While you’re waiting on those things to hit the web, though, I’ve got some sneak-peaks of all of them interspersed throughout my new reels. Though I personally had no qualms with my previous voice over reels (some of the stuff contained in them even made its way into the new ones), these things have a brief shelf-life, and I felt it was appropriate to incorporate some of the work I’ve been paid to do. Also, some advice I read on Bob Bergen’s website makes a lot of sense: don’t send an agent the same reel they passed on last time. I think the new stuff I’ve put together is an improvement, but I’m happy to take feedback from anybody willing to offer it. The Animation, Commercial, Audiobook, and Interactive reels now available over on the Reel page of this site are all new. So check ‘em out!

You’re already reading the book once ahead of time, so while you’re reading it, make a detailed list of each and every character in a Microsoft Excel sheet. (If you don’t have Microsoft Office, I don’t know how you survive in this world.) The columns in my Character Guide typically include Name, Appearances (usually just which chapters the character appears in), Description, Gender, and a number for easier organization later on. You can add more columns if you feel it’s necessary, too. For instance, in the Red Serpent books, I always have a column for Race to indicate whether the character is human or vampire. If you’ve got a book that involves a lot of different locations around the world, you may have a Nationality column to more easily determine where each character is from. Otherwise, just include that kind of information in the Description field for each character, as well as any other information that might influence his or her voice.

Once you’ve finished reading the book, you have a great resource telling you, in your own words, who each and every character is. But it’s not finished yet. Now, you add a Sample column to the worksheet. Starting with the most important characters, the ones that appear most frequently, find some dialog and record a short sample in that character’s voice. Once you’ve recorded a sample for a character, save it as an MP3, and select the appropriate Sample field in the worksheet.

Depending on which version of Excel you have, this step may vary a little, but in 2007, go to the Insert tab and click Object. Select the Create from File tab, then browse to the location of the MP3 you saved a moment ago. If you plan on sharing this Character Guide with your publisher or moving it to another computer, make sure the “Link to file” box is unchecked. Checking it saves space, but it requires the original MP3 be located exactly where it was when you inserted it. Otherwise, Excel embeds a copy into the worksheet, and no matter where you take that Excel file, you’ll be able to play those samples by double clicking the icon representing them.

Work your way down from the most important characters to the bit parts and one-liners. If you don’t know what to do for a certain character, skip them. Then, once you’ve figured everybody else out, you figure out what not to do based on what you’re using for all the other characters, and find a voice that works through process of elimination. When you’re finished, this Character Guide is essentially a comprehensive database of all the characters in the book and the voices you plan to use for them. Now, when you’re recording the audiobook, you have something to reference when you forget what voice you wanted to use for the bellboy when he says “Right away, sir” on page 163, and you’re not forced to risk repeating another character voice by guessing.

This method obviously may not be quite as feasible in the setting of an on-site studio recording as it is when you work from home. But, you never know. Ask the engineer if you can take a second to open up your laptop. It also may not seem nearly as necessary or even useful for a book with only six or seven characters. I’d still do it, though, because it really doesn’t take that much effort if you’re already reading the book before you start recording. And, as I said, that’s a step you really shouldn’t skip.

I didn’t know this until very recently, but it’s apparently rather common for audiobooks to be produced under a huge time crunch. So much so that the narrator is given no time to read the book in advance. Some experienced narrators have actually developed a common practice of, essentially, cold reading for the final product. Simply jump in the booth and read the book for the first time in front of a microphone. If you ask me, to do that is a huge disservice to the book, the author, and perhaps most importantly, the audience.

When you read a book, a good book, you get the sense that the author is completely in control of the story. Even though you probably have no idea where it’s going, he/she does. The author is in the driver’s seat the whole way, and you’re just along for the ride. Similarly, when you listen to a good audiobook, the narrator is doing the driving. Well… maybe a flying metaphor would work better, as the narrator’s kind of the author’s co-pilot, but you get my meaning. It’s hard to drive (or fly) somewhere when you don’t know the destination or the route. If you get into the booth with merely a synopsis on the back of the book to guide you, you’re not properly prepared to lead the audience on that journey. If you’re taking a tour of the rainforest, you don’t want a guide that’s never been into the rainforest before.

I take great pride in my ability to bring uniquity to each and every character. But this isn’t something I do by simply guessing at who each character is. A lot of characters in books are introduced through dialog long before the reader gets important details about them. The first time you’re reading a book, you may imagine a French character with a German accent, or a heavy smoker with a smooth and velvety voice, until you get to chapter eighteen and discover more information. If the first time you’re reading is in the booth recording final narration, you’ve now got to go back and re-record every inch of dialog that character’s had for the last seventeen chapters. But even if you’re not doing any character voices at all, familiarity with the story is essential to quality narration.

How many times when you’re reading a book to yourself do you stop and say, “Wait a second, did I miss something?” and go thumbing back through stuff you’ve already read to figure out exactly what’s going on? Sometimes, the author intentionally leaves the reader a little bit in the dark about certain things for a while. Other times, especially with books that aren’t as well written, there are situations that are inadvertently a little unclear for one reason or another. As the narrator of an audiobook, you have to know what the author means by the words you’re reading at all times. If you don’t, the listener will be able to tell that you’re just as confused as they are, and that’s not good. You’re the co-pilot, remember? How would you feel if the co-pilot on a commercial airliner came on to the intercom and said, “Good morning, folks. It’s my first time today, but don’t worry. In theory, I can land this thing if the pilot has a heart attack mid-flight.”

Preparation becomes even more of a necessity with books involving unusual character or place names, or words that don’t actually exist in the real world. It’s kind of a given that when you come upon a word you don’t recognize during your narration, you stop to look it up. But when that word is fictitious, invented by the author, you won’t be able to do that. Yes, the author will explain what his fictional word means somewhere in the book, but if that doesn’t happen for a while, you have no idea what you’re talking about.

Furthermore, you may not know how to pronounce the fictional word, character name, or location. Sure, you’ll be able to make a pretty good guess, but what happens when you deliver your finished audiobook featuring a main character named John Howe, pronouncing the last name “how-ee” all the way through, only to have the publisher tell you the “e” is silent? If you take the time to read the book before recording, you can write down all the words you have any inkling of uncertainty about, then ask your publisher if they have a preference on the proper pronunciations for any of them. In a lot of situations, they’ll tell you to use your best judgment. But it’s better to figure that out ahead of time than during or after recording.

I was going to smoothly transition from the subject of preparing yourself for an audiobook to my personal method for doing so, but this article is already way too long. So, I’ll save that topic for a follow-up article tomorrow. Stay tuned for part two!

The best example I can find right now that’s appropriate for all audiences (because a lot of them are about how to trick women into being more attracted to you, or how to increase your size, or how to perform better in bed, etc) is this video advertising the Truth About Abs program. I’m actually fairly certain the product in this case is actually legit, but the advertising method is still a pretty good example of the deceitful marketing I despise, and it definitely still applies for the purposes of this article. They put slightly more money into the production of this ad by hiring an artist to draw some simple doodles on a whiteboard for the visuals, but usually these ads are even more cheaply produced with simple black text on a white background, replicating the voice over and highlighting important words by making them bigger or different colors.

I’ll give another, more personal example to explain why these ads are deceitful and wrong, and why all voice over artists should avoid them like the plague. A few weeks ago, I submitted to a project on Voice123 that had specified a budget of $100 for a script with 7500 words. I very nearly deleted the project and went on my way, as $100 for a script of that length is absolutely ridiculous. I then thought to myself, “The going rate for audiobooks is about $200 per finished hour, and 7500 words is slightly less than that.” So, I quoted them a rate of $200, recorded the small sample of text they requested, and forgot all about it, assuming that since I had doubled the budget they stated they had available, they’d never be interested in hiring me.

Two days ago, I received an email from the client, stating they’d adjusted their script down to 4500 words, and increased their budget to $150. I told them I’d be sticking to my quote of $200, as it still undercut the standard rates of the industry quite substantially. They then agreed to my price, and sent me the script. It wasn’t until then that I fully understood the intended purpose of the piece. I was to record a lengthy anecdote advertising a product that would teach people with no programming expertise how to make “bank” on the app store. In this anecdote, I was to tell people how I made $42,724.05 last month, and how I’d be getting another $51,798.60 for this month any day now. The product was a membership to online courses teaching people how they could make that kind of money. Skipping ahead to the end of the script, “…our regular monthly membership rates are well over a hundred dollars per month. But NOW for a limited time only, you can take advantage of our premium lifetime membership for a one time investment of only $97.”

Needless to say, I turned down the job, telling the client that if their product really produced that kind of money for people, they’d be selling it for a little more than $97, and they’d be paying me a whole lot more than $200 for the voice over. But, in a larger, more global sense, it doesn’t matter whether or not the product being advertised actually can deliver as claimed. It doesn’t matter if it’s a complete and total scam or not. This kind of advertising is deceitful and wrong by its very nature. They originally wanted to pay $100 for, essentially, fake testimony, in the form of nearly half an hour of finished “professional” voice over. The “professional” part is intentionally enclosed in quotation marks because any VO working for that kind of money isn’t even paying their phone bill. Even if you don’t have a problem with blatantly lying to the audience and saying “I made a bunch of money doing something” you’ve never had any experience with in your life–not playing the role of a character, mind you, but leading the audience to believe you’re talking about yourself–you have to have a problem with the fact that somebody, somewhere, is making money by preying on you. They’re making money by preying on a whole bunch of people, but that starts with the person who agreed to do the voice over for an insultingly low price. Furthermore, you, the voice over actor agreeing to work on such a project, become part of the scheme, and help that person to prey upon others, as well.

As voice over actors, we have the power to put an end to this deceitful advertising fad. I recognize that it can be difficult, especially in this economy, to turn down money when it’s offered to you. In fact, when I asked my roommates their opinions about this project when the $150 was offered to me, they thought I was crazy for rejecting it. But the only reason they’re paying disgustingly poor prices for our services is because they think they’ll find somebody that will take it. The voice over industry has the ability to prove them wrong. By not working on projects like the ones mentioned above, we force advertisers to resort to more honest tactics. Pay real money, make real ads, instead of preying upon people trusting enough to take them at their word.

It’s doubtful that anybody reading this knows my origins in the world of voice over, so I’ll start with a little history. I made a small splash back in August 2005 with an amateur web-released radio play called The Chalice of Silvermoon. I wrote, directed, produced, voiced… basically, I did everything for the first few months until I brought my best friend, Erik Sanburn, in to split the workload with me. We found a home on a little site called WoW Radio (now extinct), a live shoutcast/podcast hub for fans of World of Warcraft. Over the course of four years, while dabbling in talk radio podcasts off and on, we developed a moderate fanbase with our silly radio play. Perhaps the peak of our popularity happened relatively early on with a machinima rendition of our pilot episode we used to win a couple of awards in the 2006 competition hosted by Xfire and Blizzard Entertainment. We continued the radio play, though not with the kind of frequency we would’ve liked, until some time in 2009 when we inexplicably and abruptly stopped.

We’ve been working on renewing the series for a while now, and we’re getting very close. During the past week, we finally made a public announcement about our new animated series, The Chalice of Evermoon. We actually wanted to keep it a secret all the way until release, but we need to get a little financial support from our fans in order to make it happen. I know the readership of KyleMcCarley.com isn’t exactly the same demographic. But this is, was, and always will be my pet project. And anybody who has a reason to read a blog written by a voice over actor is going to have plenty of reason to watch a professional caliber web cartoon. This thing’s going to be big. We just need a little help to make it happen.

So do us a favor. Hop on over to our GoFundMe page and offer a small donation. We don’t need a whole lot, and every little bit helps. Thank you, my friends.

To anyone considering a career in voice over, I encourage you to think about some things first. A lot of these apply to entertainers and performers of all kinds, so just substitute “voice over actor” for whatever entertainment profession you’re considering, and if it doesn’t make sense, skip to the next bullet point.

Of the two P2P sites I use to book voice over work, Voice123 has always been my #2. I never liked the idea of its SmartCast system, which decides on behalf of the voice over actor which projects he/she can or can’t audition for. I greatly prefer the open approach of Voices.com: let the community think for themselves. Recently, though, I’ve become increasingly agitated with the SmartCast system, as it’s slowly been increasing the number of projects it neglects to invite me to audition for.

SmartCast is Voice123′s catchy marketing term for an automated system that selects voice over actors to audition for individual projects based on several different factors. Some are basic, like the criteria of their profile (language, age, gender), but others are a little more abstract, such as your feedback history from previous auditions, and what the client’s personal taste is for your voice or voices like you based on the feedback they’ve given on previous projects. How an automated system can compare likenesses between two voices, I have no idea. This system invites VO’s to audition, starting with what it believes to be the most likely candidates and working its way down, until the project has reached its target number of submissions, which is something the client sets when posting the project.

However, the “likely candidate” part of that sentence isn’t entirely true. Because SmartCast lowers your priority on the invite lists of all projects if you’ve been auditioning more than the average VO. That’s right. You’re punished if you use the service you pay a subscription to too much. Now, before I get all bent out of shape over this, I have to say that I understand the objective of this limitation. Voice123 doesn’t want its market to be oversaturated with auditions from people who aren’t right for the projects they’re auditioning for. So, by holding over our heads the knowledge that if we audition too much, we’ll miss out on future opportunities, the system forces us to be extra selective with our submissions, which means we’ll only submit to things we’ve got a real shot at booking.

But the problem with this in my mind is that there is no definition for “too much” auditioning. The formula’s limit on this is based on your total audition count over a certain time period in comparison with the global average. That’s a number that’s constantly changing, so it’s hard to tell when you’ve crossed the line.

Furthermore, the automated system, SmartCast, doesn’t exactly limit you with a maximum number of auditions, anyway. It invites you to audition to certain projects, and then you’re allowed to decide to audition or not audition to any of the projects it invites you to. When it decides you’ve been auditioning “too much” lately, it doesn’t simply prohibit you from auditioning for more projects. Instead, it starts inviting you to audition less. At the end of every day, subscribers to Voice123 receive an email letting them know what projects were posted that day, and which of those projects matched their profiles. There’s a column in the list of projects matching your profile that indicates whether or not SmartCast has invited you to submit to that project or not. If you’ve been auditioning too much for SmartCast’s tastes, you’ll start to see more of the words “Not yet” in that column.

That’s the big problem I have with the system. VO’s are limited in how many auditions they can submit, but they don’t get to choose what auditions they submit to. It’s like having an agent who deliberately doesn’t pass on audition notices to you completely at random. And, keep in mind, SmartCast doesn’t have any idea whether or not you’re actually booking work, so your success rate doesn’t necessarily mean anything to it, especially if the clients you’re booking don’t leave you with positive feedback.

I personally believe that the voice over community is intelligent enough to make its own decisions. We don’t need a computer to decide those things for us. And, let’s face it, the number of projects a person might be right for is completely relative. Every voice is different, every project is different, and some people have more specific niches than others. I audition for projects pertaining to animation, video games, apps, radio commercials, web videos, phone systems, and more, in all five of the English dialects available on the site. I work from home as a voice over actor full-time, and I’m self-represented. Naturally, I’m going to be auditioning for more than the average Voice123 user.

But, I’ve proposed the idea of abolishing the current “Smart” Cast system on the Voice123 forums, and been met with absolutely no support. So, I’ve now proposed a compromise. Instead of getting rid of SmartCast, let’s revise its method of imposing limitations on paying VO subscribers. Let all VO’s see and choose to submit or not submit to any project matching his or her profile. But assign a hard number to each person that is their daily/weekly/monthly limit. This number can change based on the amount of projects being posted and the amount of auditions the VO is submitting compared to others, just like the current system uses those factors to determine whether or not the VO is invited to submit now. Essentially, the system would be exactly the same, but it would give VO’s the chance to decide which projects they’re right for based on the whole list.

If you’re a Voice123 member like myself, I encourage you to give this issue some thought. Once you know where you stand, weigh in on the forum topic I started on Friday. Something tells me nothing’s ever going to change if I’m the only one complaining about it.

So, VoiceBunny does not cast projects through auditions. It casts them through a race. They have plans to implement additional options for the casting process, but for now, that’s all they’ve got. In the future, they’ll offer an option for clients to accept submissions from X number of VOs and pick their favorite to use and pay. So, that method is a race in which ten people finish, and then the client just picks which of the ten finishers is the winner. Again, not an audition process, because the submission you send in is the one they use. No re-takes, no dialog. You get paid as soon as they decide to use your submission, and your business relationship with that client begins and ends in all of about five minutes. Finally, they’ll eventually offer clients the chance to browse profiles of registered actors and pick one to hire, but that service is already available through Voices.com, Voice123, and ten or twenty less reputable websites, so there’s really no advantage to VoiceBunny there.

So, clearly, clients who use VoiceBunny are not going to be very picky. A client who isn’t very picky probably doesn’t have a lot of money budgeted for their voice over. By design, the site caters to clients looking to pay for less than what quality voice over is worth. Hopefully, if they’re not paying quality prices, they won’t get quality work, but that will be determined by the voice over actors who choose to use the system. Based on the research I’ve done, I don’t have a lot of hope.

I signed up for VoiceBunny after receiving an invitation to join the beta a few months ago. It’s free, so why not? Since that time, I’ve received all of two casting notices from them, both of which were well below my personal minimum. I assumed I wasn’t receiving anything because the site was still in beta and it didn’t have a whole lot of usage on the client side yet. But a few days ago, VoiceBunny made a public launch announcement. Wondering how they could’ve possibly gained any useful information from their beta test with so little usage, I tried an experiment.

Admittedly, the site is still in its “beta” phase, and it’s brand new in the eyes of clients and voice over actors alike, so there’s plenty of room for it to develop beyond my study’s results. But it’s now in public beta, meaning it’s available to anyone who chooses to use it on either the client or VO side of things. When a VO registers for VoiceBunny, they configure their profile with their gender and age range, as well as the amount of time it takes them to complete projects of varying lengths and the minimum amount of money they’re willing to do that work for. Since I received, essentially, no results from my profile during the private beta phase, I temporarily lowered my minimum rates to, basically, $1, and reviewed the section labeled “Previous projects that match your rates and profile.”

In the 35 days preceding my experiment, 77 projects were posted to the Bunny, ranging from 3 to 1689 words in length, and from $5 to a whopping $133. Of all 77 projects, 3 were willing to pay $100 or more. The average rate offered on all of these projects was $36.30. For those of you reading who are not professional voice over actors, I’ll spell that out for you in plain English: The rates currently offered on VoiceBunny are beyond insulting.

However, the truly disturbing discovery I made came later. I dug a little deeper and discovered a “suggested pricing estimator” for clients to determine how much to pay for the work. The client types in a script, and the system calculates the average rate offered by all currently registered VO’s for a project of that script’s length (word count). When I copied and pasted a script of 413 words from one of Voices.com’s job postings (a job offering a budget of $250-$500), the suggested price VoiceBunny’s estimator gave me was $116.83. When I deleted some of the script and put in a word count of 214, the price was $85.73. 108 words yielded $62.15. So, assuming that estimator really is calculating based on the average rates of the site’s registered VO’s, the clients aren’t necessarily bottom-feeding because they’re cheap. They could be bottom-feeding because the voices on the site are completely devaluing themselves and the entire industry by trying to undercut their competition.

It is possible, in theory, that quality voice over actors with integrity could register for the site and enter more realistic rates and hopefully bring about equilibrium on the VoiceBunny market. But based on the discussions going on all over the web within the voice over community, none of the reputable VO’s have any interest in using VoiceBunny at all. Not only are the rates currently offered there completely insulting, but the system completely eliminates all possibility of an ongoing business relationship. A huge part of being a successful work-from-home voice over actor, really being a successful practitioner of any business, is the ability to keep your customers coming back for more. VoiceBunny, by design, does not allow voice over actors to instill any of their clients with a sense of loyalty. VoiceBunny casts the client’s project for them by taking the first person to walk in the digital door, and the client can’t even write that person a thank-you note. There is no interaction between the actor and the client whatsoever.

That is where the VoiceBunny system inherently fails. Even if the rates were to change as its userbase grows, by prohibiting the potential for ongoing relationships, prohibiting even basic communication between voice and voice-ee, VoiceBunny is an insult to the voice over industry. I would like to completely erase my VoiceBunny account based on principle, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do that; once you’re registered, you can’t un-register. Instead, I will do my part to improve the site’s assessment of the value of voice over work by setting my profile’s rates accordingly. And I will never be auditioning for a VoiceBunny project as long as its business model remains the same. I suggest any self-respecting and/or industry respecting voice over actor who had the misfortune of registering for this site and happens to have stumbled upon this message do the same. Any of you who were holding off on registering until the verdict was in, I think you know what your answer is.

Say no to bunnies.

UPDATE: Due to the amount of traffic this blog post seems to be receiving, I’ve removed links to the VoiceBunny website. If they’re there, the Bunny’s search ranking is improved, and I don’t want to help him in any way. If you’re curious, you’ll have to find your way to the VoiceBunny website yourself (it’s not very hard if you know the name).

However, I recently read something unsettling in regards to these websites that has slightly shaken my faith. Late the other night, while bolstering my LinkedIn profile, I joined a few voice over-related groups. I came upon a discussion about a new site from the creator of Voice123 called VoiceBunny (which will be the subject of my next big post). One of the big contributors to this discussion was a man by the name of Bob Bergen.

Bob Bergen is a modern day legend in the world of voice over, particularly in animation. His opinion is one I’m naturally inclined to give some weight to. In this discussion, Mr. Bergen asserted that the very existence of “pay-to-play” voice over websites like Voices.com and Voice123 (sites you pay a subscription to for the use of their services) is a detriment to the industry as a whole. Clients are able to pay voice actors less money by circumventing the unions, and the resulting fewer union jobs causes less work for union actors, and agencies and casting directors to be less likely to take a chance on newcomers. He believes that if those two websites were to close up shop tomorrow, the voice over industry would be better for it. Union actors would have more jobs to choose from, and non-union actors would be more likely to sign with union agencies and break into the unions.

His argument got me thinking. Bob Bergen’s career started during the “golden age” of voice over with an agent who was willing to take a chance on a fresh faced… err, voiced… kid with absolutely no credits on his resume. In contrast, still in the early stages of my career, I book enough work all on my own to support myself exclusively on voice over, have a resume that’d take four pages to print in full, and I can’t even get an agent to talk to me. Maybe the floodgates opened by Voices.com and Voice123 weren’t entirely a good thing.

Yet, this prompts the question: if taking lower paid non-union work is a bad thing, but I currently have no means of getting the higher paid union work, how am I supposed to feed myself? Like it or not, the P2P voice over sites are here to stay. If I stop using them, they’ll be just fine with their thousands of other clients, and I’ll be the one to suffer. It’s also worth noting that Bob Bergen is not only a member, but a board member for both SAG and AFTRA (soon to be some Frankensteinian SAGTRA or whatever they’ll end up calling themselves after the merger), so his opinion is a bit biased.

My friend and coach, Cheryllynn Carter, had these words of wisdom for me on the subject: “My beef with the union and vo is that by their apathy they created the current vo situation. Now that it is way too late for them to be involved they want the power back. The only way for them to do that is by guilting actors like you…the ones with talent and lots of potential into not working so that they can take the easy road and say non union actors suck. So they get a union shill to write an article or blog. Fight the power my friend.”

Ultimately, I have to do what’s in my best personal interest, and I have to believe that means getting paid to do what I love. Does that hurt the industry as a whole? Maybe. I don’t think so, though. And the blame doesn’t lay exclusively on me. I have standards. I won’t work for less than a certain rate on any project, no matter how small, and I charge substantially more than my personal minimum more often than not. Yes, these rates undercut union minimums a bit, but that’s because they have to in order for me to remain competitive. Because the industry is changing just as swiftly as technology is. The unions didn’t change with it, and now they’re trying to catch up. Until they do, I firmly believe that only good things can come from using the tools available to voice over actors to book work within their field of expertise.

UPDATE: Bob Bergen took the time to respond to an overly lengthy email from me and offered a lot of truly invaluable advice based on his wisdom and experience. While I still disagree with his sentiment that working non-union prevents aspiring actors from furthering their careers, I have to acknowledge that he gave me a LOT of useful insight. As a result, I’ve given my website another minor makeover, and I’m altering my marketing strategies in a way that should prove to be very effective. Thanks, Bob!

Starting with a career update, over the past two or three weeks, I’ve managed to swiftly climb out of the economic hole I fell into as a result of unpaid wages and voice problems. For starters, all the clients I’d been waiting on paychecks from finally paid me off. I also booked a slew of new gigs from both new and old clients. Nexon had me revisit the Chaos Theory Music studio in Santa Monica for some more Dragon Nest work, and I had some of the most fun I’ve ever had inside a booth. Keep an ear out for Matron Bristlebane in the next big update! Bubble Gum Interactive had me do some quick work for a new secret project of theirs that will, with any luck, take off in a big way some time in the near future. And a few new clients had me recording things like Prince Charming and the Seven Dwarves for some kind of flash-based gambling game and a chubby tribal chief of a village on some mystical world for a match-3-game coming to PC, Nintendo DS, and iOS.

So, that’s what’s been happening for me in terms of work over the past few weeks. Over the past couple days, I’ve also been developing my profile on LinkedIn, and on a mostly unrelated note, immersing myself in several hard-hitting discussions about the voice over industry. I’d like to share my opinions on these big issues here, but doing so is going to require a lot of lengthy writing, and it makes no sense to lump all of that together into one post. Instead, I’ll be adding a new post for each of these issues and publishing them to the site periodically over the next week or so. Depending on how many new issues I discover I have opinions about, this may turn into an unhealthy obsession leading to my unforeseen suicide, but we’ll go ahead and jump onto this crazy train and just see where it takes us, anyway. So, that’s it for this particular post, but look for another one to follow within the next day or two. We’ll start with the subject that kept me awake all night last night: The impact of non-union “pay-to-play” voice over job sites on the voice over industry as a whole.