Take Care of Your Mouth

Well, I've been out of commission for a little over a week. Here is the problem.

First off, here's a preface. This is going to be less about voiceover and more just about taking care of yourself. 90 percent of people who read this may never have this problem but those who do may benefit from this or may not.

Here we go. My teeth ain't so great. I've been chewing out of one side of my mouth for maybe 4 years just because I broke a tooth at some point and can't chew on it. Finally the days came where it started to ache. I'd be in pain for a few days then POOF gone. A month later again. Now, I get hit HARD. Can't even take it.

I hear about this great thing for toothaches, pure garlic. Guess what it works. I use it, it dulls the pain and sometimes gets rid of it all together. Here comes the next problem. Garlic in excess, ended up burning a few well place sores in my mouth. Not only is this ridiculously painful but the placement is so bad that SPEAKING is painful. Now, I've got a bad tooth and I can't even do VO anymore.

That is the last straw, I decide to get the job done. I end up getting a root canal (emergency) and it was bad. PAINFUL. I got out of it and I was shaking. Here we are a few days later, the pain has subsided almost disappeared and I did my first round of auditions. Finally, I'm back.

In conclusion, take care of that voice. Take care of your teeth. I still have to go back and see what else is on the list. YEESH!!! 

Know Your Worth

I think often times, while I'm doing a job that's huge. "This is pretty cheap"

Voices.com has a minimum of $100 per job and those jobs could be as small as a paragraph or even a line, BUT they could be 1000 words, which is still pretty good. Here's what you need to take into consideration though:

1) A round of pickups, it is bound to happen, the round of pickups may even be just doing it over again. That could double your time.

2) How many takes do you wanna give? For smaller, I give 2-3 takes. It keeps the client happy right off the bat and it's no skin of my back because chances are, by the 3rd take it's pretty awesome. However, it's more time. For larger, I have a tendency to give only 1 take MAYBE 2, depends how I feel.

3) The uploading factor. If time is money and you have a slow connection, then you're losing money.

4) The file format problem, 95 percent of the time, they just want a wav or aiff, possibly an mp3. But, there are occasionally these crazy clients who want some weird format that's almost too weird to be true.

In the end, it's only $100, sometimes even less. So, here's the question, what are you worth.

If you're a new kid in town and have less than say 30 jobs under your belt, then do the small jobs, do the free jobs, do videogames for free, do voicebunny jobs for insanely low amounts of money. The proof is gonna be in how many jobs you get. You want to be efficient at VO.

For the question of ISDN, nothing is worth that amount. At least not now, I make a decent living without the need for an ISDN. Someone who has ANYTHING less than a 1k job and requires an ISDN and has that little quote of "You have to take care of the studio." is taking advantage of non-union. Any client who says, I want you but I need ISDN, I basically say, "I've had people call into the recording session and they've listened in and directed. If you want to do that, it has worked before."

Recently, I got a pretty big job with lots of little tutorials. They were maybe 1 minute long scripts. I charged $25 because I want to give them a deal but I can't think of going ANY cheaper than that. This is hard work and it takes time and effort. What's the price that you can sleep at night with? What's the price that you can get up in the morning as a VO artist and smile knowing that you're not doing a 9-5pm (if that's the case)?

That my friend is your price, that's what you're worth. That little borderline between happy and mildly insulting. hehe.