One of the things I like best…

Is meeting young, talented people and, when possible, offering a bit of help. A very fine example of a talented young voiceover guy is Donovan Corneetz. Donovan lives near Raleigh, North Carolina so he’s not a long way from where I live in Charlotte. But, the only two times we’ve actually spent any time together has been out West. Two years ago we met for the first time at the 2005 edition of the Dan O’Day International Radio Creative and Production Summit, which is held in Los Angeles.

And Donovan was at VOICE 2007 as well, which was in Las Vegas. (Technically, we did actually say a brief “hi” while we were both in North Carolina, because he had to change planes in Charlotte on his way to Las Vegas and we ended up on the same flight there last Tuesday. But, you get the point.)

We enjoyed some wonderful conversations between the many sessions; but the most fun for me was getting to see Donovan in action. Here’s what happened. He knew from our conversations that I had brought my portable studio with me to VOICE 2007. So, when he received a call from one of his voiceover clients asking him to get a commercial recorded and delivered in less than 24 hours, he asked if he could record on my system. I was happy to help. We got his script through the web interface to his email, got levels set and began recording. In only a couple of minutes we had all the material recorded that we would need for the voice track for this spot. I then edited the pieces together and we had a nice clean take of everything straight through. That’s when the fun really started.

You see, Donovan not only had to record the voice track, he had to mix the spot with a donut jingle! Since all I had with me was my Sony Sound Forge set-up, which has only the most rudimentary of mixing functions built in, we had one big challenge. But, that wasn’t all. We also had to get the music bed! Donovan thought he’d saved a copy in his email, but he hadn’t. So, he called his wife and talked her through finding the file on his workstation at home and emailing it to him. We then made a few trial and error attempts to mix the voice track with the jingle, only to discover that the script had the length of the donut wrong. So Donovan had to re-record the voice track. (Eventually, to get things “just so” we combined portions of the 2 reads to get exactly the right length and delivery.) And then more trial and error attempts at mixing. Since I only had headphones with which to mix, it was a real “shot in the dark” as to the quality of the mixing, but eventually we arrived at something that sounded right to both of us.

Donovan then emailed the mixed file to the client and we hoped for the best.

The following day, he said he’d heard from a different client, who needed another voice track (this time without music, thankfully) and again it was a “right away” job. So we trooped back up to my room and did the email, record, edit and return email thing again. One side benefit to this project was Donovan’s discovery in his inbox of a note from the first client. They were very happy with the spot! Huzzah! And as it turned out, the day after, the second client was also very happy.
Mark my words, this young man is going places. Donovan Corneetz. You’ll want to remember his name.