- You'll land jobs based not only on your experience,
but usually on the strength
of your demo reel and your website.
The best voice demos have a number of varied voices
all presented in very short segments.
Just a few seconds of each voice is enough
for a producer or director to know if they like it.
So in your demo, move on quickly so people don't get bored.
You want them to hear as many of your good voices,
your great voices, as possible in a short amount of time.
In the beginning of your demo reel,
you should also state your name.
As you gain experience,
you could start building various demos
for different types of character uses,
such as announcer samples, or cartoony samples,
dramatic, accents, that type of thing.
So let's take a look at a voice actors site
that's built by an actor I've worked with, Dan Wachs.
Dan has been a professional voice actor
for a number of years.
So he has a lot of samples,
and he's able to really break it down
into specific things that clients might want.
So when you look at his website,
you'll notice he has video demos and audio demos.
The audio demos are for things like radio spots,
and video's obviously for anything where we have images.
So he actually gives demonstrations of both.
That's a great way to do it.
And if you look down underneath each one,
you'll see the way he's got them broken down into,
for example under video, car commercials, beer commercials,
sporting goods, political.
And that's good, because political is actually
going to be a completely different read than a car spot.
And then under audio demos, commercial, corporate,
political, sports narrator,
documentary narration, e-learning.
So you can see here that if I'm a client,
and I'm looking for a very specific type of voice,
he's helping me get right to that.
So rather than go through five or six minutes of demos
hoping to find the right voice,
he's allowing me to go right to a potential voice or type
of voice that'll give me the information I need
in order to hire him.
And listening to the demos is extremely easy.
As you can see, he's just got a play and a pause button
and the bar that he can scroll across if you want to
jump further into any of the recordings.
Make it as fast and easy as possible
for people to hear your demos.
On his site, he also shows, just in this one image,
that he also can record in his own studio,
so he's very easy to work with long distance.
Once you load your site,
make sure that it works on all browser.
I've run into some that worked great on Microsoft Explorer,
but won't work properly on Chrome.
You also need to make sure that you
add searchable keywords on your site,
so that your link pops up in search engines.
Your website should also be really easy to use
and give directors and producers really quick access to,
not only your samples, but your contact information.
It's amazing how many people make it difficult
to reach out to somebody.
The purpose of your website
is make it quick and easy to reach you.
Don't make people just send in a message.
Place your phone number and your email
on every page of your site.
You want to make it easy for them to hire you.