VO Studio Workflow: What’s Holding You Back?

When things actually break in our VO workflow, it’s pretty obvious. Recording stops. Audio suddenly sounds bad. We must pull things apart, troubleshoot the issue and patch the problem. However, there’s an insidious accumulation of complexity within our everyday processes which is worth examining.

Working in VO, we typically work on a fairly compressed timeframe. We’re also balancing the creative with the technical, which can wrench us in multiple directions. We must continually honor that moment of inspiration as we bring words to life, while capturing that performance cleanly. 

That’s one of the reasons I tend towards keeping things simple. “Fewer things” means fewer things to go wrong. Focusing on what we need to do in our VO studio helps remind us that our recording setup and workflow need to serve us. 

This past week while going through the details of a regular process, I realized two pieces of software could be taught to interact with one another. Of course, it didn’t initially set up as easily as I’d hoped, but after an hour or so, the bugs had been eliminated and the system worked reliably. That removed 5 separate steps from the overall sequence. 

While eliminating only 5 things might sound trivial, it was a process I do frequently, so the refinement should pay significant benefits over time. The funny thing is that those five steps had come to be through no explicit choice. I hadn’t questioned it until I saw them written out and wondered if there might be a better way. 

What is repetitive in your business? Could it be automated in some way? If not “automated”, can you at least get the basic, shared steps in place? Setting up a starting template for auditions or common types of projects might let you move directly to the recording. Are all the steps you take actually necessary? Does it matter if an audition script runs three pages if you don’t print them out any more? Are you using the mouse or trackpad to scroll through menu choices What can you commit to for the next couple weeks and integrate into your process? 

Here are a few workflow warning signs that might be trying to get your attention:

A significant number of steps to get things done. 
If you are doing the same things each time, is there a way to ask your software to help?
Or, is there prep work which might reduce or eliminate some of them? Templates are your friend.

Processes which don’t always work the right way
In the heat of daily tasks, it’s easy to just “Undo” and patch something together manually. When you aren’t against deadline, it’s worth digging into the actual cause of the problem. What is the issue prompting failure? Software updates? Out-of-date drivers for your interface? Some ghost in the machine that flipped a switch when you weren’t looking?

Inconsistent Results
Does your process depend upon things starting from a specific place? Do you have to force yourself to remember that one thing you have to do so that something else works correctly. If so, document that. Make it clear to yourself.

As boring as it may seem, documenting a process always helps. First, it lets you see all the individual tasks. Second, that becomes an asset for things you might not do as frequently. If you don’t have regular Source-Connect sessions, or might not always need to play audio back for a director, this creates a “Preflight” list of steps, which lets you do things the same way each time. Writing things out also helps to identify areas of friction or inefficiencies. That’s how I realized that there were 5 mechanical steps which could be fixed by having my tools work together better. 

If you can reduce your inefficiencies and shorten the process by a minute or two… how many auditions will you do this week? At 5 per day with a couple less wasted minutes, that’s nearly an hour a week. Over the course of a year, that adds up to an additional week of focus time – 50 hours – which you can reinvest any way you want. 

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