Monday, August 11, 2014

Finding Voice-Over Talent


My go-to place to search for talent is Fiverr.com, where people are willing to do the damnedest things for $5.  Many are doing so for portfolio-building purposes.  So I searched for voice-over artists.

Some were non-professionals.  They had only the microphones built into their computers (I wanted better quality).  Some promised to read my text "with enthusiasm."  Hmmm.

Others had experience but didn't respond to email or responded very slowly.  

A good number had experience voicing commercials but not playing roles like Shakespeare and Hemingway.  

Some sounded great but were asking for more than $5.  Egad!  They wanted me to pay them what they were worth!  For my no-budget film.

Lastly, some didn't speak Spanish.  

It all sounded so glorious in my head, and I thought it would be interesting to my Spanish interpreter/translator colleagues as well as something to put on my translation résumé.  I wanted Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf to have slight British accents in their Spanish, and I wanted the rest to have accents from different Latin-American countries.

As it turned out, I got only one native Spanish speaker, and she had only two lines as Petrus, the seriously creepy woman at the beginning.  

And as a last resort, I recorded Edna's voice myself.  Wowza!  It's really strange to see actress Penelope Morgan speak but hear my own voice in my odd-sounding Spanish.  Hahaha.

It was frustrating and slow, but exciting when it finally came together in my video-editing software.  Not perfect, but I'm very pleased, and it makes me laugh.  I hope it entertains others as well!

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