Liz de Nesnera. Best of Both Worlds VO.

Fluently Speaking Your Script's Language in English and French.

Do the Footwork

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I’d like to chat about something I’ve been thinking about a lot these days.

It’s about doing the footwork.

We all take steps every day to advance our careers, enhance our relationships and make a better life for ourselves and our loved ones. Here’s the thing though….you don’t really know how it’s all going to turn out. Sure, you want it to turn out in your favor. You want that happy ending, but sometimes you never know what action you take will make that ripple and ultimately have that positive (or negative) impact.

Sure, a new voiceover demo is great. A new website? Fabulous! But sometimes it’s about sending an email thanking someone for writing a book that made you laugh….which can lead to a wonderful friendship. Or attending a business conference where you meet someone who becomes your best friend….or even the love of your life.

Just keep doing the footwork, and as someone once told me: “Stay out of the results.”

Be true to yourself, and you’ll be surprised at where you’ll be led. I know I have been.

Rant on Language

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OK, let me get this out of the way right now, so that it cannot be said that I did not “admit” this from the start:

I am not a teacher. I am not a parent either.

There, I said it.

But I AM a person who speaks more than one language due to parents & teachers who felt that this was important to my development and to my education as a whole.

Given that I use two of my languages in my work every day – I am a full time bilingual voiceover artist – I can say that speaking more than one language is vital to my everyday life. [Read more…]

A Community. Not Competition

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When I became a full time voice talent (or actor, or “-over” or artist, or faffer…whatever you want to call it these days! ;-), one of the statements that I heard over & over again was “Oh forget it, it’s always the same 10 people that get booked for those jobs.”

Really?

So how have I managed to make a full-time living at this? [Read more…]

Education of the voiceover….and of the most basic kind

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There’s a lot of talk these days about voiceover coaching and education.

Voiceover Coaching has become a veritable industry unto itself with some good coaches and – as always – some charlatans. I’m not going to get into that here.

I have been lucky enough to be coached by some of the best, and I’m STILL being coached and educated. I really feel that it’s a constant process of developing my skills and taking my abilities to the next level.

It’s an education that I take seriously. [Read more…]

You never know who’s listening, watching, reading.

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In today’s day and age of social network-meetup-hi-look-at-me-ing you never really know who’s out there peeking in your website-blog-twitter-facebook-window.

That’s not a bad thing, in fact it can be pretty cool!

I had a wonderful experience at the NYC Voiceover Mixer hosted by Voice Talent Productions last month: a fellow voice talent, who I had never met in person, came up to me and told me how much she appreciated my posts about telephony and how much she learned, and thanked me for the help I had given…virtually. That made me feel really nice! [Read more…]

Happy New Year!

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OK! So it’s “that” time of year again…Resolution-time!

What interesting about the concept of “resolutions” is that they usually involve some sort of major sacrifice or herculean effort….losing weight, quitting smoking, getting to the gym more often…Resolutions, frankly have a bad rap because they usually DON’T involve efforts we really want to make …but rather ones we feel we SHOULD make….and that’s why they are so often NOT kept.

On the other hand, when it comes to my voiceover career – that I LOVE – I see resolutions not as bad, but as opportunities to play and expand and grow as a voice talent and a business owner…I WANT to do these 🙂 What a concept! [Read more…]

Software Review: Word2Wav

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Those of us that are full-time voice talent do a lot of different types of work. TV and radio commercials, E-learning, and a lot of Message on hold and Interactive voice response work.

Many of these types of VO work require that individual files be created….MANY individual files……hundreds of files with names like #sys_Press_Pound_Twice_then7.wav

Renaming a few of these files manually is fine, but then you’re looking at hundreds or even thousands of audio files with names like that, it can be a daunting task. [Read more…]

Pay it back by paying it forward

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I’ve said it before in this blog, but I’ll say it again, there really is no competition in VO. Either you’re right for as gig, or your not. And I love that.

It leads to a wonderful sense of community within this business that I don’t think exists in any other. Those of us that work at our VO dream everyday know this and live it. How?

By helping each other out whenever we can.

I’ll take this past Tuesday as an example. [Read more…]

When is YOUR New Year?

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Well…here we go again!

A brand new calendar year! (What’s the alternative right?)

Is this a fresh start for you? Or just another day….

For me, frankly, it’s a little of both.

When I was a kid, summer started at my best friend’s birthday the first week of July and ended with my birthday the last week of August. [Read more…]