In any business, your business card is your introduction.
And depending on the business you’re in…sometimes your business card is not of the paper variety. It could be the decal on the side of your van, the picture of your band on your poster, or in our case, your demo.
The demo or demonstration shows what you have to offer any prospective buyer…it doesn’t have to include everything (and shouldn’t)…but it should include the very best of what you can do…all in a timely and efficient manner.
Most demo’s don’t get played past the first 5 to 10 seconds…as producers, talent scouts and creative directors and producers can usually tell in an instant if this is worth listening to immediately. And when they do listen further, it’s not to help make up their minds, it’s to help organize in their minds what you may or may not be useful for in any work they may have.
Some of the time, demo’s sent to Overnight Radio are of low caliber (ie: someone told me i have a voice for radio, so here is my iPhone recording of me doing my best daffy duck impersonation). Fair enough, we get that. Not for us, but we get it.
Other times, we get fantastic demos that show amazing range and a dynamic read, on a multitude of different types of scripts. We used to get very interested in these and follow up right away. But sometimes (more often than not), to our dismay, when faced with actually voicing scripts in that style, the voice talent shows a lack of skill in performing. We’d say ‘but you had such a great hard-sell on your demo…can we have it like that?” only to get a confused response of ‘but i DID give you that read”. This wasn’t a situation of us being duped by a voice talent swapping out their voice for another on their demo…it was their voice – no doubt about it. But for one reason or another, they could not duplicate the read for us.
We realized a few years in, what was actually going on…the voice talent, while possessing great voices – actually lacked in certain directing skills…directing themselves.
Directing yourself is something that looks easy, but it is quite the opposite. Like a band producing itself, for the most part…it comes off as directionless. It’s hard to navigate your car when you are inside it, with only a vague idea of where to go. If on the other hand you had a GPS unit to see your car from up above…your course will be well plotted, efficient, and get to your destination fast.
The same can be said of a producer. He/she is outside of your car (your voice) and can guide your finely-tuned engine to the destination (the message) far better than without. You are the driver of the voice, you are not the navigator. It took a lot of effort to mold your voice to what it is today, it’s concise, it’s beautiful and it’s worth listening to. These are the things you worked on your whole career and it’s paying off. Especially on the straight-away…scripts that conform to the race track you built in your mind for the optimal performance of your voice.
It’s when things start to veer off that straight-away that you start to need a navigator, or as they are known in our business, creative directors or producers. These navigators seem unnecessary to most voice talent, because they have been practicing on a certain road so long, that they have forgotten that roads curve.
If you have a hard-sell on your demo and you are a working voice talent…BUT no one gets you to do hard-sells, it’s because you don’t know the route, you don’t know how you actually did that great hard-sell on your demo. You most likely had a director/producer/navigator on that trip. And now when you are asked to go that route, you are lost.
In my opinion, most voice talent are fantastic at one or two types of reads on their own. Anything beyond those parameters requires a navigator…OR it requires you, for a lack of better terms, create your own GPS unit. This requires you to drive and drive and drive, and map and map and map (ie: voice, voice and voice again) until you have mapped out the voice area. This could take many weeks, to many years. And you will only know if you have done it correctly when people ask you to do that type of read again.
If people ask you to do one type of read over and over again, it’s because it’s the only read they feel you can do. You might be confounded by this, as you have done lots of other types of reads, and they sound great…to you. But if you were to honestly look at that read from a satellites point of view, you would see that it veers away from the actual destination intended.
Becoming your own director/producer is a talent few of us possess. It’s really tough to see the earth from our perspective. And while I advocate that everyone become their own director/producer, a more realistic approach is to fine tune what you can do, and represent that and ONLY that on your demo. Focus on what you are best at, and present that, a lot o that. If you are great at soft-sells, warm reads and the like, present that and only that on your demo. Don’t bother with acting, hard-sells, cartoon voices etc…just show us what your car can do, all by itself, without a navigator.
Anything else, is a reach at best, and false advertising at worst.