Working Abroad as a Voice Over Talent

Julie-Ann Dean: Welcome to Voiceover Experts brought to you by Voices.com, the number one voiceover marketplace. Voiceover Experts brings you tips, pearls of wisdom and techniques from top instructors, authors and performers in the field of voiceover. Join us each week to discover tricks of the trade that will help you to develop your craft and prosper as a career voiceover talent. It’s never been easier to learn, perform, and succeed from the privacy of your own home and your own pace. This is truly an education you won’t find anywhere else.
This week, Voices.com is pleased to present Enda Caldwell.
Enda Caldwell: Hi. It’s Enda Caldwell and this is Voices.com. You’re very welcome to this very Irish edition of the Voiceover Experts podcast. Well, first of all, I’ll make no excuses for the fact that this is a very echoey room that I’m recording it in due to the fact that it’s just a temporary accommodation, you know. I’m just passing through from a place called Seborga in Italy. I would urge you to Google it. It’s a very interesting place which you should visit if you ever get the chance.
So it’s been recorded here. I’m from Navan in County Meath in Ireland which is the same town as Pierce Brosnan. Now, if I’ve popped when I’ve said Pierce Brosnan, there you go, I need to – I’m a bit more coaching myself on the all voiceovers. Now, how did I get started as a voiceover? Well, as a child, my speech and drama teacher with the London College of Music and her name was Patricia Malloy. She said, “Enda, you know, if you go home and you record it onto a tape recorder, you’ll listen back to yourself doing the prose and poetry pieces for the exams that you have in your step 1, 2, 3 and grade 1, 2, 3, et cetera. Record them into a tape recorder and listen back to yourself and it’ll help you.”
Well, I really did and I became very comfortable with the sound of my own voice and not nervous at all to listen back to my rather, Aled Jones choirboy type of sounding voice at that time. So, it became a bit of fun and something I would do as a hobby and when my friends would come around or my cousins and that we’d play these games of recording people reading news and making fake commercials and funny things, just into a normal tape recorder.
It was all a bit of fun back then and I really loved the idea of being able to perform and to animate and, you know, really just to enjoy being a voiceover or in that case, it was a performer as such. So radio came along then and I became interested in radio because I thought, “Well, here I am doing this. I’m not playing football like the rest of the guys but what can I do that, you know, is really cool that would make me cool?” And of course radio, because I thought, “Well, you know, DJs are cool.”
And I listened to the guys on the radio. They seemed very expressive. I seem to relate to them and there was one DJ, he’s from New Zealand and his name is Pat Courtney. He has to take some credit and the voiceover that I would thank and the production genius who inspired me was Tony Allan. So those guys and Chris Cary for starting Radio Nova back in Dublin in the 80s. I’ve got to thank him because without him and his excellent, you know, commitment to quality then, I wouldn’t have heard all this great radio. I would have been stuck listening to RTE reading out the the Angelus, you know.
Then, Atlantic 252 which was a huge international project opened 12 or 15 miles from my parents’ home and that was a little ditty bitty town called, Trim. And I went over and I met some of my radio heroes like Paul (Cavanagh) and other people who were involved in the management and setting up and presentation of this big, wonderful CHR Radio station which was basically, to all intents and purposes, the European version of Z100 New York, okay. Now, you get me.
Now, we had Pirate Radio stations still spreading up as well and by the time I got to college around 18, I met a fella by the name of Tony Gallagher among others and John Gartland. And these guys were running little pirates from backyard and sheds and from their bedrooms and old sorts of weird and clandestine places. I would be obviously offering my services to voice ads which you would know as spots in the States and commercials and all that kind of thing and doing the imaging for them.
So, I got involved in that and just was really fueled on by being involved in the Pirates and it was all a little bit hush-hush, you shouldn’t really be doing it. Then local radio, I got involved in that and that kind of became a career and a job for me and I did a lot of production work as Head of Production and did a bit of experience of tip by (indiscernible) stations like that. And then working all around the country in local radio and different regional radio stations. I got to do a lot of different voiceovers that way.
So that’s how I really become fueled on by it. Now, you know, I would listen to the War of the Worlds from the CD in the car and think, “Wow, if I can only sound just a little bit like, you know, the way Richard Burton sounds, it would be just awesome, you know. Minds immeasurably superior to us.” You know, and all that kind of thing and it’s I guess – I mean, I’ve heard that he did that just sitting in a hotel room somewhere and it was all done in one take, I believe so. So the myth or the legend or the rumor has it.
I would encourage you to have listened to that. Definitely, Richard Burton doing the War of the Worlds, he is definitely one of my top three voiceovers apart from Tony Allan and some of the guys from the States. Obviously like Don LaFontaine and Sean Caldwell and you know, people like that and Spyder Harrison and other friends of mine in the States who sound really, really good.
Being Irish as a voiceover, well you can get a little bit type-cast and I don’t laugh but it’s very difficult to break into the international market looking for things like representation from agents internationally. You do get boxed off into a corner a little bit. It’s becoming less and less now because now, they’re thinking, “Okay. So we don’t want to use US voices. We don’t use an English voice. What else can we get? Okay, an Irish voice. We haven’t thought of that.”
So there is a little bit of that thinking and long may have continue and I hope that it starts to spread head a little bit more because I’d like to see that and some of us, Irish voiceovers getting a little bit more of the pie. Being a voice artist in a foreign country, well, one thing you’re going to need. First stuff, my advice to you is get a portable kit so that you’re always mobile and able to deliver work. You would need something like a laptop or a portable USB mic. My best advice really would be to get a laptop with the Dolby edition on it so you can add it up, stuff like I’m recording right now onto a Dolby. Have an external sound card, a really good high quality one and Edirol UA-25 is the one I use and it’s made by Roland who also make the keyboards. That soft solid (indiscernible) play.
But you’ve got things you also need like a portable tripod microphone. You need, you know, basically what the microphone I use is the Rode NT2-A which is also a really good broadcast mic but it’s a really good all-around mic. It’s not quite a Neumann and it’s not Neumann price but it’s a good mic. The Hercules mic standard use is very handy. I’ve got a (KNM spit pan) for when you’ve had too much to drink and a memory stick is very handy, a 4GB. I was only joking as well about that too much to drink but you can do good voiceovers if you have a lot of whiskey.
Anyway, a memory stick. Four gig memory stick have got to be enough memory that you can take it form the laptop and if you’re in a country say, like India, as I’ve experienced or Italy where the broadband and wireless coverage is somewhat patchier and you need to go to a McDonald’s to send that or go to a local internet cafe to send off your stuff. I would be armed up with all those things if you were a voiceover in a foreign country.
Now, getting back to me and where I’m at now, I’m in Seborga, Italy that’s because I live and work here but I work not too far away in Monaco with Riviera Radio which is the English-speaking radio station on the Riviera for the side of France. So I spent 45 minutes from here. I’m hoping to get a place a little bit closer to it but that’s another story.
Now, as we move on with the Voices.com podcast, I mostly say, it would be very interesting to hear from other Irish voice artists all around the world. So if you are, just give us a shout. I’d love to hear from you and you know I’m sure if you just contact Stephanie at Voices.com, she’ll pass on all of my details to you.
What’s it like landing in a foreign country, outside of Ireland or England to work as a voiceover? Well, it was interesting. Just little things like obtaining visas and that. In Luxembourg, you have to be interviewed by the police even if you have a letter of police clearance from Ireland. now, I would have thought, you know, where the EU. I mean, if you move from the West Coast to the East Coast of the States, you don’t have to go down to the local cop shop and be interviewed.
And the same thing happened to me here in Italy but, I guess they just want to keep tabs on everybody and keep the movement on them. Anyways, if you got a Facebook account, everybody knows what you’re at these days. So I think there’s a few things like that. I mean, if you’re working in places like Luxembourg and I was very lucky in that. I worked for Radio Luxembourg and RTL and they own the huge advertising agency, IP and worked with some great coaches there like Cecile Somers. Thank you very much, Cecile.
And we did some commercials which were kind of bi-lingual where you’ve got to have some pronunciation differences. So, you know, you’ve to really have a little bit of the dialect and maybe know how to do the accent of it, you know. Like if you want to say wine names and things like (indiscernible). You know, you need to really change how you deliver and maybe a listen to the way that the French or the Italians or per se the Germans speak. You’ve got to really tune your voice to the sound of how they do it. Not that you necessarily need to speak the language because the words are there in the script but you would certainly need to know how to pronounce them that they sound authentic. I think that’s the important thing to remember.
I hope I’ve covered everything on this Voices.com podcast. It’s always a pleasure. You can check out more about me at endacaldwell.com. It’s great to talk to you and I wish you the best of Irish voiceover look and I thank you for tuning into this podcast at Voices.com.
Julie-Ann Dean: Thank you for joining us. To learn more about the special guest featured in this Voices.com podcast, visit the Voiceover Experts show notes at Podcasts.Voices.com/VoiceoverExperts. Remember to stay subscribed.
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