I’ve written a number of times about my generally happy experiences with finding work through Voice123.com. A few months ago they added a blog to the services they make available, with posting priviledges for those of us who are premium members.
Since my blog is mainly about voice-over, I read the posts there from time to time and today came across an excellent, and lengthy post by Michael Minetree. I encourage you to read the whole thing, but here are a couple of highlights, that really gave me a kick in the pants.
All one has to do is watch the new season of American Idol to witness how people throw half hearted attempts at getting to the big leagues. At times all of us are guilty of it. I noticed a while back that I myself had gotten “a little lazy” in the audition process. After 10 years, you tend to develop a routine where by you do everything the same.
Whew! As I read those words I realized that I had certainly fallen into the habit of routinely doing my auditions the same way each time. In fact, I had been wondering to myself just a few days before why the response rates for my auditions via Voice123.com and Interactive Voices seemed to be falling off lately. Duh!
Auditioning is also one of those things we have to do in order to get any work, so after a while it becomes like taking out the trash. If we don’t do it no one will – and as long as no one is watching, we can let it pile up for a while. What happens after it sits there for a while? It starts to stink. Much the same way our auditions do after we begin to see them as a chore, or something “that is beneath us” because we have been doing this long enough and we know what we are doing.
I generally try to do every audition that comes my way as quickly as I can, so I don’t really let things pile up; but the point here about seeing auditions as a chore, again really hit me. Pat Fraley said in a seminar I attended last year that auditioning is the real work of the voice-over artist. (update: The actual sessions are just the times you get paid.) I have been allowing myself to forget this truth.
There’s a lot more from Michael, so like I said, read the whole thing.