Adventures in Voice Acting

My Colleagues, My People.

Adventures in Voice Acting

Photo by Antonino Visalli on Unsplash

Colleagues.

Let’s talk about relationships.  Professional ones.  Clients, prospects, coaches, directors and colleagues are all examples of important professional relationships.  One of these however, at least in my experience, is especially valuable to a rich professional life – colleagues.  

 

Feeling Lonely.  

I’ll be honest…I’m very much a verbal person.  That’s how I learn, process, and communicate.  Makes sense that I went into voiceover, right?  Voiceover however, is mostly a solo act, and although I am communicating with the listener, I am not speaking with another human being in real time.  I miss that interaction.  

Don’t get me wrong, I love working from home…the flexibility, convenience, and comfort can’t be beat.  But I do miss those professional relationships, confidants, colleagues that I had in the traditional workplace, where we’d talk through a challenge or opportunity one of us was facing.  Those discussions were impactful and led to some pivotal career decisions.  

Back to the present day, I don’t have coworkers here in my home office (aside from my pets), so I’ve had to figure out a way to replicate those collegial relationships for my present reality.   

 

Community.

And I have!

I’ve got my VO accountability group that shares goals, challenges and achievements.  We’ve been meeting every other Tuesday for a few years now.  I always look forward to those sessions.  No subject is off limits – conferences, classes, coaches, scripts, rates and everything in between.  While our focus is accountability, over time, we’ve become a safe space for one another – we’re colleagues and friends who’ve got each other’s backs.  

I’m also lucky to have voiceover workout group partners.  We practice scripts in different genres, alternating between performing and directing.  While I value their feedback and insights, I also enjoy hearing about their lives inside and outside of voiceover, and finding commonalities in unexpected ways like a love of rabbits, life as parents, or a passion for flowers.  

 

Growth.

I hope to continue to grow my network of colleagues – my people – in voiceover.  I want their success as much as I want my own, truly.  After all, I believe that there is room for everyone, if you want it and work at it, in voiceover.  Colleagues can help you navigate that journey.  All ships rise with the same tide, right?   

Interested in what makes up a strong professional relationship?  Check out this article from Harvard Business Review that examines 3 Traits of a Strong Professional Relationship.

 

XOXO,

Sarah

Social Media: A Reluctant Love Story

Adventures in Voice Acting

Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash

Anxiousness.

Social media makes me anxious.  It’s the features, the look, the hashtags.  I’ve never understood how to use it – how do you know when to post, what to post, and why am I posting it?.  Facebook came out after college, and since I’m not one to pay attention to new tech, when it became mainstream, I ignored it.  I eventually created an account at the encouragement of friends, but I never post. Why keep it?  Well, I use it for the groups that I am involved with – voiceover and my virtual gym – so I can stay in the loop.   Don’t get me wrong – I’m not being critical of those who love Facebook – I admire people who are active on it.  My inner introvert just comes out and screams, “hide!” when I think about posting or replying to someone else’s post.

What about other social media platforms?  LinkedIn is more my speed.  I feel safe in the professional environment, and I understand the boundaries.  Still though, I struggle with what to post about myself or related professional content.  Mostly I “like” and reply to others’ posts and share my own content when I feel inspired, which is rare.

I have a confession – I love Instagram.  It’s my guilty pleasure.  I have a private page where I post photos of my children, animals, and flowers, and follow friends, all things Bravo (don’t judge me) and my favorite podcasters.  Still, I don’t understand the difference between stories and static posts.  How do you know when to use which?

As to the others?  I like Clubhouse, but I am hardly ever able to jump into a room.  Forget twitter – that is a scary, dark place.  Tik-Tok just makes me feel old.

 

Excuses.

What is it about some social media (Facebook in particular) that gives me pause?  The idea of having something in writing in perpetuity is scary.  I also hate conflict and miscommunication, so there’s that.

There’s something else though – internal dialogue.  I’ve thought of myself as a non-technical person for my entire life.  I was one of the last in my peer group to get a cell phone, smart phone, and I was a hold out on texting.  So that means, I told myself, I must be “no good” at technology.

There’s evidence to the contrary, however.  I’ve learned to edit audio and I’ve set up my voiceover booth, so that’s something.  Tech may not be my favorite thing in the world, but it doesn’t mean I’m not good at it.  I suspect that my inner introvert has been using this excuse as a reason to avoid social media…. Back to that later.

 

Authenticity.

A few weeks back, I was on a zoom with other VO artists and the team from Celia Siegel Management  for our weekly, VO Brand Mingle.  The discussion evolved into how it’s important to be your authentic self and to put yourself out in the world in creative ways, because it will not only help you as an artist – it will also help your business.  I found this seemingly logical concept to be insightful.  I wondered, how am I putting my authentic self out there?   Aside from this blog and an occasional post on LinkedIn, I’m really not.

Back to my inner introvert.  Let’s call her Jane.  After this realization, Jane and I had to have a talk.  I told her that her negative attitude about social media was no longer serving either of us, and she needed to adjust her point of view.  Jane surprised me, she said OK!  Jane was ready to warm up (a little bit) to social media.  Ok, that’s the end references to myself in the third person (a little bit goes a long way).

 

Having Fun! 

I’ve started an Instagram page for my VO business!  My handle is @sarahmcpheevo – Follow me!  I love Instagram, but my private profile doesn’t seem like the best place to share my VO content, so I’ve started a new one!  I don’t know how often I will post but I am looking forward to interacting with my VO community and having FUN!  It’s ok that I’m not into Facebook right now, maybe I won’t ever be into it, and that’s fine because trying to force myself into it, is not being authentic.

I realize this story will not end like a fairy tale.  Instagram and I will not run off into the sunset holding hands.  First things first, I have to figure out how to take a decent selfie.  I took about a dozen before I found one that was acceptable for my profile picture.  There’s probably a YouTube tutorial I should look up.

Alright, I’m going to save this, post it on my blog, and go share it on LinkedIn.

Xoxo

Sarah

Voice Acting, Learning and Telling Stories

Adventures in Voice Acting

Storytelling, Voiceover, Voice Acting
Peregrine Photography

Looking Back.

I’m someone who tends to focus on the future.  I try to be better about being “present,” but it’s not easy.   I also don’t want to neglect the past…so in that spirit I’d like to share a memory of my first steps into voice acting.  As Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music would say (sing), let’s “begin at the very beginning, it’s a very good place to start,” with a story about my first voiceover.

Kidding and musical references aside, it was part accident and part kismet.  In 2017, I worked full time managing a public health HIV services program, and I was looking for ways to incorporate personal stories to improve health outcomes and reduce health disparities.   I found an opportunity to participate in a digital storytelling (DST) workshop with StoryCenter  and signed right up (after it was approved by work, of course – if you’ve ever worked in a bureaucracy you know what I mean).   In case you aren’t familiar with them, StoryCenter are the founders of the DST movement and have helped over 20,000 individuals tell their stories since 1993; they do great work – you should definitely check them out.

Finding Voiceover.

The DST workshop was an amazing, unique experience.  Here’s a very condensed summary: over the course of several days, participants (with the help of facilitators) write a first-person narrative story, record a voiceover of their story, and select images to appear with the voiceover.   They put it all together in a video, which results in a 2-4 minute digital story.

During my workshop, I went through this process, and without knowing it at the time, I recorded my first voiceover. A few weeks after the workshop, I was at home, shopping online (as one does), and the MP3 file from my voiceover started playing out of nowhere.  I was so confused.  I’m not sure how it happened (I must have accidentally opened the file without meaning to), but as I sat there and I listened to my voice play, I realized for the first time, that this was a field, a profession, and something I wanted to pursue.

Building Community.

Right away I began looking for training.  I have a theater background, so I knew I had the acting chops, but I also knew that voice acting is a craft all its own and I wanted to learn and develop my skills.  So, I started by doing research and took a few local and online classes; I got some good advice, made connections, made mistakes, listened to a lot of podcasts, found good coaching, and found a voiceover community.

Over time, I made friends, learned to edit audio, built my home recording space, and in 2020 (after lots of training and preparation) I had my commercial demo made.  I launched my website in January 2021, and I study my VO skills every day.  I am even working on several additional demos – K-12 narration and medical narration.  I have come a long way from that first voice over in my DST workshop and I will continue to grow and succeed because I am committed to excellence and quality in both voice acting and storytelling.

Telling Stories.

Yes, storytelling.  I see voiceover as a mechanism for telling stories.  Storytelling is an essential communication tool because it paints the picture of the messages we want to convey.  For example, in public health, messages are often framed in terms of statistics, graphs, rates, cases and maps.  While these are important pieces of objective, factual information – on their own they do little to impact individual behavior, thoughts, feelings or opinions.  Storytelling fills in the gray area in between the facts.  It offers a personal, humanized perspective on the public health issue, and puts the message into a real-life context for the listener.

As a voiceover artist, I do not tell my first-person narrative, as I did in my DST workshop, but I do communicate a message, a mission, a purpose and a story.  Thankfully, I am a natural storyteller, as well as an excellent listener, and to be a great voiceover artist, I need to be both.  As my friends at StoryCenter say, “Listen Deeply, Tell Stories.”