, we’re doing good things like having a rate guide for every single country, which we’re going to database. So I mean, our goal is to help people as much as we can.
You know, in the early stages of the career, help people and support people as much as we can in the intermediate to advanced stages of the career, and then give people tools for free that should be free that you don’t need to pay for.
Wow, Hugh, I’m a little concerned about your designs on world domination.
No, I’m just kidding.
I mean, I suppose like Gandalf said, you know, I wield this power with a desire to do good.
Well, thank you so much, Hugh. I mean, it sounds like such a fully featured, well-rounded service that would be useful for VO talent at any stage of their career. So thank you very much for creating it and building it into what it is today.
So do you have… I know you just released the latest version, but do you have any plans for the future right now? Any ideas?
Well, do you know, someone said to me on the launch webinar, when’s V6 coming out? And it literally took us a year and a half to build V5, and I think it was 14 people we had in total to build it. It’s a pretty big monster.
I know exactly what V6 is going to be, but I’m afraid I’m not going to tell you.
Oh, okay, okay.
I mean, what I will do is I’ll say that we have incremental things coming out. So I mentioned the other four courses that we’re going to be bringing out. With the kind of globalization around the world, our aim is to get to 25 different territories within five years.
And in the background, we’ve already signed another five of those. So by the end of this year, I would hope that we’re on sort of nine to ten territories around the world. And yeah, I mean, there are lots of little things we’re going to be doing, things in the CRM, like linking the CRM up to Mailchimp and just little incremental things that are going to help everybody.
But V6 itself, that one is… Well, that’s going to be something else, so I’m not going to spoil the surprise for that one, because I mean, with some of these things, I mean, things like the Void, I mean, that was not something that existed anywhere, so we had to make sure we could do it and that it would work functionally and be accessible to everybody so that it would work the way it should do. Otherwise, it’s kind of not worth doing, you know?
So, Hugh, we know that from seeing you at various events and functions, we just spent time with you at MAVO in 2018, you were really a subject matter expert when it comes to all things voiceover, so we thought we could talk a little bit about some of the issues that affect voice actors all around the world, and one of those that we hear a lot about is rates, and you actually spoke about this at MAVO in your opening address. What are some of the challenges you see in the rates discussion for voiceover people and voice actors around the world?
Well, rates is kind of a hot topic, right? It’s been a hot topic for, I guess, over two years now. The thing is that we live now in a status quo, but the status quo is moving, so we have pay-to-play sites, and some of them are good, some of them are bad.
Some of them are doing active things to try and stop the race to the bottom. Some of them are actively trying to be at the bottom. And this, I mean, as far as I’m concerned, this is capitalism, you know, so this is always going to exist in some way or another because people take opportunity and they run with it.
I think the issue for the voice industry as a whole is really one of education because I think the people coming into the industry don’t understand why the rates are set, what is in their minds, so high. You know, they come from jobs which are, you know, paying maybe not minimum wage, but, you know, $20, $25 an hour or $30 an hour, and then they look at an hourly rate from the voice over industry at $300, $350 an hour, and they think, well, that’s just amazing, and actually I’m quite comfortable undercutting you at $150 an hour, but they don’t see what’s behind the figure and why they’re kind of set the way they are and why they’ve always been that way. So I think it really is a case of education.
The rate guides are definitely helping, you know, whether you use ours, whether you use GVAAs, it doesn’t really matter, as long as you’re basing it on something and well-educated. And after that, I believe that people have their own choice to do what they want. So, you know, if they want to go on Fiverr or cheap voice over beers or whatever it may be, as long as they go in with their eyes open and they know what the score is, then, you know, then that’s fine.
They can do what they want. So, but then the second issue is one from the business side. And what a lot of the pay-to-plays aren’t doing, and in some facts, the agents aren’t doing either, is actually educating the hirers.
And that’s really important because I think, you know, if you do a Google search for voice over and go down to the bottom of, you know, page one or whatever it may be, you’re going to find cheaper alternatives as well. And there’s always, you know, the guy in the office who can do it or who says he can do it or whatever it may be. So again, it’s about educating the industry people, the industry hirers to see why it matters to have someone who’s, you know, an expert in their field in the same way that, you know, a carpenter would be versus some total amateur putting up a shelf, or why the system is based the way it does and how the quality is going to affect the perception of their brand.
So it’s a tough argument to have either way, I think. And, I mean, I don’t know about the states, but price fixing is illegal here in the UK. So it’s a difficult subject matter.
The one thing I do think doesn’t help is the people who do the whole posting of, you know, I can’t believe this, look at this, it’s a national spot for $80.
The browbeater, basically.
Exactly. And it just brings everybody down. And what they don’t realize for themselves is that everybody’s watching, you know, and it’s always the same people who do it, and I personally see them as very negative and wouldn’t want to hire someone like that because they’re probably going to badmouth me somewhere down the road for something I’ve done, you know, or whatever it might be.
So I think as long as it’s done constructively, and you know, I mean, all the conferences are doing good things, they’re all putting up rates, discussions. Wovo’s doing a good job pointing to all the rate guides. Most of the education companies, ourselves, GVAA, we’re all doing good things about rates.
So I think it’s stabilizing and it’s moving. And as long as we accept the fact that everything is going to change and that, you know, this time in two years’ time it will be a different industry again, then we’ll all be okay.
Wonderful. Well, I hope your predictions come true for the most part, like cautiously optimistic. Well, thank you so much, Hugh, for joining us today.
I learned so much about you and your wonderful company, and we’d love to have you back another time.
I’d love to come, Sean, thank you.
So Hugh, you mentioned conferences. You yourself are part of a conference that takes place in the UK for voice acting and voiceover industry. Tell us about the One Voice Conference.
Well, the One Voice is… Well, there are actually two conferences in the UK. One is One Voice Conference, and one that’s been running a lot longer, which is the VOX Conference.
As it turns out, as of last year, we now run both of them, but they’re different things. VOX is for the local radio industry, and One Voice is an entire voice-over industry-based thing. In the UK, the One Voice Conference is by far the biggest.
And actually, in terms of the number of people who attend, I think it’s around sort of 300-ish. We’re going for 350 this year. It’s the second biggest in the world after VO Atlanta.
And I don’t mind saying that VO Atlanta is a really special conference, and we kind of modelled it on the same ideas, because it’s just so good. And so, One Voice itself is a UK version of a really good conference model. We have an awards ceremony in there, which is different.
By the time this is released, the One Voice Conference awards will have been… The submissions will be open, and so you can enter. There’s also an international male and female category this year.
And we’d just love to see people there. We really make sure we pay attention to the amount of good quality speakers we have there. For example, the keynote speaker is a guy called Hugh Bonneville, who’s a very famous British actor, and you’d probably recognize him from the Paddington films and from Downton Abbey.
He’s the Lord of that… Lord Grantham in that. So we’re going for a very high caliber level of people.
What’s also really lovely about it is the position of it. It’s right on the Thames, just opposite Canary Wharf, and it has its own pier and its own boat ferry, which takes you across every morning, which is special.
That’s great. Well, hopefully some of our audience will be able to attend. I’ve actually talked to a few people that are attending, and that should be exciting for them.
I’m not sure I’ll be able to make the trip across the pond this time, but it is one of my bucket list items for sure.
Next year.
Yeah. Well, Hugh, thanks again. Is there anything you’d like our audience to know that we haven’t covered or how they can reach you if they want to sign up for a membership?
Sure. Just go to gravyforthebrain.com, and you can either take… We’ve got lots of free stuff on the front page.
There’s lots of free webinars you can go and take without being a member. As I said, there’s lots of free content on there that you don’t have to be a member to get. For example, the escrow service is free.
The void is free. Our calculators and our rate guides are all free. There’s even a little intercom button at the bottom right where you can get directly through to Harry, who’s our support guy.
Oh, I love Harry.
And actually, I have an offer for your listeners, which would be, let’s say, Podcast 2019. And that will give you a little discount if you pop that on there as well.
So type in that code, Podcast2019, and they can get a discount?
Yeah, exactly.
That’s great. Well, thanks again, Hugh. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon for you, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Thank you, gents.
As a voice talent, you have to have a website. But what a hassle getting someone to do it for you. And when they finally do, they break or don’t look right on mobile devices.
They’re not built for marketing and SEO. They’re expensive. You have limited or no control.
And it takes forever to get one built and go live. So what’s the best way to get you online in no time? Go to voiceactorwebsites.com.
Like our name implies, voiceactorwebsites.com just does websites for voice actors. We believe in creating fast, mobile-friendly, responsive, highly functional designs that are easy to read and easy to use. You have full control.
No need to hire someone every time you want to make a change. And our upfront pricing means you know exactly what your costs are ahead of time. You can get your voice over website going for as little as $700.
So if you want your voice actor website without the hassle of complexity and dealing with too many options, go to voiceactorwebsites.com where your VO website shouldn’t be a pain in the you-know-what.
Hi everybody and welcome to our interview portion with the wonderful Peter Dickson. Known to millions simply as Voice Over Man, Peter Dickson is the best known and most sought after voice talent in the UK and arguably the world. So Peter’s voice has been featured on over 30 AAA game titles including Fable and Kinect Sports.
He has voiced over 30,000 TV and radio commercials, been the promo voice on over 60 channels, been the featured voice on over 200 TV shows, and he was the voice of the London 2012 Olympic Games beach volleyball. Please join us in welcoming Gravy For The Brain founder and Voice Over deity, Peter Dickson. How are you doing today, Peter?
Hello, Peter. It’s a marathon just to get to your intro.
I know, I know. I’m exhausted just listening to it. No wonder I’m tired.
Mind you, that’s been a career right there lasting over 40 years, so you’ve compressed it very nicely. Thank you for that wonderful intro.
Right, so you can just stop now.
I wish I could.
Leave some for the rest of us for crying out loud.
Oh, come on.
Well, Peter, thanks so much for joining us this morning or this afternoon for you, this morning for Sean and I. As you are in the UK. And we want to start out by talking about your background as a voice actor.
Tell us a little bit about how you got started in the whole world of voice acting. And then tell us what brought you to founding or helping found Gravy For The Brain.
Okay, good question. A good opening question. What I would say, first of all, is that my love for voice and for all things spoken word goes back to a very early childhood, actually.
When I was about five years old, I remember listening to my father, my father’s radio set or radiogram, as it was known then. This was a rather elegant wooden case to fair, inside which were impossible-sounding orange-glowing German valves and these wonderful fruity voices that emanated from this radio set. And I, as a young child, remember distinctly sitting at home in my living room in those early days, many years ago, listening to these voices and thinking, wow, this is just a whole different world in there.
Of course, at age five, I naively assumed that people lived inside the radio set. And so I can also remember looking through the grill to see where they were. And imagine my disappointment when I didn’t see anyone.
But that was what sparked my interest in radio. And so radio was my first love. And when I graduated from university, I did a degree in psychology, which has stood me in good stead, actually, working in this industry, because there are quite a few lunatics in this world of ours that we live in.
Nice lunatics, nicely mad. There’s nobody I’ve met, actually, who’s been in any way unpleasant or difficult to deal with. But that aside, I think the degree was useful.
And while I was at university, I also did some work in media for the BBC. I was working part time for them while I was a student. And then when I graduated, I joined the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation full time as a radio reporter.
And then subsequently transferred from journalism into on air announcing. So I was an on air talent. I was reading news bulletins.
I was announcing in between programs. I was introducing record programs and shows. So that was my basic founding in voice, in using my voice.
And after about 10 years when I subsequently went to London, of course this was all in Ireland where I started, then I came to London. I again worked for the BBC for about eight more years in national network radio. It was a fantastic experience.
And I learnt everything I know now, a lot of what I know now from those very formative eight years when I was in my 20s, early 30s. And after I had had enough of that, and I definitely had had enough because I felt I wasn’t learning anything new and I wanted to explore new ways of using my voice in the corporate world and in advertising and in games and all the other things that were exploding around me at that time. It was just at the beginning of the explosion in digital media and the multi-channel environment had just come upon us.
And so I left the BBC to go freelance. One of the scariest things I think I ever did, I was just recently married and had a mortgage and a house and family on the way. And I was just thinking, well, this is a hell of a risk, but boy, I was glad I took it because it was a matter of timing, I guess, as well.
I just hit the rising wave. And I’m not saying it was easy. It was pretty difficult because back then there were a few voices on the circuit, on the market, and they had, from what I could see, stitched it up completely.
And so they were working a marketplace that was virtually shut to everybody else, which I was determined to break down that wall, of course, and managed to do that in small increments. And so, you know, literally 40 years later, I kept pushing and got through the wall, and here I am on the other side. And it’s, you know, I’ve just had the most fortunate career you could imagine.
I’ve enjoyed every second of it. I’ve rambled on very long there. That was a very long sequence.
But I hope it’s put into context, it’s put into context, you know, where I come from and what I do.
But actually, that gives us a great segue, because Hugh actually mentioned your tenacity and your passion for acting being some of your greatest attributes in sort of pursuing that work. Can you think of any other experiences or just kind of attitudes that you have that you felt were helpful for people who want to break into acting or voice acting in general?
Well, it’s, this is one of the reasons why Hugh and I both set up Gravy For The Brain, the online mentoring education platform, because we both felt that not enough was being done in that area for people. There was, there were ad hoc courses here and there. Of course, there are excellent voice coaches.
And I’m sure that, you know, if you ask Hugh, he’ll tell you that, you know, those are all fabulous. And of course, I would encourage people to do one-on-one coaching. But the problem with that is that it’s not always suitable for everybody at the initial stage of their career, or even if they’re just considering dipping their toe into the water to see if they like it.
So because of the financial barrier that that presents, because it is one-to-one coaching is and can be, you know, a relatively costly exercise because you’re engaging in other professionals’ time. And again, not to say that that’s not worth it, but it is worth it when you get to the stage where you need to have it. But in the initial stages, we felt there was a gap in the marketplace for identifying a business that would help people get into voice over and show them all the various components and aspects of it and teach them the basic rudimentary skills and show them what’s required.
And whether or not that’s for them, then they can then make that decision later on down the line, having spent a relatively small sum of money, to then go on to seek one-to-one experience and training and mentoring with other professional people around the world. So that’s why I started it. As for personal attributes, I think you definitely need to have a thick skin, because part of the stock and trade of voice artists, in fact all actors, voice actors as well, is the ability to withstand constructive criticism and rejection.
And believe me, if you can’t take constructive criticism and direction, then this is not the business for you, because every day all of us, and I include myself in this as you do, I’m sure Sean and as you do Paul, we get rejected on a regular almost hourly basis for most things that we do. But it’s more than made up for by the occasional times when the client says yes. So I always say to people, you’ve got to be prepared to be tenacious, you’ve got to be ambitious, you’ve got to have a thick skin, and you’ve got to be creative in your business approach as well.
Many years ago, when I started as a freelancer, I used to sit and wait for the phone to ring. I had an agent back then. I was very fortunate.
I got an agent early on. I thought, well, I’ve made it now. I’m going to sit here and wait for the phone to ring.
You’re laughing now. I can hear why.
We’ve talked about it on the podcast many times.
Yeah, I was disabused. How naive was I? The phone didn’t ring.
It rang very occasionally. I remember on many occasions picking up the phone and ringing my agent to see whether they were still in business, which seemed like a reasonable thing to do. But at the end of the day, no.
You have to make your own opportunities. Your agent is there to support you and to negotiate contracts for you when you get them, and indeed also to put you forward for jobs. But the main bulk of the work, I think, for all independent freelance voice artists must come from yourself.
You have to self-start. You have to self-find work. That work, of course, can be then subsequently handed over to your agent for negotiation, and believe me, that can be very worthwhile, particularly if you’re starting out and you don’t really know the true rate or the worth of the work that you’re being asked to do.
So those are the qualities, I think, that anybody considering a career, or indeed who has just recently embarked on a career, should certainly consider whether or not it’s right for them. So that’s all I would say on that at this point.
Well, you talk about the self-starting entrepreneur attitude people have to have in order to get into the business. One of the great ways they can do that is by accessing Gravy For The Brain. So tell us a little bit about some of the specialties that Gravy For The Brain has to offer to aspiring and even veteran voice actors.
I’m glad you mentioned veteran voice actors, because there is a perception, I think, in our industry that Gravy For The Brain is just for newcomers. It is for newcomers, of course it is for newcomers. As I mentioned earlier, it’s the first port of call for many people considering a career in voice over.
But Gravy For The Brain is so much more than that, as I’m sure you know, having used it and worked with it yourself. It is something that is infinitely useful to people who are already in the business and even to those who have established careers. As I said, part of our ethos is to educate and support and mentor.
And we do all those things in so many ways. We have currently 16 bespoke courses on all the genres that you could possibly want to work in in voice over. We have live mentoring 24-7s, so you can get assistance on any topic or question that you want to ask that’s bothering you or you need answers to.
Either on the creative side, the studio side, or indeed the business side. We have experts and people who will be able to mentor you through those issues. We also have the webinar library.
We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of hours of topics, all independently searchable and relatable, that you can find a topic if you need help on any particular subject pretty quickly. And we also run, as you know, social events throughout the year in the United Kingdom currently, but very soon we will be expanding that social element to the United States, so that’s going to be very exciting for us with J. Michael Collins, who is now working closely with us on the US side, so hopefully you’ll be seeing some social events in the very near future.
I do emphasize sociability in this industry, because it can be very isolating and rather lonely working on your own, as you do day in, day out in your own little space. It’s fun while it is, but when you end up some days not speaking to very many people, it’s rather nice to get out and socialize one-to-one, face-to-face. That face time is very important, not just talking to your own colleagues, of course, but also interacting with potential employers and agents, engineers, people within the business, because it’s in those social interactions, I think.
You mentioned earlier one of the qualities for success. I firmly believe that as a voice artist, your success will increase exponentially. The more parties you go to, the more conferences you attend, the more people you speak to.
Those connections and interactions will lead eventually to more work. And so…
Does time at the bar count towards that?
At the bar, absolutely. I would caution the bar. I would say yes, to a certain extent, but the problem with the bar is that if you…
Promises can be forgotten at the bar.
The next morning you forget everything, you see. So that’s the problem. You can’t remember who you spoke to.
Yes, I’ve had that experience.
Or take business cards. The business cards are great, but then you wake up the next morning and you can’t remember who anybody is, even by looking at the business cards.
Or you can’t remember if they’re still going to talk to you. So I’m glad you’re actually here, because we had a long discussion at Uncle Roy’s, of which very little seeped into my memory banks, but I’m glad you still agreed to come talk to us.
I know. Who are you again? Sorry, I forgot.
Socializing is very important. Absolutely.
Well, I’m really glad that you mentioned that, because I know a lot of voice actors and actors in general are surprisingly introverted types or personalities. So I think it’s really important to realize that even though you might be pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone, that social networking is so important, especially if you are in a place where you do have a lot more local opportunities, like a larger city like LA., New York, or London.
Yeah, absolutely. I would just issue one word of caution about social networking and socializing online is that you will know who the culprits are yourselves in your country, and certainly I know who they are in the United Kingdom, is that there are certain people who will spend their lives on Instagram and on Twitter and various other platforms that they’re endlessly outputting on. The problem with that is, that’s all very well, but you create the impression that you’re not busy, because if you were working in this business to the extent you should be, then you wouldn’t really have the time necessarily to devote to extensive ramblings on social media.
So by all means, do use social media. LinkedIn is very good, Twitter is very good, Instagram is good, but in limited quantities, and keep it relevant and brief and interesting for people. But don’t overwhelm them with endless daily posts about what you’ve had for lunch or where you’re going for your holiday.
Keep it relevant and keep it brief, and keep it minimal, because otherwise you give the impression, you serve the impression to others who are watching you, and some of those people may be your potential employers, that you are what you might call a mouth on a stick, and not particularly busy.
Yes. And keep it positive, right? Be grateful for the industry you work in.
Oh, keep it positive, yes. There’s no room for negativity on social media, or indeed what you might call irony, you know, because irony only works when you can see the whites of the eyes of the other person, or you know them intimately enough to know that what they’ve just said is contrary to their own view. So, you can be misunderstood so easily on social media with a flippant remark, an ironic remark, and it could be misinterpreted and could actually act against you in so many ways.
So, yeah, keep it positive, keep it lovely, keep it nice, and give praise where it’s due to people who you want to work with. And, you know, you can use it in so many positive ways. I don’t see why people need to use it negatively.
Wonderful, absolutely. My philosophy is if it can be misinterpreted, it will be misinterpreted. So keep that in mind.
One of the things that I love about Gravy For The Brain is that throughout the year you actually have a number of contests. So it might be a fun, say, a poetry reading or a tongue twister reading, and they usually have some wonderful prizes involved. So I’d love to learn a little bit more about what started that and other ways that you try to contribute to the VO community.
Well, you’re very, very observant. I’m glad you’ve noticed that. We do like running contests because it engages people’s interest and it also serves a double function of enlarging the footprint on our website.
So we do… We’re self-serving in a way, in that respect, but we are also giving back. We are literally giving some really fantastic prizes like microphones and interfaces to people who win.
So, yeah, it’s good to do. We run those from time to time. We also have recently…
Well, last year, in fact, we ran our very first conference, the One Voice Conference in London, which I was so gratified to see so many people attending that. Literally 30 different countries came to that. It was a fantastic event.
And for our inaugural event, it was nothing short of amazing. It was really great to see so many people there. And this year is setting up to be an absolutely brilliant conference again in May of 2019.
So we’re very excited about that. And also the awards that we run in the same weekend, the One Voice Awards, which is, I think, probably without doubt the fairest and most equitable awards you could imagine because our judges, and we have quite a broad, wide panel of judges, all at the top of their game, stellar names from the industry, some of them voices, engineers, agents. They don’t know who each other is, so they’re all in isolation.
They don’t know who their other fellow judges are. The entries, the voices who put their entries in are randomized and anonymized, so the judges don’t know who they are or where they’ve come from. So everyone is judged basically solely on how they present themselves on their entry rather than favoritism or maybe you might know somebody, or the judges themselves, could collude.
So I think it’s a very fair contest, and so we’re always at Gravy For The Brain coming up with initiatives. We have just recently launched V5. We’re already working on V6 of our platform.
We’ve got some other great ideas to come, and so I just see this business of ours evolving and expanding. We’re now moving into other areas of the world. We’ve got global ambitions.
So I’m so pleased that what started out as a very small seed of an idea at a bar… See, there you go.
Ironic.
One day, many years ago, with Hugh and I and a few other people, we were chatting. And this small germ of an idea has literally just grown into something that is a global enterprise. And I’m so proud and delighted to have been associated with it and long may it continue.
Well, that’s great, Peter. One thing I wanted to ask is about the name, because some of the nomenclature that you use I feel may not be as familiar with our audience. For instance, V5.
Hugh was talking to me about that for months, talking about how that was coming out. I had no idea what the V stood for. So that means version, right?
Version 5.
Are you serious, Paul?
I’m absolutely serious.
Where have you been? Do you own an Apple product?
No. But to that point, tell us where the name Gravy For The Brain came, because it may not immediately be associated with Voice Over to some people.
Well, again, a good question. It is a name that goes back to when we started our business, Gravy For The Brain, at the very early days, in fact, day one, we had Voice Over content, Voice Over, we had a Voice Over course on there. But our joint aim was to make the business a global educational platform, not just for Voice Over, but for all topics related to the entertainment industry, so singing, public speaking, playing the drums, playing the piano.
There’d be all kinds of courses on there that we would be able to add on over time. So the word voice didn’t really sit comfortably in that early concept. So the name Gravy For The Brain came to us from Patrick Stewart, the actor Patrick Stewart, who in a movie has a line, I think, where he’s injecting some kind of serum into somebody, and he goes, the guy says, what’s this you’re giving me?
He says, don’t worry, it’s just gravy for the brain. So it comes from Patrick Stewart. And the name, of course, was intended to be an umbrella name for an overall educational online educational company serving content on all subjects to do with the entertainment industry.
But then we realized that actually we didn’t know an awful lot about some of these other subjects. And it was difficult selling individual courses because that requires an enormous amount of sales effort to sell individual courses, access to individual courses. So we completely rewrote our business model and aligned it with the business model that’s used by, say, Netflix or Sky in the UK, where individual subscribers pay a single, simple monthly fee and they get access to absolutely everything that we do with no further charges.
So that model right there completely revolutionized our business overnight and it makes it much more simple, easier to understand. And because there are no contracts and no exit fees, people just love it.
Well, that’s wonderful. Yeah, there’s no confusion because it’s all essentially the same product and it sounds like a very wonderful service. And it’s a very memorable name, too.
I was actually curious about that one, even though I understood V5.
Now, now.
I’m just teasing. I’m just poking fun. But it’s a great name.
I mean, it conveys richness and decadence for your mind. So I love it.
I like that. I like the decadence bit. Gravy For The Brain.
Well, Peter, thank you so much for joining us today. I was just curious, where do you see the future for Gravy For The Brain and what’s the best way to learn more about it?
Well, you can find out all about it if you go to www.gravyforthebrain.com. That’s our website. That will take you to our landing page and everything is on there that you would ever need to ask, all the questions, frequently asked questions.
We also have lots of free stuff on there as well. So if you want to just go and have a look and dive in, you can take some sample courses. You can look at all the different things that we do and even get some scripts and tips and ideas about voiceover.
If you’re curious about it and you want to know what we do, then that’s the absolute one stop shop for everything. And if you do like the idea, you can dive in and get a month’s access to everything we do. And if that’s as far as it goes for you, that’s great.
You can leave without any questions after a month. If you want to stay on, of course we do hope you do, then we’ll help you build your career in voiceover and show you exactly what you need to do, what you need to be looking at and doing on a daily basis. And we’ll hold your hand all the way through that journey.
And so it’s something that we’re here and committed to for a very long time. And we are, as I said, V6 or Version 6 for football.
I’m slow on the uptick.
You just needed to add like a decimal in there or something. 5.0. Oh, I got it.
Oh, I see, yeah. So V6, Version 6 coming up later this year, we hope, or early next year, will be absolutely incredible. Or as you people say, awesome.
So we’re looking forward to that very, very much indeed. So I do hope that if you’re listening and you’re in any way remotely interested in voiceover, even if you’re an established voiceover or you’ve just been working at this business for, you know, six months or a year or two years, please check it out because there are some fantastic resources like our Career Planner Tool, we’ve got our Voice Over CRM, we’ve got a whole live voiceover job. Every voiceover job in the world is updated every five minutes on our site so you can see all the jobs that are being offered.
We’ve got an internet database that’s open to everybody, not just members. Our voiceover internet database is called The Void. So it’s void.gravyforthebrain.com.
Go there and you’ll get access to all the suppliers, to our industry, all the studios, all the agents, everybody who works with voiceover is in that database. That’s being added to and increased and built up over time right now in live, real time. You can build your own career profile website.
We’ve got voiceover blogs. We’ve even got an escrow service now. So if you’re ever worried about a company or a client abroad not paying you, this is an increasing problem now.
Clients are booking voices and then they don’t get paid. Well, the escrow service, the Gravy For The Brain and escrow service puts paid to that. You know, the money goes into escrow and the voiceover gets paid when the audio is delivered.
So it removes all that risk for both sides actually, not just the voiceover but also for the buyer. So we’ve got it all covered and we’re building this thing all the time. So it’s everything you need, everything you’d ever possibly want.
Peter, what currencies does the escrow service accept?
It accepts UK pounds, euros and US dollars.
Oh, okay, great. That’s fantastic to know.
Yeah.
A wide margin, wow.
Well, Peter, thanks again. Enjoy the rest of your afternoon or evening it’s getting close to for you, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Well, thank you very much indeed, and thanks for having me on The VO Meter. It’s been fun.
You’re very welcome, Peter. It’s been a pleasure. So thank you so much to Hugh and Peter for telling us about Gravy For The Brain.
Up next, we have J. Michael Collins to bring an American perspective onto some of the recent developments they have over here. But first, a word from our good friend Tim Page over at Podcast Intros.
So let me tell you a bit about Tim and his team. They’ve produced over 1,000 podcast intros for some of the biggest podcasts on the planet. Each demo includes custom-written scripts and hand-selected music, and is guaranteed to showcase your voice and talent in the best light possible.
They’ve got a finger on the pulse of what podcast producers want, and you can be sure your podcast demo will sound professional, current, and competitive. Now, we talk about this a lot, but Tim actually produced Paul’s and my podcast demos, and all I can say is that he and his team were absolutely amazing to work with. Their script writer created original scripts perfect for my voice and personality, as well as being reflective of current popular podcast genres.
I recorded in the comfort of my own home studio, and Tim worked his mastering magic. The whole process only took a couple of days, and I couldn’t be more pleased with the result. So, I can’t say it enough, but Tim is a consummate pro, and he’s so easy to work with.
So thank you, Tim, and podcast demos. Hi, everybody. We are in our IPDTL-sponsored interview room with the incredible J.
Michael Collins. So J. Michael has over 20 years of professional experience as a voice actor.
He has worked with some of the biggest companies, brands, sports leagues, and organizations on the planet. In addition to this work in the classic agency-based world of VO, J. Michael has established himself as a leading authority in the online casting marketplace, and has become recognized as an industry-leading talent coach and demo producer as well.
J. Michael is a 16-time Voice Arts Award winner as a voice actor, demo producer, script writer, and casting director. So please join us in welcoming J.
Michael Collins. How are you doing, J. Michael?
I’m doing better now that you put together that little publicist package for me. I’m going to have to hire you guys.
You know, everyone feels so good after that.
My tail’s wagging. I got my ego rubbed. That was very sweet.
Happy to give you a little ego stroke there.
Very nicely delivered, too, Sean, I must say.
Oh, sure.
It’s almost like you’ve done this before.
I know. I know. Thanks.
I’ve been practicing. Welcome, J.
Michael.
It’s so great to have you here today.
It’s a pleasure. It’s a pleasure to be here in one of my favorite industry podcasts that I know I’m a devoted listener to.
Which one?
Very yours. This one.
We made it, Paul. Oh, my God.
This is being recorded.
Oh, wait.
Yes, we are recording. You’re right.
Whew. I’m glad to be here, guys.
Well, thanks for the kind words. So as you may know, as an avid listener, one of the hallmarks of the podcast is us finding some six degrees of separation between the people we have on the show and ourselves. And one of those ways is that you started your career, or at least started your life on this earth very close to where I am based in Baltimore.
You were down in Northern Virginia, correct? Tell me a little bit about where you grew up and how you started voice acting maybe at a young age.
Well, it’s actually funny. I mean, we got to Northern Virginia after bouncing around elsewhere for a while. I had sort of an itinerant upbringing in that my father was, over time, became a pretty well-known guy in the corporate communications and public relations world and sort of went from company to company fixing problems.
So I was actually born in DC at Sibley Hospital. Oh, cool. By the time I was two, we had moved to Paris, France, came back to the Boston area at age four or five, was there until age seven or so.
Then we were in New York and then finally wound up in Washington at about 10 or 11 years old and that became home for a while. Yeah, it’s not where my… I did some gopher work for a couple of radio stations there.
I wouldn’t say that’s where my career started because I wasn’t on air back then, but I was telling somebody else a story recently that even when I was a little boy, five, six years old in the Boston area, there was a radio host named Jess Kane who was a friend of my father’s. At five or six, this guy would call me up before I went to school. He just thought it was really cool to have a little five-year-old come on the air for some reason and would just chat me up.
I guess I gave him something interesting content-wise because he kept calling. That was the morning drive show in Boston. That was sort of my first exposure to somebody who wants to hear your voice, and the ego just grew from there.
That’s awesome. Well, I know, unfortunately, you’re a Redskins fan, and even though I’m in Baltimore, I grew up in Philadelphia. So that’s the only bone of contention I have with you being from the DC areas.
I know you still love the Redskins.
I don’t have a lot of hate in my heart for the Eagles. I reserve most of that for the Cowboys, although the Patriots are my number two team, so I wasn’t too pleased last year.
Yeah, I’ll bet you. But we can have a common enemy in the Cowboys.
There you go. There you go.
Well, great. So Sean, we’re going to talk a little bit about the industry. Why don’t you start with the first question about industry trends and how J.
Michael can offer his expert opinion on that.
Well, absolutely. Well, people who are familiar with you, J. Michael, know that you’re sort of this paragon of online casting.
So why don’t you talk about your own experience getting involved with the online casting or the pay-to-play site world and how you’ve sort of become a champion and mouthpiece for people who are looking to get involved with it.
What was that word you used, paragon? That’s a lot of syllables.
It’s only three, come on.
Well, you know, look, online casting, it’s controversial. There are people who hate it. There are people who…
I don’t know if there’s anybody who adores it. It’s just a matter of the reality that we live in today. I happened to start on the various sites that were out there pretty much when they first came into existence.
I had lived this sort of charmed life as a just very moderately successful voice actor up until about 10, 11, 12 years ago when these sites started coming around. I was living on a golf course. I was going out and playing sometimes 36 holes in a day.
I was doing auditions maybe four or five times a week through my one or two agents that I had at various times. I was booking enough to make a decent little living, but I thought, hey, this is cool. I’m working five hours a week, ten hours a week.
This is awesome, and I don’t really need anymore. Then all of a sudden these sites started to come out, and I realized that… Because I never wanted to do the LA thing.
I never wanted to do the New York thing. I’m not a traffic guy. I’m not a smog guy.
I know those cities have redeeming values, and I don’t want to knock them, but it’s just not my cup of tea. So these sites came along, and I had a lot of people at the beginning tell me, what are you doing? You’re going to ruin your reputation.
You’re going to ruin your career. You’re never going to make any money on this. This is nonsense.
I said, look, guys, this internet thing kind of seems to be going somewhere. Maybe what we do is going to go in that direction as well. And as I started to see some of the work that was showing up on those sites, the broadcast work always paid a little bit less than it should, and in some cases a lot less than it should.
But, you know, the core of the work that I’ve always booked online has been the corporate narration, the learning, the explainers. And that’s always paid relatively fair rates. In fact, in many cases, more than you would make as an agency or union talent on a lot of that work.
And so I just took a look at it and said, well, wait a minute, this is real money. And oh, look, I’m booking. Well, let’s see where this goes.
And over the years, it evolved into some pretty substantial results. And then, of course, it really has changed our industry so much in the past five or ten years. But it’s not going away.
And I think that despite all of the controversy out there, that one of the messages I’d like a lot of people to take home from this interview and this podcast and the state of the industry in general is just that look at what’s happening now. The new sites that are coming out, all they’re talking about is transparency. All they’re talking about is how do we make sure voice actors get paid what they’re worth.
All they’re talking about is, you know, what do we need to do to serve you as a community? Voice 123, despite the substantial problems that they’ve had since their rollover, they’re trying to make the right noises. What do we do to serve the talent as well as the clients?
We have been making an impact on the way that online casting works. And there’s no running away from this. This is, you know, a line…
I don’t remember who said this recently, but I think at some point I agree with this, which is we’re going to have to stop talking about online casting and just start calling it casting, because that’s pretty much where we are at this point. We can’t get away from technology. We can’t get away from the fact that we live in an on-demand society and a market that wants our skills available to them now and on demand.
So what we can do is we can dictate how it’s going to unfold and how the future is going to look. That’s the message that I’m trying to bring to the industry.
Well, that’s wonderful, because I know a lot of people feel powerless in this situation where it’s just… I mean, like you said, rates are going down. We have no control over it, but you do have these sites that are actually listening to us, and there are people who actually care enough about their careers that they’re being vocal about what they want, and they are trying to get groups of people to jump on that, to prove to each other that, yes, we do have the power to control the direction this is going before it gets out of our hands.
My only follow-up to that is, do you think that the push for transparency is real? We’ve seen it with certain players. Armin Hirstetter at Bedalgo is a prime example.
He’s walked the walk for the last couple of years, and he’s definitely genuine. But do you think there’s a bit of labeling, people taking advantage of that term and using it where they don’t really have the means to back it up?
Well, certainly. I think anybody is going to jump on anything they can to boost the visibility and the positive profile of their site if they can. Armin, obviously, is the gold standard that we like everybody to follow.
I think Kevin West has been doing a pretty good job with Being Planet of engaging the community and trying to lead his site. I kind of refer to him a bit as an American Armin. I think it’s going in that same direction a little bit.
You know, look, it’s degrees of transparency. Voice 123 could be better. They used the word in a blog post recently, which was a little laughable.
But at the same time, you know, there’s things that could be better and then there are things that are abusive and dangerous to our industry. And I think that they still kind of land on the right side of that fence, whereas others don’t. And we’ll continue to monitor that.
You know, we all know how a lot of us feel about voices.com. We hope that they’ll make changes. There was some commentary recently that they were about to make some changes, and then all of a sudden, we see that their website went back to the same old language, so we don’t know what’s going on there.
The new site that’s coming out, voiceover.com, Matt Dubois, the guy who runs Voice Casting Hub, you know, his model is sort of a hybrid of the other ones. But, you know, from everything I’ve seen so far from him, he’s out there telling everybody exactly what they’re doing, exactly how it’s going to work. You can agree or disagree with certain elements of that, but I think that all we want from these sites, you know, even…
One of the jokes that I used to make was that VoiceBunny, for as much as everybody hated VoiceBunny, they had a pie chart up there for a long time that said, hey, we’re taking 70 percent and this is where it’s going. You know, look…
We don’t have to work there, we don’t have to like it. All we ask of these sites is that you tell us what you’re doing, how you’re doing it. If you’ve got some wacky algorithm, tell us how it works so it’s not a mystery, so we know how to behave ourselves in a manner that’s going to allow it to favor us as much as possible.
If you’re involved in taking money, tell us exactly how that works. Don’t hide anything. And if it’s more than we’re comfortable with, then we’ll just work somewhere else.
It’s too tight of a community. This isn’t like Walmart where the widgets and the cat food is not going to talk back. We’re the cat food here.
We talk back because there’s only so much of us to go around. There are only so many of us that are capable of doing this on a high level. You have to communicate with us and you have to be honest with us.
If you can do that, you can almost do whatever you want. We won’t like it, we’ll complain about it, but at least tell us what you’re doing. I think that’s where a lot of the controversies come from over the years.
Totally makes sense. In addition to your work as a voice actor, as we talked about in Sean’s eloquent introduction, you also direct and coach. Your company, JMC Demos, produces demos as well.
Tell us a little bit about JMC Demos and how your approach to coaching helps the voice actor.
I’ve become passionate over the years about careful always how I answer this question because obviously I’m making money doing this. You never want to phrase something as giving back when it’s profitable. That’s not what coaching and demo production is about, but at the end of the day, I think the coaches who do the best job are the people who take real satisfaction in seeing talent advance their careers.
The phrase I like to use is sending the elevator back down because we’ve had a pretty good run. Being able to say, okay, let’s take this next generation and help lift them up. As a coach, which is something that I don’t have as much time for as I’d like, I only keep a handful of people on, but when I have the opportunity to work with folks, especially new talent, it’s amazing to sit and watch them develop and to see them take skills that are raw.
For me, I don’t work with anybody who I don’t believe has a pretty strong chance of going out there and building a successful career. It’s amazing to watch them from just the beginning, when they’ve done a talent evaluation or that cliche that we all hear told them they had a nice voice, when they first talk to a coach and say, okay, maybe you’ve got some chops, let’s see where this goes, and then watching the light come on, like hour four, hour five, hour six, where all of a sudden they realize it’s not just talking, that it’s acting, and they’re starting to speak to me as a character and not as themselves. That’s an amazing transformation to see.
And then when they actually do go out and turn it into a business, it’s really heartening. Demo production is something that I take just an absolute joy in, hearing the diversity of talent that are out there and the skill level that they’ve gotten, and the way that we can make those demos come to life. You guys know I work a lot with AJ.
McKay. He’s the lead audio engineer for JMC Demos. Yeah, he doesn’t suck.
And the stuff that we come up with, the way that we’re able to highlight the skillset that these talent have and put them out there in a way that is marketable, that allows them again to sign with top agencies, to go out and get on production company and ad agency rosters, to go out and do their own marketing and book their own work. Again, we’re making money doing this. It’s not giving back, but it’s amazingly rewarding to watch people take the work that we’ve helped them do and go out and turn it into a business.
And so, yeah, it’s become a passion really in the last seven or eight years for me to help people down that path and to kind of send that elevator back down when I can.
Very cool. And like you’re saying, it’s kind of like, it’s difficult to say like this is philanthropic work, but we really do appreciate it because you’re helping maintain and ensuring the integrity and the professionalism of a whole generation of voice talent. So, I mean, that is something to be grateful for.
Absolutely. So you mentioned that you’re not able to coat so much on your own, but I know that you’ve actually partnered with Gravy For The Brain to create sort of this Gravy For The Brain USA, which is a bit of taking their products and sort of localizing it to more of a US market. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
Well, Gravy For The Brain USA is something I’m really proud to be a part of. I watched Hugh and Peter kind of wander into the US market over the last couple of years, and I think like everybody else about three years ago, we all just went, who the hell are these guys?
I remember seeing them in person at VO Atlanta thinking that exact thing, especially when Harry strolled in.
Right, and great gravy for the what?
I know, I was like, what does that even mean?
And so it’s kind of, you know, it’s interesting, it has been very interesting getting to know them over the last few years and discovering that there just aren’t too classy or gentleman out there other than the hosts that I’m currently talking to here. But they’re really tremendous guys. They’re very, very, you know, people find the British a little poncy sometimes.
Once you get to know them, they’re so down to earth. They’re two of the nicest human beings you’ll ever meet. They have the interests of the industry at heart.
And I’ve had the opportunity over the years to work as a coach and doing webinars and things like that for a variety of different coaching organizations. All those ones that I’ve worked with, I’ve always been able to wholeheartedly support. I’ve had the opportunity to talk about either starting my own or investing in one at some point.
That’s not what happened with Gravy For The Brain. I’m not actually an investor there. This is a situation where I just finally saw something that said, okay, they’ve got the whole package here, by which I mean they’re bringing content over that has already been well developed.
But it’s been well developed, even though it has the US market in mind, largely with the UK market in mind. So I have the opportunity now to localize this content, to redo a lot of their videos, to make this content more relevant for the American market, to give talent access to vital information that allows them to help get a head start on their career without spending a whole lot of money. It’s an opportunity to…
We’re going to do a couple of webinars every month, hour and a half, two hours of just deep diving into this month we’re doing e-learning. Last month we did ad-libs and the conversational read. And we’re just going to cover every topic that you can possibly think of.
We’re going to bring in guest speakers. We had Celia Siegel and AJ McKay last month for a demo session. We’re going to be doing one with Joe Zee just soon for anime and dubbing.
We’ve just got a great lineup of people that we’re going to be working with. And it’s the library of content that already exists, that’s going to continue to grow, that is global in nature. So if you want to access any of the stuff that they’ve already got or any of the stuff through any of the other different country portals that they have, even if you’re just a member from the USA portal, you’ll have access to that.
And then long term, it’s things that they’re offering like The Void, which is this information database where you can go in and find ad agencies, production companies, coaches, demo producers, you name it, any resources that you’re looking for in the industry. They’ve put together an escrow service, which is not an evil escrow service that somehow mandatorily takes your money. It’s the kind of escrow service that you want to use, which is one that if you are dealing with a client that you have found on your own and you don’t want to take it to an agency for whatever reason, but maybe it’s a big number.
They’ve got an escrow service that you can come and use now that’s going to take a fair, small percentage, but allow you to protect your interests. The client can deposit their funds. The client then releases the funds when they’re happy with the work that you’ve done.
Therefore, you’re protected. You don’t have to worry about getting paid if it’s something that you’re concerned about. Probably not something you want to use for a $100 or $200 job, but if it’s for a big gig, there you go.
They’re just constantly thinking of new resources. It’s an organization that really has taken stock of all of the feedback the industry has been giving over the past few years with regard to integrity, with regard to rates, with regards to not being a demo mill, not trying to take advantage of people, and it’s one that I’m really proud to associate with.
That’s fantastic. So are you doing most of this, or are you doing it all online and remote? Do you ever get together and have a few at the pub with you and Peter?
We have had a few at the pub. Actually, when we do the video localization, I’m going over to their studios to record that live. I’m not going to speak to their judgment with regard to putting me on camera, but I guess somebody had to make that mistake eventually.
In any case, we do get to down a few pints from time to time.
That’s awesome. What are the other plans for the future for JMC demos and your business as a whole?
To be honest with you, I think we’re in a place right now where it’s time to just catch our breath a little bit. The demos brand in particular have been pretty aggressive over the past couple of years. Building that up, I wanted there to be another player on the scene that offered just absolutely world class quality where you know that you’re going to get a personalized experience where every demo is going to be scripted and targeted to who you are as a talent with your feedback as a part of that process and your collaboration and then targeted to what the market is currently looking for.
And in a manner again, we talk about fairness and transparency. One of the things that I’m super proud of with JMC demos is that we offer an unconditional satisfaction guarantee or your money back, no questions asked. So you work with us, there’s no risk.
You come in the door and if any reason at the end of that process you’re not happy with the demo that you have, I will refund you 100% and we won’t have to talk about it again. And I’ll still have a drink with you if you want. But I think it’s important that, you know, demo production is such an esoteric and amorphous…
That was a multi-syllabic word there. That it’s so hard to nail down sometimes what is amazing, what is the standard, that some people are worried when they get into paying a demo producer a lot of money, and it’s not cheap. If you hire somebody like me, or Chuck Duran, or Uncle Roy, or any of the people out there, or Nancy, or any of the people who do really, really good work, you’re going to pay a lot of money, because we’re good at what we do, but on top of that, what you’re paying for is the fact that we’re taking time away from the other things that we do, in my case, voice over.
It’s not an inexpensive process, and I think it’s so important that when talent go into the demo production process that they have the peace of mind of knowing that at the other end, one of two results is waiting for them, either the demo of their dreams or no financial loss. And so that’s one of the things we take pride in. I think this, you know, the future, the next couple of years, it’s simply about offering the quality service that we’ve set out to do.
We’re still going to be present at a lot of the conferences, and AJ is going to be speaking at quite a few of them on my behalf, and I’ll be attending a few of them as well. And we’re just going to be there to support the industry as much as possible, and we’ll see where it goes from there.
I have one related question that just came to mind as you were talking about the demos, and with regard to your new partnership with Gravy For The Brain. Have you noticed, or are you planning on changing your approach to demos for your clients in the European side? Because there’s that disconnect where some European companies or people that are hiring for Voice Over jobs sort of get offended if you have something on your demo that you didn’t actually do.
Isn’t there sort of an unwritten rule that you don’t put a spot on your demo if you’re a European talent, if you haven’t done it? Whereas in the US, you’re showcasing maybe major brands that you just want to show you can do, whether or not you’ve actually done their commercial?
I think that’s less of an issue in the UK market than it is perhaps in the continental European market. I know that comes up a lot with German clients and French and other continental clients. The UK market, I think, now is trending more towards what the American market does and doing demos that are created from scratch.
One of the reasons, Paul, I got into doing demo production was if I went back eight or nine years and listened to the demos that I had then, most of them were spots that I had done, that I had put together into a compilation. I think you go back 10 years or so, most people’s demos were still largely composed of work that they actually did. The demo production as an art is kind of something Chuck sort of got going, and then a lot of us kind of followed in his footsteps over the years.
But if you listen to real spots, you guys all know. I mean, anybody who does VO knows how often it happens that we do this incredible, national, wild campaign, and we’re just so excited to get the audio back and put it on our website or put it on a demo, and then we get it back and we go, ugh, what did they do? And so I think that we’re in an era now where a demo production team or a demo producer who understands content, who understands scripting, who is able to nail the content, to again, feature the talent and meet the market, who obviously has the technical prowess to produce the demo to an industry standard level and the directorial prowess to do that, can put together something that is ultimately going to sound better than real work.
So I don’t see that as an issue in the UK market, and I think over time, I would imagine that probably the rest of the world would follow that pattern as well.
Yeah, I guess it only makes sense as the skills of not only the demo producers, but also the voice talent themselves and those of us that do a little engineering on the backside, they had to go in that direction. I recently had a client where I was doing a series of medical narration for them, and they were posting on the YouTube channel. Some in excess of 15,000 views.
Great for my YouTube channel, right? Great publicity. Until suddenly, they got lazy and stopped putting background music behind it.
So now, every breath, every pause is accentuated and it sounds like garbage. So I had to stop using them because they’re no longer a good showcase. And I thought about maybe pulling them down, adding my own music and doing a re-edit, but what’s the point of doing that if it’s work that’s already been done?
So, to your point, now that everybody is sort of on board with the same process, it makes sense that it would trend in that direction.
Very cool. So you were talking about earlier how you and your team try to make a lot of appearances at some of the voiceover cons throughout the US and throughout the world, actually. And if you’ve ever been to an event where a JMC is involved, you’re a speaker, you’re an MC, you have contests at your exhibit hall booth.
I mean, you’re so involved in, like I was saying, you’re an MC, you’re an active speaker at a number of the different panels. And you’re also involved with a very special grant that is very close to my heart, the Unicorn Grant. And for those of you who don’t know, the Unicorn Grant is an award that goes out to people who sort of exemplify the giving spirit and the work ethic of the voiceover community.
So I was very honored to be named a finalist last year, but I’ll let JMC talk a little bit more about the origin of the grant and how he got involved.
Well, I think you summed it up pretty well. It’s meant… It’s the VO Atlanta Unicorn Award or grant, and it’s meant to recognize one individual each year who’s just genuinely exemplary character.
We’re looking for the kind of people who give back without asking anything in return, which disqualifies most of us. But what we do now is we select three finalists based on public nominations, and Sean was a very, very worthy finalist last year.
Oh, shucks.
Yeah. And actually, the nominations are currently open. When is the podcast actually released?
This won’t air probably until the first week of March, second week of March.
So by the time you hear this, the nominations will be closed. But take a look at it next year. But the Unicorn Award is a…
It’s something that… It’s a special moment. And, you know, it’s funny how it came together.
I’ll give you guys a little bit of the backstory about how it started. It literally started as AJ. McKay and calling me up one day saying, hey, we should do something special for Jen Henry at VO Atlanta this year.
She’s just helped everybody out so much. And me doing what I do, I couldn’t just, you know, buy her dinner. It suddenly kind of turned into this thing.
And before I know it, before we knew it, we had, you know, pretty much every, the who’s who of the voiceover industry contributing something to this special moment, to this special award. And we talked to Gerald, and Gerald agreed to make it part of VO Atlanta. And the first year, the idea was we were going to honor Jen who, I don’t know how well you guys know Jen Henry, but she’s given a lot to a lot of people over the years in the VO industry.
And again, without really asking for anything in compensation for that. And we just felt it was someone that we wanted to recognize. So we created this.
And we, just the community in general kind of came together and agreed that she would be the first person to receive it. There was no process at that point. But once we did it once, and it sort of brought the house down, we decided, okay, this is probably going to have to become a yearly thing, and we want to, we want it to be this special moment at VO Atlanta where we recognize, you know, somebody who isn’t out there, out front every single day, whose face you don’t see on every webinar or every conference poster, who’s not trying to sell you something.
Coaches are disqualified. Demo producers are disqualified. Anybody who’s selling paid services to talent is not qualified for the award.
So we’ve, again, continued to work with some incredible industry partners. I mean, I think we have 30 or so people contributing again this year. All of the major coaches you can think of, all of the major demo producers, for the most part, that you can think of are giving coaching, they’re giving demos, they’re giving gear, some are giving cash contributions, which we often use to get a sweet water gift certificate.
And the nominating process right now is ongoing. We select three finalists for the Unicorn Award. The Founders Committee, consisting of myself, Anne Gangusa, Cliff Zellman, and then Jen, who was the original winner.
We are the judges. The nominations are open to the public. There’s no fee to enter.
You don’t have to be attending VO Atlanta. You don’t have to have any intention to come to VO Atlanta. The only stipulation is that if someone actually is nominated as one of the three finalists, that they have to agree to come.
We pay their airfare, we pay their hotel. We bring them in and give them the whole weekend. I don’t think we give them a food budget yet.
We should probably start doing that. But I guess there’s food at the conference, right? There is.
In any case, we pick three finalists. Then whoever had the highest score among those three finalists is the person who winds up being declared the winner of the Unicorn Award. Something we’re doing a little bit differently this year for those who are coming to VO Atlanta is that we are…
This will probably irritate, Sean, because it’s a year late. We’re spreading the prize pool out a little bit more among the three finalists. What we’re doing this year is there’s still going to be one winner who gets the ceremonial unicorn statue that they keep custody of for a year, and then they bring back to VO Atlanta and pass on to the next winner.
But this year, out of this massive prize package, it’s worth about $70,000 worth of VO goodies. The winner, we’re going to do kind of a fantasy football kind of draft after the winner is declared. We won’t do this live on stage.
This will be done privately later, but the winner will get to choose two items from that list, and then each of the runners up will get to choose one. Then the winner gets to choose two more, and each of the other finalists get to choose one until they’re all gone. We’ve had some feedback that some people thought, okay, it would be great if we could just give a little bit more to each of the runners up as well.
And I think we all agreed that would be a good thing. So that’s just a little format change this year. But other than that, it’s still going to look very much the same, and we will find our unicorn.
We’re actually in the process of closing nominations in the next few days, and then the judging process will begin. And the other thing I want to add before I finish on that is it’s not… what I think makes this a little bit different than any of the other scholarships or grants or anything like that that are out there is that this isn’t about hardship.
This isn’t about somebody who’s struggling financially or is otherwise in need. We will take that into consideration when it comes to evaluating the submissions. But what this is about is character.
We’re looking for somebody that makes us all want to be a little bit better. And I think that in the first two years with Jen the first year, with Susan Maisel last year, and then Sean and Sean, we had two Sean’s as our other finalists last year, Sean Daeley and Sean Chambers.
Scott Chambers, yeah.
Scott Chambers.
Two S’s.
That’s as bad as me calling you Peter, Paul.
That’s a tradition.
That’s a tradition. But in any case, we found the kind of people that we want to really highlight and that make us want to be better. And I think that’s what this is all about.
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for all of the hard work that you and all the other contributors do.
So that basically wraps up the questions we had for you, J. Michael Collins. We’re so happy you were able to join us.
You are a consummate talent coach, and you have the look, along with Hugh and Peter, to go ahead and just take over the world. And we expect to see great things from you, young man.
Thank you, sir, and I appreciate the limited use of excessive syllables.
Well, we’ll see you at VO Atlanta, and have a great rest of your February.
See you guys there. Thanks so much for the chance to talk to everybody.
So thanks so much to J. Michael Collins, and again to Hugh and Peter from Gravy For The Brain. Those developments are really exciting.
Now, our interviews were brought to you by IPDTL, and IPDTL is the cost-effective ISDN replacement. It’s great for interviews, like you just heard, outside broadcasts, voice overs, and of course, podcasts. There’s no special hardware or software required.
It works anywhere with an internet connection. You can have a monthly or an annual subscription, and it runs in the Chrome web browser. And the best part is, it just works.
So thanks again to IPDTL for being our sponsor. So Sean, exciting stuff across the pond, huh?
Hugh and Peter actually donated a Gravy For The Brain membership to me for being a Unicorn Grant recipient last year. And so I got to see firsthand all of the resources that they’re offering. So if you’re interested in some premium voiceover education, check out gravyforthebrain.com.
And it’s okay that they’re trying to take over the world if they’re benevolent, right? You heard in the interview with Hugh where I said I was a little concerned about his designs on world domination. But it’s okay because Hugh, Peter, and J.
Michael Collins are all respected pros, and they’re all just fun to hang around with, actually. I’ve had several libations with each and every one of them, and it’s always been fun. All right, so that pretty much wraps up this episode of The VO Meter.
Measuring Your Voice Over Progress.
Coming up next, we’re going to have an episode with Celia Siegel, branding expert, and following that, we’ll be at VO Atlanta. I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to do any content on site, but I hope to, so stay tuned for that.
After that, we also have our British Invasion podcast. That’s a roundtable featuring British voice talent who work in the US., and you can talk about their unique experience with that, so I’m really looking forward to that.
Aside from all of that just wonderful oral candy with all those British accents in the same room, I’m really looking forward to that. So, we’ve got all of those coming up. As I mentioned before, I hope to be getting a lot of interviews and videos from Emerald City Comic Con next month, so stay tuned for that.
Hopefully, we’ll be able to pepper some of that audio into the podcast. So, thanks for listening to this episode of The VO Meter. I’m Sean Daeley.
If you’ve got questions, you can reach out to me. It’s Sean, S-E-A-N, at Daeley, D-A-I-L-Y, vo.com. That’s Sean at daeleyvo.com.
I always love answering questions from you guys, and if you guys have any questions or submissions you’d like to send us for the podcast, just let us know.
And I’m Paul Stefano. You can find me at www.paulstefano.com or at PaulStefano on Twitter. I love to answer questions.
I also like to eat, so if you want to hire me, look me up. Thanks.
So thanks again. Take it easy guys and have a wonderful day. Thanks for listening to this episode of The VO Meter.
To follow along, visit us at www.vometer.com. VO Meter is powered by IPDTL.