Radio’s Centennial, Promo and Trailer Teleclass, Queen Elizabeth II is Podcasting, Turning Non-union Jobs into Union Jobs, and how to use Watermarks in your recordings.
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Radio, Union and Non-Union Jobs, Audio Watermarks
Transcript of Vox Talk #2
Male: Episode 2
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Welcome to VOX Talk brought to you by Voices.com. My name is Stephanie Ciccarelli, co-founder of Voices.com and your host for today’s show. VOX Talk is about you. It’s a new podcast that helps you grow your voiceover business.
Each episode will begin with news and current voiceover events in a segment called The Loop. Then we’ll explore business development and hot trends that will set you apart as a professional voice actor. Next on the list is Tech Talk, a segment where our team will review products and guide you through the technological landscape.
Now that we’re ready to go, let’s move on to our first segment.
Male: The Loop, informing you of news and current voiceover events.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: Radio is 100 years old. Once upon a time, someone had a brilliant idea. The date was Christmas Eve 1906, the man was Reginald Fessenden and his idea included transmitting his voice and the singing of a Christmas carol to ships in the Atlantic and the Caribbean. By doing so, he gave the world what is considered to be the first radio broadcast. Truth be known, Reginald, a Canadian citizen transmitted history’s first wireless voice transmission in 1900 while he was under contract with the Weather Bureau. Later that year, he would go on his own, proving his theory on December 23rd from an island in the Potomac River. At the time of his death, Reginald Fessenden had over 500 patents to his credit.
In other news, Rodney Saulsberry, author of “You Can Bank on Your Voice” and the voice of television promos and numerous movie trailers such as “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” “Finding Forrester,” “Tupac: Resurrection,” “Friday,” and “Dumb and Dumberer” is teaching a six-week promo and trailer class on Thursday evenings starting on January 11th through February 15, 2007. Seating for this teleclass is limited to 12 participants on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information about Rodney Saulsberry’s promo and trailer teleclass, visit VoxDaily at blogs.Voices.com/VoxDaily.
Our last story is about technological advancements at Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth II is now a podcaster. In conjunction with the BBC, all of Queen Elizabeth’s speeches are now being podcasted as well delivered through broadcast mediums. Queen Elizabeth recorded her official Christmas message earlier last December as a podcast ensuring that avid listeners and royal admirers would be able to subscribe ahead of time thus receiving the MP3 message as it happened in tandem with a live broadcast scheduled for Christmas day.
Male: The Biz, helping you grow your voiceover business.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: This week in The Biz, we’ll be looking at how you can turn a non-union voiceover job into a union voiceover job courtesy of Avi Melman and Pat Fraley. In his holiday podcast, Avi Melman interviewed the illustrious Pat Fraley, voice actor, author, guru and all-around great guy. While I was listening to the podcast, something struck me. I’ve never heard of this before but upon closer examination, it makes absolutely perfect sense.
If someone offers you a job and states that it is a non-union job, you as a union talent can still take that job by following a simple formula deemed kosher by the union. For example, Pat is a union player. A client offered him a job to voice a talking parrot. The job itself looked like it would cost about $500 to do, perhaps less. Pat quoted $1000 and the client was quite agreeable but insisted that the job he was offering to Pat was still non-union. “No problem,” says Mr. Fraley. And why was it not a problem for Pat? Because Pat knows how to turn a non-union job into a union job.
Here is how you can do it too. By union ruling, you can turn a non-union job into a union job by taking the fee appropriate to a payroll company who tells you how much it’s going to cost. This payroll company acts as a union signatory doing all the paper work for you which in turn greatly simplifies matters for your client. The job is thus unionized. The union gets paid, the agent gets paid, Medicare gets paid and so forth. Rule of thumb, the fee needs to be 40 percent more than the AFTRA or SAG minimum for this formula to work. In other words, non-union jobs that pay lower may not qualify to be turned into union jobs. For links to the article and to the AFTRA and SAG rates, visit blogs.Voices.com/VoxTalk.
Male: Tech Talk, walking you through the technological landscape.
Stephanie Ciccarelli: This week in Tech Talk, we’ll talk about watermarks. A watermark is essentially a snippet of sound used to protect custom voice recordings in an audition situation or when asked directly to record a custom sample of the script. It could be a recorded beep, bell or tone that briefly overlaps with your voice, for instance occurring in the middle of a word or name in an audio recording. At Voices.com we advocate the use of watermarks and strongly encourage you to use them to protect your voice samples from theft or misuse.
To quote a conversation at VoiceOverTimes, this is how David Houston uses water marks, “If I decide to add a water mark, I just use a 0.5 second, 1 kilohertz tone placed every few seconds. A music bed played at a low level is another option. Just make sure that you note in your proposal that the audition has in fact been watermarked.”
You can download some sample watermarks here at Voices.com What’s even more exciting is that we’re currently developing a bank of tried, tested and true watermarks used by your colleagues in the (AudioWhiz). This collection will be a communal bank of royalty-free watermarks, absolutely safe and free for you to use to protect your work. If you would like to donate a watermark, send me an e-mail including your MP3 watermark to [email protected]
Thank you for joining us today. Log on to Voices.com for more information about how our service works and how we can serve you. Have a great day.
Comments
Boy, am I ever behind the curve. I remember listening to this podcast, but I didn’t realize it was seen fit to mention lil’ ol’ me. Belated thanks for the nod, and keep putting together these great podcasts.
~ DH