Tuesday VO Tech Tip: Untangling & Reinforcing

When things are busy in our home voiceover studios, it’s easy to quickly fix things just enough so that we can get back to work. Over the course of the year, there’s an ever-increasing list of items to address when we have time: loose door handles, boom arms that won’t quite tighten enough, cables that could be a little less stressed or more out of sight. These are issues that would be nice to fix but aren’t vital to address when time is limited and projects need to get out the door.

We often have a bit of seasonal slow down toward the end of the calendar year. Holidays begin to draw more attention and client demands lessen. I’ve spoken before about how a “rainy day tasks” list gives us a great way to fix up our studios when we find some downtime.

However, there’s another key component in the process. What have you done to recharge yourself? This is a good time to take stock of skills gained in the past year. Taking an honest look at our successes help us to recognize areas of improvement. While we are always trying to improve our abilities, acknowledging the competence we’ve gained can remind us of how strong our foundation has become.

Our own improvements can be difficult to recognize in ourselves. It often feels as though we’re relentlessly trudging along on the same plateau. One of the wonderful results of teaching and working with voice actors is seeing their skills come together over time. There’s nothing better than working with someone I hadn’t seen for a few months and hearing strong improvements in performance and audio quality.

As we learn solid skills, they continue to get stronger over time. That’s one of the tenets behind the idea of “iterative improvements” that I frequently share. Every time we step into our studios, we make things a little better. As certain aspects are improved, it distills those things that can be done with more efficiency, or created with a touch more polish. We are always dancing between the spinning plates of technology and performance, learning a bit more with each step.