As a Creative Director for a Global advertising company (we went global last year) it is my job to think. People pay me money to sit on a desk and look at the ceiling while cogs and gears in my head whir, twirl and spin to the sound of mental dialogue.
Now for some reason I’m very good at looking at other people’s problems and coming up with solutions for them… but for myself it’s sometimes hard to take that essential step back and look at your own problem subjectively and without bias.
So dear Voice Over friends and colleagues I present to you my Big Idea. It isn’t as big as twitter else I would be looking for private investors and trying to get the wheel turning on it secretly until the project was ready. No my idea has potential and that is why I am showing it to you today.
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Good Morning Readers,
Today I speak of a small adventure I had last week. My trusted home computer, which my wife uses to chat with her friends and family abroad, and which my daughter watches some of her Barney shows on, tragically died.
I bought this specific PC in 2005. It was an AMD Athalon64 3500+ that might not mean much to you but at the time it was a decent enough single core computer. Since then multicore PCs have become the norm and the world has moved on.
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By Mahmoud "Danger" Taji
The ripples from the Frankenstein articles have not died yet (thankfully). The input that was provided to the Pay to Play (or if you like Voice Over Marketplace) websites has proven both informative and valuable to them.
I can understand that sometimes when the right questions are not asked then the wrong conclusions are reached.
For those who have not yet read the Frankenstein series of articles, here are links to them:
- Taji’s Frankenstein Monster: The Perfect Vo Casting Site
- Taji’s Frankenstein Monster Part 2: IT’S ALIVE!
- Taji’s Frankenstein Monster Part 3: The P2P Websites React
So far 3 of the 4 Voice Over Marketplaces (or VOMs) have provided positive feedback on the suggestions made by all 13 participating voice actors in the first Frankenstein article (except packing up and leaving as Mr. O’Connell might have implied).
Armin from Bodalgo.com has recently revealed the Spanish version of bodalgo.com (which was the project taking up most of his time recently) and now that he’s done with that is starting to work on some of the suggestions and improvements made in the previously mentioned articles.
Michelle, Donna & Robert from voplanet.com have also taken the suggestions we’ve made to heart and are working on integrating a few of the suggestions into their VOM.
A nice surprise was the involvement of David Ciccarelli, the CEO of Voices.com in the dialogue. While writing up the Frankenstein articles I sent out emails to all the people I thought would benefit from the back and forth that was happening in the comments section. I was pretty disappointed that the Ciccarellis did not reply… until I realized I was operating on Egypt time where our first day of the work week is sunday… sure enough come monday I got a comment posted from David C.
Being a stickler for Public relations (though my aggressive rants would sometimes imply that I keep nothing of the sort in mind) I also sent out thank you emails to the site owners who took the time to involve themselves in a dialogue with the voice actors collective.
Doug de Nance
As a voice professional, I perform the craft in the traditional way – the way you’d expect. I voice commercials and promos and do a whack of corporate narration. I even sneak in a little animation voicing now and then.
But I have a secret. A dirty little secret. A secret that Taji asked me to share with you. It took me a while to work up the courage, but I feel I have finally come to the moment where I can share it with you. OK, so here goes…
I announce monster truck shows.
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It took some time but pretty much all the P2P websites (that I know of) on the market have reacted to Taji’s Frankenstein Monster suggestions we made. I have listed their reactions Chronologically (and apparently alphabetically… which is a nice coincidence).
All of them replied publicly except for Voice123 who sent me an email with their reactions. Since I don’t have permission to reprint that email I’ll just republish the reactions of the other 3 major website with the hopes that Alex, Juan or Steven from Voice123 will grace us with their reply publicly.
No Michelle Summers mentions that there are other P2P websites out there… Personally I am not aware of any others so if you guys do know of them… please leave a link of the P2P website that was not mentioned in the list of sites.
I would like to clarify to those reading that when I mentioned Social Media Integration in the profile pages of these websites I mean the possibility of integrating a place on the profile page where the profile owner’s latest tweets can be displayed or if they have a blog … that their blog’s RSS would display snippets of the latest article that person wrote. There are more social media variants but those are the two that stood out.
I would like to thank everyone who participated on both ends of the discussion from the VO actors to the VO Casting site owners and operators. And if anyone has any ideas not mentioned in the other two articles then please add them in the comment section:
Taji’s Frankenstein Monster Part 1
Taji’s Frankenstein Monster Part 2 : The Conclusion
Some of the replies are long and detailed so make yourself comfortable:
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