SO, I JUST GOT BACK FROM ONEVOICE USA…

And it was an absolute blast! It’s always a fun time seeing my VO friends from around the US, Canada, and the world! It’s an awesome opportunity to catch up with a ton of awesome talent and celebrate each other as many of us were nominated for OneVoice Awards (myself included, and I was very honored to be recognized by my peers in this way). Some of us even teach at these events, and while it’s great to learn from each other, these conferences are unique in that they get outside perspectives to help us hone our craft to be attractive to buyers… including people who work directly with said buyers, which makes these conferences really, really helpful.

YES, I’M SERIOUS

Voice over artists of all stripes are continuously working on their skills (performance, editing, audio, video, etc.), and conferences are a great place to do that. Both to deepen the understanding of their current skillsets and to expose themselves to different ones. Either way, this is good for both talent and buyers. Here’s why.

ELEVATING PERFORMANCE ELEVATES PRODUCTS

It should go without saying that actors who get better at their craft and stay up to date on the bleeding edge of trending read styles book more, but the other side of that is that it improves the quality of productions as a whole. As a buyer, you might ask yourself “how does that happen at a voiceover conference?” A valid question with a pretty simple answer: it’s not just talent teaching talent. It’s the people that cast and the people actively working with buyers sending their message to talent, basically helping to train talent to give you, the buyer and a voice actor’s customer, exactly what you want in the format that you want. These events are great opportunities to get a message to talent and give them exactly the direction they need to help make your products and services better. So long as it’s not generative AI voices… most of us don’t really like that… at all.

IT’S NOT JUST ACTING, IT’S EVERYTHING

While acting is critical for voice actors to deliver great audio, knowledge of technology, social media, business, marketing, contracts and a plethora of other relevant topics are discussed and taught to make their client’s lives easier. Voiceover talent are constantly learning how to best integrate their services into the workflow. For example, medical voice actors are not only learning how to pronounce things like “antiphospholipid syndrome,” but also learning to keep their audio consistently processed and mix ready for any other project they may work on in the medical space. Another example could be that video game voice actors learn some of the legal jargon in their contracts so that they can adequately protect themselves from doing anything wrong, and also keeping their recordings/performances from being used for any purpose they don’t want them to be used for.

THE COMMUNITY IS STRONGER FOR IT

These are not just events for learning, but in fostering and reinforcing the community. How does this affect buyers? This expands the network of professionally trained, vetted voice actors that buyers can more easily trust to produce a good product. At the end of the day, it’s about quality, and you get quality with human voice actors. I’m confident that the VO community can likely deliver. Just remember to ask.