So you wanna be a voice-over artist? What’s the job? In essence, voice-over work might appear to be simply a matter of reading some words into a microphone; in reality, though, it’s a highly skilled, highly competitive, sometimes highly paid, niche in the television and film industry. Highly paid? Voice-over work for television adverts can be incredibly lucrative – first off, you get paid to go into a studio and whisper ‘it’s soft, velvety, and silky to the touch’ in a sound booth; and then you get a thing called a ‘repeat fee’ each time the advert – complete with your voice-over - gets a showing on the box. Which will leave you several thousands of quids in. Fantastic! When do I start? Hold it right there, Nelly! If voice-over work were just a simple case of spewing out the words and collecting the mullah, we’d all be doing it, wouldn’t we? As Michaela Strachan amply demonstrated in our V is for Voice-Over programme, you need to develop a number of skills before you can wow us in a sound booth. What skills are those then? That depends on what kind of voice-over work you’re going for, but first off you’re going to need to have a good voice: warm, colourful, attractive, pliable – a bit like the toilet rolls you’ll hopefully be doing voice-overs for. So what are the different types of voice-over work? Well, the real plum jobs are the adverts and documentary voice-overs – intoning something like, ‘The harsh terrain leaves the Innuits prey to attack by rabid Polar Bears,’ over pictures of the South Pole. Documentary voice-over artists tend to be actors and actresses, like Zoe Wannamaker, whose voice carries the necessary gravitas (that’s ‘seriousness’ to you and me) to reflect the emotion of the piece. Then you have the Announcers: these are the people who say ‘And next on BBC 1 Wales…’. This is highly skilled too, because you’re going out live, you’ve got to read a script in a limited amount of time, and you often write your own material. Fine. How do I become an announcer? Well, there are three routes in: if you have the voice of the Gods, send a tape to an agent who specialises in voice-over artists; become an Actor, become a news reporter. (See our very own N is for Newsgathering and T is for Talent for more details on how to get ahead in these fields). Future prospects Fairly bright. Television and Film Producers might be sounding off about the computer-generated virtual actor being just around the corner, but nobody’s saying anything about virtual voice-overs at the moment; and with the proliferation of new digital and cable channels, there are increasing work opportunities.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Jun 2013 11:51:17 +0000