Voice work

Read this story in this week's New Yorker, "Voicebox 360" by Tom Bissell.
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http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/08/15/110815on_audio_bissell

It's mainly a profile of voice actress Jennifer Hale and her amazing contributions to video game characters.

I'm just guessing, but it seems to me that voice-over narrators now receive about about 80 percent less that what they earned in the days of recordings in studio, pre-digital.

I used to be an A-V producer myself in New York. When we hired someone like Peter Thomas or Howard Ross to record for 10 minutes in a studio, we had to pay them a minimum of $500 for 10 minutes of their time for an industrial. Inspired by this idea of quick money of sorts, I became a VO narrator in NY for awhile, too, joined a union, and had an agent, doing this part-time on my lunch hours.

Today a VO artist is usually expected to have an in-house studio and act as their own engineer. If you're a real actor you probably don't also want to be an audio engineer. If you're a poor actor you probably don't want to make the $5,000 investment in a home studio just to submit online demos and recordings through the online VO factories, where you'll find yourself bidding on gigs against the rest of the VO talent in the universe.

This said, there is a sweet studio in San Francisco that calls occasionally, and I am ready and able to go in for auditions and would love to do some more VO work.