Voices For All

Heartland Community College offered an interesting class with introduction to voice acting. The fellow who traveled from Miami to give the class (and a host of other identical classes along the way) is one of the three national voices for Verizon. There's never been a better time to break into voice acting. Voice over work is all around us. Not only are they in T.V. and radio, but also in answering machines, grocery stores, video games and a host of other places. The Internet supplies a ton of jobs, and the spread of audiobooks demands talent too. I quickly found jobs that pay $200 for 30 seconds of voice. How to get the jobs? You submit a demo of your voice to the prospective employer. And the work can be done from home, with a simple microphone set-up that I bought at a local music store. A good demo, considering any sound effects and the studio time of an engineer, runs $1,500 (a big investment, but much less than starting up your own Burger King store!). The intro class mentioned a master class, and it sounds like a good deal. In addition to a full day and a half of instruction in a classroom setting (max class size of 14 enables more individualized attention), you get a 2 hour session of 1-on-1 time with the instructor during which time they cut two demos for you. They also provide your own web site. The class is the first week of November, up near where Mom lives. The instructor is Eric Hunt, a member of Voices For All who creates the training (and has a favorable B+ rating by the Better Business Bureau - felt I'd better check). His co-worker Casey Rose (1-518-618-1297) helped make arrangements for me.