In most jobs, when you take a holiday, you get holiday pay. When you’re a voice over and self employed, that doesn’t happen – if you don’t work, you don’t get paid, simple as that. Thats our choice and I’m not complaining there at all.
Voice Over holidays can be tough, I have regular clients who require scripts to be voiced on a weekly basis. You can hardly turn round to them and say ‘sorry, I’m off for a week, find someone else for that week, and I’ll pick up when back’ The likely hood is that they’ll tell you to ‘go jump’! They want continuity on their voice over projects, not lots of random voices.
The solutions are: 1) you don’t take on work from clients who require regular(weekly) voice over work – bit of a stupid idea, really, in my book! 2) You get a portable studio and take that on holiday with you, simples!
The portable voice over studio doesn’t have to be stupidly expensive either. Ive seen a number of home made jobs that require a few pieces of acoustic foam, a few pieces of cardboard and a microphone stand – the idea being that you glue the foam to the cardboard, place the pieces around the mic and hey presto you have a very makeshift voice over studio – you just need to find a quite place to put it and a small room!! One voice over I know swears by the acoustic brilliance of a duvet, I kid you not! On many holidays she’s’ been under the duvet having fun with her microphone, then popping back out to the beach when the voice over audio is done and uploaded, the client none the wiser that it was done under a duvet.
At the end of the day, whatever practice a voiceover uses to make sure theres no sound leakage, background noise and good acoustics of the voice on the audio, surely it doesn’t matter – as long as it sounds good and the client is happy.
Ive just come back from my weeks holiday in the sun. Prior to going, i advised clients that Id be away and gave them the option of recording double lots of voice overs either before I left or on my return, or me voicing scripts whilst I was abroad. All of them went with voicing whilst abroad – no stress whatsoever. I packed up my mac, microphone and other bits, which all fit nicely into a hand luggage suitcase – years of practice – although you can’t get anything else in the bag, so if you’re travelling with some airlines you can’t buy any duty free as theres no-where to put it!
When I arrived at our apartment, I found the quietest place to set-up, got all my gear out, which includes roles of acoustic cloth, and within about 30 minutes I had a perfect soundproof studio – again, years of practice helps here! I was then set-up and ready to go. I voiced a few scripts in the morning before hitting the pool, a couple in the afternoon and then clocked off for a few cocktails. Clients happy, me happy, everyone is a winner.
I bet you can’t tell which audio was recorded whilst abroad – some of its online right now, check out the voice over samples here. As ever, if you’re in need of a voice over, get in touch here.
Neil
