Finding My Voice

I went to a local business networking meeting the other day.  I hadn’t been to such an event before, but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.  One of the first things that happened after I entered the room instantly reminded me of this video by fellow voiceoverist Philip Banks:

While I wasn’t exactly pelted by business cards, my first few interactions with people at this event were fairly shallow.  Could I have done better from my end?  Sure.  However, it’s a little hard to keep a conversation going when the person who just handed me their card has walked away after discovering that I have no card to give them.

This happened several times within just a few minutes of entering the room, but then something happened that was even more memorable.  I noticed a lady who was walking around the room with a collection of personalized faux-cloth bags hanging on her arm by their carry-handles, each one folded up nice and flat.  She approached me and said something to the effect of, “Hi!  I’ve got a bag for you!”  After handing me the bag (which contained a collection of promotional trinkets for her business), she immediately moved on to find the next bagless person in the room.  No small-talk.  No mention of her name (that I can recall).  No effort to see if I even wanted a bag.

Want to leave a lasting impression?  Do something memorable.

Want to leave a lasting BAD impression?  Do something memorable that says (essentially) that you care more about spreading the word about your business than you do about developing a real relationship with someone.

Networking isn’t about tagging as many people as possible with something that has your business name on it.  It’s about building relationships of trust.  Do you really think that I’m going to trust you with my business — or the business of someone I know who is looking for your services — if all that you did in an attempt to earn my trust was hand me a card, a pen, a bag, or anything else?  That only says that you care about you.  As the saying goes, “They won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”  To expand that in a business context, a potential customer won’t care how much you know (about insurance, real estate, auto repair, etc.) until I know how much you care about them.

Now, I don’t claim to be perfect.  I’ve made plenty of mistakes, and I’m not proud of any of them.  However, I know for a fact that I will never make certain mistakes again, especially after having seen them play out in a slightly different form at this recent meeting, and the careless “shotgun” approach is one of them.  Thankfully I haven’t sent many “Here’s my demo!  Give me a call if you need anything!”-emails, but sadly there have been a few.  Not any more, though.  I’ve got a bright pink promotional keychain to help me remember that lesson.

My wife is pursuing a Masters degree in Music Education, and it’s interesting to see how her view of certain types of music is affected by the things she’s picking up in her classes.  While driving home after her last class yesterday, she was listening to a strong orchestral-choral track from an album full of music composed specifically for film trailers.  She later told me that in comparing that piece to similarly-styled pieces by classical composers, a description came to mind that seemed to capture her feelings about the more modern piece in the most succinct way possible:

Epic fluff.

The music sounds big and powerful, and when married to the quick-cutting, fast-paced visuals of a dramatic film trailer, it creates the impression of grandeur.  However, when separated from the picture and analyzed it on its own, its lack of true substance becomes clear.

As you can imagine, epic fluff isn’t isolated to the realm of music.  From food to entertainment to physical enhancements, we’re frequently sold a bill of goods that may have body, but most certainly does not have soul.  The sad thing is that despite the lack of true substance, we often return for more.

Can I recognize epic fluff in the things, people, and situations that I encounter each day?  I’d like to think so, and in many situations I feel like I do pretty well.  However, I fear that there are plenty of times when I decide that I’m happy to accept epic fluff in favor of something with more soul.  I choose cheese fries over salad, a mindless action flick over a thought-provoking drama, or web-surfing over working toward my goals.

So how does one work to avoid epic fluff?  I believe that it starts with a conscious decision: a decision to forget the fluff and search for soul.  It sounds easy in theory, but you may already know that it’s a lot harder in practice.  It’s way too easy to fall for the fluff, partly because we’ve fallen for fluff so many times before, and partly because the fluff is often packaged more prettily than its soulful counterpart.  How is the pattern broken?  My gut says that it’s broken by implementing another easy-in-theory-but-difficult-in-practice principle: choosing to think more carefully before we act.  It could simply be a matter of asking the question, “Is this epic fluff?”  If the answer is yes, it would be wise to avoid it.

So what on earth does this have to do with voiceover?  Plenty, but I’ll let you ponder the application on your own.  If you have thoughts on this subject, I’d love to hear them.

I just ran across a fascinating example of interactive multimedia.  The thing that kills me is that I didn’t know that it was interactive until the “show” was almost over.

It might have helped if I could read the text used throughout the piece.  I have a hunch that somewhere on the splash page are simple instructions that explain how visitors can play a part in the presentation of the work, but everything is in Spanish.  Even though I took a couple of years of Spanish in high school, what little of it remains in the ol’ noggin after (*gulp*) twenty years didn’t help.

It might have helped if I’d paid closer attention to a couple subtle visual cues.  They were there from the very start, but I initially viewed them as merely part of the “show,” even though I couldn’t quite figure out how they fit with everything else that was happening.

Near the end of the presentation, I realized that the mouse cursor still sat in the middle of the view, right where I’d left it after clicking “Play”.  As I reached for the mouse to move the mouse cursor out of the way, a series of thoughts shuffled through my mind in rapid succession…

“Interesting.  The cursor happens to be sitting right where….oh…wait.  If I move it, does that mean that…..ooohhhh….it does!  I’ve been passively watching it play out when I could have interacted with this thing all along, making myself a part of the experience!  Now that’s pretty aweso-……….aw, maaaaannn.  It’s over.”

I kicked myself for not seeing the cues for what they were, and for my poor recollection of Spanish that likely would have helped me learn about the piece’s interactive nature sooner.  Then I took the natural next step.

I reloaded the page and tried again.

Looking back at my earliest attempts at reading commercial copy for my first voiceover coach roughly two years ago, I cringe at how naive I was about the voiceover business.  Similar to my initial view of this interactive piece, I’d say that my initial reads would fall under the category of “passive”.  I somehow had the idea floating around in my head that the bulk of what I needed to do was give a clear and clean read, and that was it.  The same could be said for my initial approach toward narrative work.  I’d begun a solo project for Librivox a few months prior to my first coaching session, and my primary goal when reading was to keep it clean and clear, without rushing things.  I’d also begun creating spoken versions of a weekly family letter that I’d been writing for a couple years.  Yep, you guessed it.  Same goal.

Give me a character to perform, though, and all the stops would come out.  Mr. and Mrs. Clean’n'Clear were there, along with their pal August Dontrush, but I also invited a bunch of other folks to those sessions who I’d been ignoring for the commercial and narrative reads: Madame Texture, Monsieur Character, Li’l Miss Attitude, and the most important contributor of all.

Me.

Why did I feel that these folks had no place in a commercial or narrative read?  Beats me.  What’s really strange (and somewhat sad) is that I still didn’t “get it” for many months after those initial commercial coaching sessions.  During those months I continued soaking up voiceover info from blogs, podcasts, forums, etc., but for some unknown reason the stuff that I read and heard didn’t touch on the one key idea that I somehow needed to break my preconception that it was “voiceover vs voice acting”.  When I finally heard/read someone share that key idea, though, it jolted me awake:

“Voiceover is voice acting.”

What?!  You mean to tell me that I could have — and should have — been applying my passion for acting toward all areas of voiceover, not just the fun character parts?  That I should have brought my soul to all those reads, and not just my voice?

Yep.

Why did I not see this sooner?  Were there subtle cues pointing to this truth all along?  Did I miss something in the instructions that would have led me in the right direction sooner?  Did I not have the proper interpreter to help me understand the instructions that I’d been given?  No matter.  I had the answer.  All that I had to do was take the next natural step, a step similar to the one that worked with this beautiful piece of interactive sight and sound:

Reload the page — replacing the one in my head that contained the mess of my former misconceptions with a clean one that began with this new discovery — and try again.

“You never get a second chance to make a first impression.”

I forget how long ago I heard that wise bit of wisdom, but it has always stuck with me.  It hit close to home many years ago when the mother of a high school friend told me about the first impression she had of me.  She saw me in church, where I was sitting in a bit of a slumped pose, my unkempt mullet framing a rather morose expression on my face.

First impression (in today’s terms): meh.

As she related this story some months after that initial impression, she said that she was glad to know that the real me wasn’t as morose as the image I presented at that time.  Similarly, I was glad that she’d taken the chance at getting to know me.  Still, the story of her first impression stuck with me, and led to conscious changes in the way that I presented myself.

This situation came to mind after reading some comments by Kara Edwards in response to a recent article on VoiceOverExtra.  The article presents an example of how one individual made the wrong first impression with an agent, and Kara shares some great follow-up thoughts.  The final sentences from her post are particularly valuable:

Also, make sure to approach everyone in this business (or in any business for that matter) with a ‘Here’s what I can do for you’ frame of mind, NOT a ‘What can you do for me?’ attitude. You’ll find more doors are opened by being kind, humble, and prepared.

“Kind, humble, and prepared.”  Those are words to live by, and it’s easy for some to ignore those words — or greatly undervalue their importance — when looking to break into a desired line of work.

I’m reminded of a call that was patched through to the animation department at Reel FX one afternoon about a year ago.  I was the (un)lucky bloke who answered it, and whose ear was immediately hit by a barrage of words.  After a short stretch, it became clear that the caller was a fledgling animator who was looking to break into the business, and who couldn’t hold himself back from presenting a rapid-fire sales pitch.  He claimed that he was self-taught, had gone as far as he could down that path, and wanted to find a studio that was willing to meet with him in person to see his material and give him a chance. I practically had to interrupt to ask him questions.  After each question, he’d launch back into pitch mode to provide an answer (and then some!).

Did he have a demo reel?  No.  Was he willing to take the time to prepare a reel?  Not really.  Was he willing to work with the local school that he was now attending to wait for one of their tours of the studio?  No.  Everything I got from this guy felt desperate and pushy.  He complained about how various people that he’d talked to previously (including those at the school) didn’t understand him, and how he didn’t want to take the time to go through the established processes/channels.  In short, he wanted us to give him the green light to come to the studio immediately and talk to us.

One of our supervisors encouraged me to get his name, and after sufficient wrangling, I eventually did.  After the call was over, I passed the name along and asked the supervisor why he wanted it.

“I’ll pass it on to recruiting,” he explained.  “I want to make sure that we never hire him.”

Strange that some prefer to burn bridges before they even cross them.