VO Studio Mindset: Shipping It

Often in the creative whirlwind of our home voiceover studios, a sudden moment of weird isolation creeps in.

Sometimes, it’s just after you’ve sent off your audition. You’ve analyzed the script, sweated over the details, found the right attitude, recorded a take that feels spontaneous and unrehearsed, yet accessible and connected. Your audio quality sounds great – no annoying background noises or distracting sounds. You sound solidly on mic and relaxed. It sounds like you.

Then you hit “upload” or “send” or complete the process of transferring it to your agent’s site or the client portal. And… the world just keeps on turning. No heroic cheer breaks out among the rooftops. You find yourself just wanting some tiny verification that everything was good enough. However, as I try to warn other voice actors, we don’t have to get used to hearing “no.” We need to be comfortable with hearing nothing.

When working with a coach, we traditionally get focused feedback on our efforts. That’s essential to help build the skills we need to compete. When we don’t get that, it can be like a heaviness hanging in the room which will not dissipate. Waiting for feedback which never comes can cause us to overthink our efforts, changing what might be a perfectly viable approach.

While booking the gig can be confirmation of competitive reads, no one wins every opportunity they audition for. The truth may be that you were in the final group of selects, but things just didn’t fall your way. It’s virtually impossible to know if you were next in line or 99 out of 100.

That’s where we can start second guessing things. An uneasiness can begin to creep in earlier in the process. This unease causes us to start questioning our equipment, wondering if there isn’t some “secret sauce” effects processing that no one wants to tell you about, or recording take after take, hoping that a lightning-strike of brilliance will occur. All of a sudden we’re in the “bridge painting” loop – we reach what should be the end, but start worrying that the beginning isn’t that good. When we fix the beginning, it strikes us that the middle could be improved, which, in turn makes us doubt the quality of how we ended things. Then we fatefully consider the beginning once more, and begin the process again. Have you met my friend, Sisyphus…?

What you send out today probably won’t be as good as what you do next, week, next month, or next year. Our skills – both in terms of the performance and the ability to evaluate that performance – do not remain static. We get better every time we get stuff out the door. Perfect is unattainable. Perfect is also kind of boring. It’s the process of continually working toward improvement that brings out the best of our work.

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