Voicey Judges Revealed, Superman actor Brandon Routh, Bettye Zoller Workshops, Grey DeLisle gives birth to a baby boy, Meeting your Peers in Person, Making a Commercial Part 3, tips from Neetu Danani in India.
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Voicey Awards Judges, Marc Graue, Nancy Wolfson, Rodney Saulsberry, Brandon Routh, Superman, Superman Returns, Man of Steel, Grey DeLisle, Bob Souer, Networking, Commercials, Production, Adam Fox, Neetu Danani
Transcript of Vox Talk #12
Male: Episode 12

Stephanie Ciccarelli: You’re listening to VOX Talk, brought to you by Voices.com. I’m your host, Stephanie Ciccarelli. If you’re interested in hearing the latest from the world of voiceovers, this is the podcast for you. VOX Talk is produced twice a week, so be sure to subscribe in iTunes to receive new episodes as they come. Let’s get started.
Male: The Loop, informing you of news and current voiceover events.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Judges for the 2007 Voicey Awards have just been revealed. The judges are Marc Graue, Nancy Wolfson and Rodney Saulsberry. The three judges represent the voice over industry well and are very excited to be part of the Voicey Awards.
To learn more about how you can nominate a voice talent to win a Voicey, go to the VOX Daily blog at blogs.Voices.com/VOXDaily.
In other news, Brandon Routh, star of Superman Returns, announced on his blog that the sequel to Superman Returns, entitled Man of Steel is shooting right now in Australia. Brandon keeps a blog at MySpace to share news as well as communicate with fans.
To learn more, visit the VOX Talk links for this episode at blogs.Voices.com/VOXTalk.
To wrap up, voice over coach Bettye Zoller is offering a couple of workshops this month including the Business of Voiceovers Workshop and a Voice Acting Techniques workshop. Both workshops take place in Dallas, Texas.
To learn more about the workshops and to register, go to VoicesVoices.com.
Before we conclude, I’d like to congratulate voice actress Grey DeLisle and Murry Hammond on the birth of their first child, Jefferson Texas Hammond on January 31st, 2007. Grey is known for her voice work in animation as well as her musicianship.

Male: The Biz, helping you grow your voiceover business.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: This week in The Biz, Bob Souer highlights the importance of meeting with your peers face to face.
Bob Souer: In the late 70s and early 80s when I was just starting voiceovers, just about everything we did, included various levels of human interaction. Auditions were done in a studio or at a casting director’s office. Sessions were always done in a recording studio but the last 10 years, as I don’t need to tell you, has seen a massive shift away from working in recording studios.
Now, essentially all of my auditions are recorded in my home studio as are the vast majority of my sessions but once was work that involved seeing old and meeting new friends and the engineers, producers, writers and directors at the sessions at recording studios has now become work that’s done alone almost all the time with e-mail, instant messaging, phone calls and ISDN or source connect sessions replacing the real in-person contact we once enjoyed.
I think we need to find ways to recapture these points of real human contact. Discussion groups, blogs, podcasts and other as yet untapped online resources will continue to give us places where we can hang out and have both business and personal conversations but there’s no substitute for actually talking with people face to face.
With this in mind, a few weeks ago, I got to thinking about a business trip I had coming up that would take me to western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. I knew two other voiceover guys from that part of the world, Dan Nachtrab and Ben Wilson so I e-mailed these guys and suggested we see if we could find a place to meet that was convenient for all of us and that’s just what we did. Dan, Ben and I spent four fabulous hours over lunch in Columbus, Ohio a few weeks ago. I left for home filled with a renewed enthusiasm for my work.
The next couple of months, I’m hoping to get together with a few of the other voiceover folks who like me, live and work in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can do the same where you live. Even if you don’t know anyone else who works in voiceover near you, if you search, you’ll probably turn up someone, maybe several someones.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Networking with other people is fundamental, that’s for certain. Thank you, Bob for sharing your thoughts on the subject.
If you have an audio piece that you’d like to see included in this segment or a suggestion, e-mail your thoughts to [email protected]
Male: Tech Talk, walking you through the technological landscape.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: This week brings us through to Adam Fox’s third installment in his making a commercial series. Here’s Adam Fox.
Adam Fox: All right, we made it to part three. Now, at this point, we have our session set-up, we have the VO all edited and laid in. We have the background music in with our volume envelope faded at negative 9 dB. All that’s left for us to do is to put in our ambient sounds.
So let’s take this basic idea and spice it up a little bit and make it stand out. Let’s add in the friend that our person is talking to on the phone. Now we can do that by adding a separate track and putting that in there. I’ve created a gibberish track with the help of my tools and me spouting some garbled speech into the mic.
Now, do we always really have time to do this sort of thing? Well, no but it can really set your project apart for going above and beyond and if nothing more, you’ve already started to build your own custom library of sounds. So, now we have our well-placed background music. We have our background sounds including the friend that we’re talking to on the phone plus we have our dry voiceover laid in. Now it’s time to mix. Now, by saying this, I’m sure this is going to sound very general by saying that you want to make sure that your mix is easily heard.
Again, now that’s its own in-depth topic and we could go on podcast after podcast. Let’s just say for sense of argument that you already have a basic understanding of mixing which we all do and we just want to make sure that that voice is very easily understood and it’s not covered up by any of the background sounds or ambient sounds because that’s what they are. They’re background sounds and ambient sounds.
We have all of our sounds mixed at the proper levels, we have our background music that drops down to negative 9 dB. It’s not crushing in on the vocals, the background sounds can still be heard but they’re not overpowering to the main vocal track. That’s our point. That’s our focus point and our selling point.
Well, we have our mix. So now we need to be able to save that bad boy and whatever file format our client needs. So once you’ve saved your file format, is it really over? I find that making a pass with a multi-band dynamics and some compression of one way or another and normalizing that track can really make that track stand out. You have a tendency to lose just a little bit when you convert a file format like that because after all, you are reordering the file, you’re re-rendering that file in a different file format and another pass with a normalizer can really make that difference between losing that oh maybe, half a dB or a dB to really making that thing stand out and get somebody’s attention very quickly.
So now, we have our completed spot. We’ve taken it from the beginning, from its concept either a script that needs to be written or one that’s supplied to you. We’ve covered interpretation, we’ve covered production, both the recording of the actual dry voiceover and also, to be able to spice it up and mix in some background ambience and some music. We’ve covered this topic and I know all of us are very familiar with these things but I wanted to kind of break it down to the mechanics because as these things become so fluid for us and we get to work at our feverish pace to keep up at the production deadlines, oftentimes, we’ll find a better mic chain or we’ll find a better way to do something that we’ve been doing forever and it has just become, well, I’ll get to that and fix that later.
This gives us a good opportunity to readdress the why we do, what we do and how we build those things from the ground up. If you’re already familiar with the software, the learning curve is very small.
So since we worked so hard for it, here’s the completed piece.
“Hey Jason, how you doing there?”
“What? You lost your internet connection again?”
“I’ll tell you, either you’re downloading habits need to be curved or you need to get another service provider.”
“Who am I with? Oh, I’m with Super Speed Nation. They are the fastest, most reliable internet connection on the planet. I can even talk to relatives overseas through my internet connection without missing a beat. Who are you with?”
“Oh, they don’t end up being quite what they advertise themselves to (meet you there). Well, let me tell you. There are no surprises with Super Speed Nation.”
“You want their number?”
“Okay, here it is, 151 …”
Super Speed Nation, visit us on the web at www.SuperSpeedNation.com.
Well, thank you so much for staying tuned to all three of these segments. If you have any questions, comments or feedback, you can reach me at AdamFox.Voices.com or at my production company website at DefiantDigital.com.
Take care of yourselves, everybody and until next time, thanks for listening.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: I hope you’ve been listening to all of Adam’s segments. If you’ve missed parts one or two of the series on making commercials, check out VOX Talk episodes 8 and 10.
Male: VOX Box, answering your voiceover questions.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Voice Talent Neetu Danani from India sent us her audio commentary to play in the VOX Box.
Neetu Danani: I think to be a good voiceover artist, it is very important to have a very base voice but if you don’t have a base voice, you can work on it. I started working on it by singing, having singing classes so that I understand how to talk from my stomach and have a beautiful voice because it’s not always important that your voice is sweet but it is important that it is sounding very, very sober and you can relate to that voice that does voiceover.
And also I believe if you want to take care of your voice, it is very important to not to abuse it by shouting, screaming or screeching your voice which is very wrong because our voice is our asset which has to be taken care and if not, it is your loss because if you want to be a VO artist or you want to be a dubbing artist or be a singer or anybody in the voicing industry, you have to have a very, very particular pattern of living which doesn’t consist of cold water, drinking lots of water, and yes, also gargling and having warm water everyday. I would just say that. Thanks a lot. Thank you.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Neetu, thank you for pointing out that a voice needs to be both sonorous as well as conditioned.
Before we go, I’d like to remind you to go online to nominate either yourself or one of your peers at Voices.com for a Voicey Award. Thank you to those of you who have already participated. You now have less than one week to get your nominations in there. Just go to Voices.com and click to download the nomination form on the VOX Daily blog.

As always you can send in your feedback via e-mail, audio clip and you can also call in to leave a message to air on the podcast. Just dial 1-888-359-3472 ext. 117. Looking forward to hearing from you and remember, stay subscribed in iTunes. Bye for now.
Links from today’s show:
Voicey Awards Judges
Brandon Routh MySpace
Bettye Zoller Voice Workshops
Grey DeLisle and baby Tex
Bob Souer
Adam Fox
Neetu Danani
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