13189: Your Demos Should Not Be Rushed. Or Crowdsourced.

Raw transcript:

I’m a member of a number of groups that
have a presence on meetup.com because
they do meetups in person or meetups
online and every so often meetup.com
will tell you hey here’s a new group for
you to join that you likely would be a a
good member a good fit for and one
recently uh popped up for voiceover and
when I went and looked at it I was like
oh no no no no no no no this is a
podcast episode and we’ll do that
podcast episode next on this edition of
the vo Heroes
podcast this was such uh a quickly
enlightening moment I went to meetup.com
in response to a uh a nudge from
meetup.com hey there’s this group this
brand new group and it was some
voiceover they had some snacky name for
a voiceover group uh and it was for
beginners
um okay uh I’ll go check it out see if
there’s anything there that would would
serve me that would be be good um and in
every Meetup Group there’s a little
blurb that describes the group and the
description included a sentence that was
something like this yes and after the
first couple of meetups we’ll help you
get your demo
produced no that’s not how a demo gets
done that’s not how a demo should be
approached if you’re appealing to
beginning voice Talent the one thing you
should be telling them is resist the
urge to make your demo too early not
creating a meetup group that is going to
help them put together some that kind of
approximates a demo but really shouldn’t
be allowed to see the the light of day
especially when they’re not ready yet
they can’t be ready yet it’s absolutely
impossible I swear to
God uh okay there’s going to be some
exceptions to that rule I’m sure maybe
you watching this were the exception to
that rule who knows but 99 times out of
a hundred somebody who is a beginner
just getting started in the world of
VoiceOver they’re not going to be ready
to make a demo until they get some
really good experience doing the work
under their belt until they get a really
good appreciation for what competitive
demos need to show prospective casting
people uh what the business is like how
to use those demos once they have them
it’s an interesting exercise if you were
to say hey we’re going to we’re going to
show you how to put together a demo and
the first one you make is going to suck
and then the next ones will be better
because you’ll have learned what not to
do with that first one great that makes
sense but to kind of pitch a solution to
somebody who doesn’t know any better a
beginner in voiceover and say yeah come
to our meeting for a couple of months
we’ll do once a month we’ll get together
we’ll shoot the breeze and then we’ll do
your demo no that’s no no no no no uh
take your time when it comes to your
demo uh this applies to those packages
that are sold to you for tens of
thousands of dollars sometimes at least
5 to10 thousand by some unscrupulous
operators you know you’ll study with us
for the weekend and at the end of the
weekend we’ll schedule your demo
okay no I don’t know any other way to
say this that’s not the right way to go
about it and there are lots of things in
our business that have multiple ways of
going about it all of which will
eventually end up in the same place
hopefully success this is not one of
them this is not how to do things uh
especially when you’re creating a Meetup
Group which is a social uh Network a
social fabric that should be supportive
and providing some early answers some
some um some information that prevents
people from making mistakes not helping
them make mistakes no tell me what you
think about this maybe you experienced
this when you first started off as a
writer or an actor or a voice Talent uh
where yeah it’s easy to do all this this
is you know just go for
it uh let me know in the comments Below
on vooh heroes.com that’s where the
conversation is nice and sane and polite
and and nobody’s screaming at you to
look in the file section or use the
search function uh I’d love to know what
your experience has been like here while
you’re at it hit the like button if you
would the Subscribe button if you want
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notification Bell let you know when the
next episode comes out I’m David H
lawence the 17th I got to go to a meetup
group I thank you so much for watching
and for listening and I will see you in
the next episode of the vo Heroes
podcast

(from YouTube)