ejsvoicecast season 2 episode 11

The speaker is discussing their journey of becoming a voiceover artist. They recently completed a VO Gym class and had a one-on-one session with a coach. They received feedback on their previous recordings and were advised to work on reducing mouth noises and improving projection. They also mentioned the challenges of recording at home with background noise and mentioned setting up a Fiverr account to attract clients. They created demos and refined their offerings and pricing. Overall, they are making progress and hoping to attract more clients. I'm changing who I am. I'm making a new plan. Rearranging my life. Hey there, everyone. Welcome back to EJ's VoiceCast, the podcast that takes you on my journey of becoming a voiceover artist. Based on what one of my coaches said, you are a voiceover artist. You are a voice talent already simply by just doing it. So I have to change that intro going forward. So the last time on EJ's Voice, I completed my VO Gym class with Coach Grant. It was, as I said then, great. My other class for animation was canceled. Don't know why, but I did get to do a one-on-one with with Austin Moret. And that was fun. I got to do some re-practice reads. And the one we picked was a copy from Gravity Falls, the TV show. Enjoyed that program, watched it with my daughter. She kind of stopped watching it, but I kept going because it was fun. I haven't seen every single episode, but I've seen quite a few. I like the characters and the storytelling. It was really well done. They ended it. That was well done, too. So what did I get out of the class? Well, there was pre-posting. So working with a coach, they're going to ask you some background information. You send that off and have an idea of which way to take the class, especially since it's a one-on-one. So I provided Austin with that information, why I wanted to get into VO animation, what I was looking for, where I was at in life. All those things coaches need to provide you with relevant and effective advice going forward. He did listen to some of my work after we got on to hear what I had sounded like before to hear where I was in the middle. And then where I was at that time, I sent him three samples. The first one he listened to. Yeah, he said it was terrible. The levels were not good. That was done on GarageBand. When I switched over to Audacity, it got cleaned up. He said I noticed that. And the one I had sent to him, the last one, the third one was one I had recorded that morning, like 20 minutes before class. I did an audition for something. And he said that was pretty clean, but he hears a lot of mouth noises. Hopefully you guys aren't hearing a lot of smacking when I hear when I listen to it and do the edit of this. I don't always catch that. I look for it in the in the track. Try and get out of those bumps and boogers, as one of my coaches mentioned, to make sure it's clean. One of the things I need to do is work on the that are in here. There are quite a few. Most of them I get out before I post this, but they can be there. That takes more concentration on my part. I notice when I do this in Japanese, those aren't in there because I'm pretty much reading it and I'm not, for whatever reason, being stuck between sentences. To get rid of the mouth noises, back to eating more apples. And while I was typing this up, I was eating apple slices and drinking plenty of water. Normally, before I do a read, I get in there, brush my teeth, do a whole rinse out. Got to start doing more staying hydrated and keeping those noises out that annoy people. So speaking of reads, I mentioned that I read parts from Gravity Falls, so I got to read Grunkle Stan. I really enjoyed that. I like his character. It's pretty funny. He listened to my voice, commented that it's a good one, which I've heard before, which is one of the reasons why I'm doing this. People say I have a good voice. Let me use it. Projection is one of the key things I need to work on because of where I live in Japan. Walls are a little bit thinner. Houses, mansions or apartments are smaller. So noise carries far. This one's been pretty good. This one's pretty thick, so I don't hear a lot of noise from our upstairs neighbors. We only have neighbors on one side because we're on an outside unit. That's down to a minimum. So I may have to start putting up my makeshift booth again to help cut down outside noises and help muffle myself when talking because you can get really loud when doing projection. Being close to the mic is okay, but sometimes you're a little further away from the mic and then you bring it back in so it gets that feeling of you're back here talking and yelling. And now all of a sudden you come in close to the mic, say your line, whatever it happens to be to make your point as if you're coming across the room. Your part may be that you're across the street and yelling at somebody, which doesn't sound like this. It sounds more like this. And then you get a closer like and I told you not to do that ever again. So I'm not projecting that loud, but I'm trying to get the urgency in my voice. So for anime, cartoon, that type of voiceover, that would probably be a very good requirement to to fulfill. But when you're doing a narration or you're reading a commercial, maybe not so much. Now, talking about those sounds, when I close my door, I got my headset on and the mic is on. I can hear a lot of what's going in on in the house. Well, life starts up laundry or yelling at our daughter. I can hear that in my headset with the door closed and the shield around the mic. So I have to make sure I record in the morning, like right now, it's like five forty nine on a Sunday morning here. My daughter's already split to go to work. Wife is still asleep. So it's kind of quiet. The doors closed, the AC and the heater are off. So you don't hear that. It's getting kind of warm in here with the sun coming up, but you don't hear the crows and whatnot outside. Scooters and cars going by. We live on a pretty quiet street. So that's good. But as the day goes on, of course, you're going to get more and more noise. I played around with recording with that open and closed and then trying to clean it up in post. It works fairly well, but it's just easier to close the window of the patio. So, yeah, I can hear my daughter's got her door closed and she's in there doing her thing. I can hear her singing while I'm in here gaming on Destiny 2 or something. I can hear her singing. I close my door. Kind of can still hear her singing, but I know the mic would pick it up. I have a decent mic. I didn't go crazy and buy like a Sennhauser. Some mics that, you know, you pick up a fart two buildings over. Mine is the Elgato DX and it works quite well for me. I plan on keeping it. So far, no one's complained that everything sounds terrible. I'm going to go with that. It may cost a little bit of money to maybe do some more touch ups in here. Not sure what else I can do. Nothing really going to break the bank. I could probably put up some soundproofing tiles or something on the door or whatever to help hold in some of the noise. But we'll go from there. Speaking of costs and funding, Austin suggested I expand my reach and use other platforms. Also, the tagging that I'm doing on voices do a better job with that, which may be why I am not getting picked up. So I set up the Fiverr account and started learning how to be a freelancer in that world. Voices is the same thing, but this is more direct in my control. I'm posting costs and everything because I'm out actually actively looking for clients for my business rather than having, I guess you could say voices being my my office staff. I am my office staff on Fiverr. It can't hurt. You know, folks are looking everywhere to find talent. So maybe they don't want to go through voices because they don't want to fund it that way. They're doing one off and they don't have the budget to invest in five in invoices. And Fiverr is just an easier and easier lift for them. I need to leverage the location and what my offerings are and how to place that so that I can attract clients who are here in Japan, who are looking for somebody to do English language dubs or voiceovers such as e-learning and corporate, you know, welcome aboard audios. They have a pretty good learning video. I'm about 90 percent through it from last night. I will go through it again, of course, from start to finish to pick up anything I missed. And, you know, dot eyes and cross keys. Other information that Austin provided was actually create a demo, which I was kind of steered away from because I didn't have anything to demo. So creating a demo, though, does help with that voice match on voices. So I did. I grabbed three copies, different types, read them for those areas that I'm interested in. Learning narration, podcast intro, outros, things like that, and posted them up. Hopefully the bump I've seen this week, which took me from the 40 percent up to 60 percent, and then some of the 80 percentile range will start getting higher. There'll be more work required, of course, on my part to make sure that it is going in the correct direction. But so far, so good. So, again, on Fiverr, I said I set up the account. It was pretty straightforward, wasn't difficult. I made a mistake out of habit when I first created it and listed myself as being in the US physically. Well, I'm not. I'm in Japan. So it was a little more work, but I did get it changed. I didn't have to destroy the account and recreate it. It now says I'm in Japan, which should be very advantageous for me. So on Wednesday of this week, after completing all that and getting the basically the flag from Fiverr, because they do a review of what you set up to make sure you're not doing anything crazy or nutty, it went live. I published it and it went live yesterday. I got in and did some more work. As I said, I listened to the training videos, did some work. My demos were in there. I cleaned up what my offerings were, changed a little bit on my pricing to bring it down. I thought when I priced it, I was kind of being ridiculous. I was throwing numbers in there, but I refined them. So, you know, a hundred word read, 75 bucks. And for every 20 or 25 more words added, it's an extra 10 bucks. I'll get your product back to you within two days, two business days. Make sure I put that in there, even though, you know, there are weekends, I'm saying business days. I'm going to try and keep to that so that I can under-promise and over-deliver. Put it that way, rather than the other way around. Something the guy really stressed in the learning video from Fiverr. Yeah, I don't want to take on too much work and get swamped where I can't even produce what I'm supposed to. You don't want to get involved in that because, as I mentioned before, I do work full-time. This isn't my full-time gig, not yet. Working towards that. But I enjoyed that animation class. It was lots of fun. I'd love to do more. I would actually love to do a animation read. Some of the things that I want to get into and learn how to do are directed sessions. Source Connect, I believe, is a big thing that is being used to do those. Other people use Zoom. Some people use, what is it, Teams. But I really want to get into that. And I think there's a class coming up on that. So I will probably sign up for that and get some practice. And so I understand what how to do that and what it's like to do a directed read. Key points, takeaways from the last week. More projection. Get rid of mouth noises. Improve my online views so folks know who I am and want my services. And get more coaching. I didn't mention that to Austin that right now I'm transitioning into, after about, what, nine months I've been doing this since last August. By August of this year, I plan to have set up a schedule so that I can include more coaching and getting myself out there more. Right now I'm trying to learn a lot of things on my own. Dabble in the waters. Make my mistakes. Then I have something to pass on to somebody coming up behind me, like you folks, that I can say, hey, don't do this. Try this. Or I tried that. It didn't really work for me. I've known other people who've had success with it. Give it a try. All you can do is fail. Call it what it is. But you learn something as I've learned something. The key takeaways I can give you are when you do do a recording, make sure you preview recording before you post it. Maybe your site like Voices has a preview button. You can click it and listen to make sure what you recorded, what you named it, is what you posted. So when you listen to it, you hear the wrong audition going to the right client. You can quickly delete it and upload the correct one. Closing words, feedback subscriptions are welcome. Highly encouraged the links at the bottom of the show notes. And if you have any advice or stories to share, by all means, throw me an email. Thank you for joining me on the voice cast. We'll catch you on the next episode. Yes, I like my right to fight to die. And this is my game to play to claim a brand new name. And I'm gonna lie to you. I'm a bit nervous that I might screw everything up that I've ever done. But what's the point of living if you ain't having fun? I guess I'll try this. Try that. Might miss. Gotta find what I'm good at. I guess I look here, look there. Over where am I scared? Where am I at? I gotta make it in this life. Whatever makes me happy. Know I'm doing things right. Sipping in the summer on a goose dance ride. We'll find a nightclub for the end of the night. Oh, and we all got dreams. We all want things. But what you gon' do for it? How you gon' move for it? What you gon' be? And do you believe we can do it again? But what you gon' do for it? How you gon' move for it? What you gon' be?