How to do Voice Over with No Experience?

It's a common question, How do you get started in voiceover if you don't have any experience? We all start somewhere and somehow. In this video, Gabby lays out what to do first so that you can be successful in VO.

How to do Voice Over with No Experience? - Get started now! 5:06

Hey guys welcome, to today's edition of The Gift of Gab. Today I'm going to be answering probably one of the most asked questions I see over and over and over again online, in forums, and in my inbox, which is: "How do I become a voice actor with little to no experience?" Stick around.

So the question is, how can I become a voice actor or how can I do voiceover with little to no experience... well, none. Zip, zero, seriously... the honest to god truth? You have to either be incredibly lucky and have a whole sequence of moon and star alignment that results in you booking some work with that very limited amount of experience or no experience, or you have to be incredibly, incredibly tenacious. How tenacious? To the point where every single person who knows you and every person who encounters you is absolutely sick and tired of hearing you talk about your voiceover endeavors... and I'm not even saying that that's a guarantee. I'm not saying that either of those two scenarios is destined to happen. It might, it might not.

In the course of my career I have met a lot of different people who have come to me to take voiceover classes, and for advice and for consulting. I'd say a very small percentage of them, believe it or not, like three percent or less, have a story like that, have a story of, "I don't know, I just got hired to do this voiceover or I got sent this opportunity and I took it or I was talking to my cousin and they cast me in this thing" and literally it's like a voiceover job just fell in their lap. They don't really know how it happened themselves and that's cool... but it's super, super rare.

What I can tell you absolutely, unequivocally is that opportunity in this industry does not present itself because you sit in the studio waiting for other people to come to you. It's not how it works. What I want to do is reframe the question a little bit, because I think when people are saying, "How do I do voice over with no experience?" what they're really asking is, "How do I do this without a resume? How do I do this without a job history to support the employment that I want? Ah! That we can work with. Because the answer to that is your education, because it's like that for any industry, it's like that no matter what it is you endeavor to do professionally. If you have an education that supports the thing that you want to do, and you're very well trained, and you're very well prepared, people are more willing to overlook the fact that technically you don't have any experience, because really you do. Your experience just comes from a classroom.

We all start somewhere and producers, directors, casting people, a lot of them... even talent agents to some extent, they don't really care how new someone is or isn't. What they care about is how well-trained you are and how prepared you are to be able to do this. That's the difference. So as long as you're able to prove that you can do it and you have a demo and you have a website and you have marketing material to support that... that's really all you've got to concern yourself with in the beginning. People care about whether or not you have invested the time, and the money, and the effort into educating yourself, training yourself, and becoming skilled at this. They don't care if you're a newbie, they don't care if you don't have a resume, you just have to really ask yourself, "Have I done my part? Have I become a great student? Have I learned? Have I collected mentors and teachers along the way? And have I done everything that I can do to effectively earn my degree in this industry?" ...even though, technically, we don't have an actual degree in voiceover... would be kind of cool though.

So to sum it up, stop worrying about the doing! Just be a student, just be in the moment of learning, stop with buying the equipment and obsessing about tools and obsessing about demos for now. If you really are somebody coming to the table with no experience, just focus on learning. Hopefully that's why you're here.

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, What Not To Do, Working Actors, Los Angeles, New York,, How to Be a Better Voice Actor, voiceover coaching, YouTube Channel, Voice Acting Coach, student, learning, job experience, voiceover jobs, voiceover casting, casting directors, talent agent, directors, voice actor for hire, voiceover talent, experience, no experience needed