How to Get Started in Chinese voice over
We receive a lot of email and phone calls from people who want to break into voiceover for commercials or cartoons. It can be difficult to locate practical - and honest - information about voiceover on the Internet. So what follows are our thoughts on “how to get started” in voiceover. The information on this page applies to anyone interested in this type of work—whether you are 8 or 80. Although there are fewer opportunities for young people, they will have the advantage of time to learn and master their performing skills, and with the proper training (and networking connections) opportunities do exist. Adults have the advantage of life experience from which to draw upon when creating characters, emotions, and attitudes. If performing for voiceover is a passion for you, it really doesn’t matter when you get started—the performing and business skills you need to learn are the same. The important thing is that you have a driving desire to perform . . . and voiceover is the path you’ve chosen to start with.
The two most common statements:
“People tell me I’ve got a great voice and I should be doing commercials or cartoons.”
“I’m really good at making up funny voices and I’d love to do voices for cartoons.”
And the two most common questions:
“Should I get into voiceover?”
“How do I get started?”
Unfortunately, the first question is one we can’t answer for you. However, we can give you some guidance that will, hopefully, make your decision easier by answering the second question. After reading this page, you’ll undoubtedly have more questions. You’ll find some of your answers in the Voiceover Articles area of this site, and in the introductory book How to Get Jobs for the Voices in Your Head.
Let me begin by laying it right on the line:
You can have an absolutely wonderful voice (most people do, think they do, or have been told they do), but the business of voiceover today is not about your voice—it’s about what you can do with your voice! In other words, voiceover work is about acting. It’s about how effectively you can communicate a message, attitude, or emotion through only the sound of your voice.
You might be able to entertain your kids and friends with your ability to create unique or unusual voices, but once again, the business of voiceover is not about the voice—it’s about what you can do with your voice. For animation work, you’ll need to have at least a half dozen unique starter voices from which you can create variations for other characters. You must be able to sustain the character voice for long periods of time, be able to instantly switch between different voices, and return to a previous voice instantly. Most people serious about doing voiceover work have the raw talent, but the challenges are finding out where to get the proper training and how to make the connections that will eventually lead to landing a job.
It’s vitally important that you understand one thing . . .
Voiceover is most definitely a niche area of show-business!
As with every other area of show business, there are skills to learn and dues to pay. There are also many challenges to being successful and the potential for considerable rejection along the way. The single most important thing about doing voiceover is that you do it for the fun of it and because you really, really, really want to. If you get into voiceover for the money, I can almost guarantee you won’t be happy . . . or successful.
Here are some important things you need to know:
* A LOT of people claim to be voiceover talent — there are approximately 5 times the number of people “doing” voiceover than there are actors trying to break into movies or TV.
* It can take several years to become an established voice talent in your market.
* You can’t learn voiceover from a book - although books on voiceover will provide excellent information and resources. The performing skills can only be learned from first hand experience, which means you will eventually need a coach or to take ongoing classes.
* Taking a single workshop on voiceover will not prepare you to immediately enter the world as a professional voice talent. This is a performance craft that requires skills that are mastered over a period of time. And the length of time it takes to learn these skills is different for every person.
* It can also be a fairly expensive business - mostly due to the start-up costs of training and demo production, the cost of building a home studio, and the ongoing costs of marketing and continued training.
Consider this: When you need some dental work, would you want a dentist working on your teeth who has only completed a workshop? Or would you prefer a dentist who has a thorough knowledge of his craft and business? Voiceover work is no different. Our job as voice talent is to deliver someone else’s message in an interesting and compelling manner for the purpose of getting results. If we don’t know what we are doing, we are not truly qualified to do the work.