Saturday, November 28, 2009

Become Highly Skilled At Voiceover work

By Lauren Hulbert

In the current climate, every extra penny that you can bring into your household budget counts. Well, an obvious way of achieving this is to harness a new career. One such career, often overlooked - but surprisingly lucrative is radio voiceover work. In this article, I want to give you a simple, step-by-step plan to ensure that you have plenty of voiceover work coming your way.

The only way to improve a skill is to practice it. However, the way you practice will make a difference to the speed at which you improve. You don't have to spend a lot of money to start. Just talk to yourself in the mirror and get used to hearing your voice being made out loud. Talk into your voicemail system or use your office dictation machine to listen to yourself on playback. You can make great improvements in your voice-over skills using these very cheap techniques. Then consider investing in some better recording equipment. You could buy a computer microphone and use your computer's processors to help you improve your voice over talent. Another great way is to get into public speaking - as daunting as it might seem.

Survey after survey reveals that public speaking is one of the most stressful activities that can occur in your life. But often if you deliberately seek appropriate opportunities and embark on these chances to speak out loud with a sense of humbleness, you will find yourself warmly received. Join the local toastmaster's club, where you will be asked to speak on a weekly basis and during which your friends will analyse and comment on your performance. Then you could try speaking out at work or social functions and notice how you are received and how you felt.

To start is the key. You need to develop the drive needed to start. Once you have started, you can then look to improve. The elements that you need to consistently improve upon are your diction, your timbre and your range. Producing steady and incremental improvements in these modalities will produce the improvements you need to request more and more voice-over work.

Begin by simply talking normally. Don't try to do anything too fancy at the start, just start working. Then begin to notice how your voiceovers sound on the recordings that you generate. Try to vary how clear you are, the speed of your voice-over work and the tone of your voice. Keep controlling your breathing whilst you do this.

You then need to keep sounding clear, but try to change more unusual aspects of your speech and workout what you need to do in order to create a given result. What do you need to do to sound happy or sad? What about creating a voiceover from somebody from the North or South?

Maintain a record of your findings and keep working on how you can improve. Some days you will make minimal or no improvement - or no apparent improvement. However, just having more experience means that you must be better. To be one of the top 1% of voice-over artists in your area, you need only commit to practicing for 30 minutes every day for 90 days. If you maintain records and steadily improve various aspects of your skill, you will find yourself highly employable.

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