Here's why you might NOT be booking any Voice Over work & what you can do to fix it.

Sometimes you need to take a hard look at why you're not booking as much work as you want. In this video, Gabby lays out a key factor for why that might be happening.

Here's why you might NOT be booking any VO work - 4:41

Hey guys, thanks for joining me for another edition of The Gift of Gab. Today I want to talk about your hire-ability - literally - meaning how hirable are you right now as a voice actor? Let's find out.

There's a lot of different ways to tell if you are hire-able, and I think one of the best is to talk about what's happening with your audio, specifically in post after you record. If you're spending a crazy amount of time finessing, tweaking, EQ, fixing your audio, dealing with pops, clicks, plosives, that was a little redundant... but you get the idea, you're probably not as hirable as you might think. Here's why: you see, all that minutia that I'm talking about, all that stuff, that tweaking that you're doing is actually an indicator that your work probably needs more fine-tuning in the pre-department as opposed to the post department, because post costs everybody time and money. Even you! Pre - you want to get your material, your audio, to a place where it's just faster and more efficient. If you're doing so much work in post, think about the amount of work that your client is potentially having to do in post as well to make your audio sound usable. All of that correcting and auto healing and processing and de-clicking really, in a sense, means that what you're doing is photoshopping your audio. Let me explain what I mean.

So of all things, years ago I watched an episode of America's Next Top Model and I remember something that stood out from the episode that was very, very specific, and Tyra Banks was talking to a contestant and she was talking about how this girl who was basically an unknown aspiring model. Her pictures were okay but the photographers and the team were having to spend an outrageous amount of time photoshopping and finessing and perfecting her photos in post, and the point that Tyra was making to this particular person was that because they were spending so much time in post-production in her photos, it made her less desirable, it made her less usable as an on-camera talent.

We can kind of glean from that, in the audio world, it's sort of the same thing. If a producer is going to have to spend crazy amounts of time tweaking, changing, editing, finessing, photoshopping your audio, then you become a bit of a liability, right? You're costing them time and money. It's much easier for them to say, "You know, yeah, they were nice but next time let's hire somebody with a bit more experience or maybe somebody who's just a bit more technically perfect on the front end, this way we don't have to do all of that stuff." Point is you can use this as an indicator. You can basically kind of use it as a little bit of a litmus test to say, "Hey if I'm having to spend all this crazy amount of time in post, maybe I need to focus more on perfecting my skills in the booth so that I can minimize some of those errors, so that I can make applicable changes and ultimately just make it so that my audio raw, right out of the studio, is much better shape and much easier to use."

So devoting more time to your pre-production and your time in the studio recording is going to have a much, much bigger greater impact on your post later, and the post, of course, for your clients. So I hope this helps. If you want more tips and tricks like this, you can check out this video here, and don't forget you can always get in touch with me for a class where we can do some one-on-one time and I can help you perfect these techniques too. Bye!

704-674-8294 / GabrielleNistico.com / gabby@voiceovervixen.com

Gabrielle Nistico, Gabby Nistico, The Voiceover Vixen, The Business First VO Coach, #VoiceoverVixen #VoiceOnFire #BusinessFirstVOCoach Voiceover, Charlotte, North Carolina, Voiceover Demo, Voiceover Coaching Advice, Working Actors, Los Angeles, New York, How to Be a Better Voice Actor, voiceover coaching, YouTube Channel, Voice Acting Coach, America's Next Top Model, post-production, pre-production, audio, clients, voiceover for hire, voiceover clients, preproduction, postproduction, audio engineer, technical, fix it in post, litmus test