VO BOSS

Do you know the difference between dubbing, ADR, walla walla, and looping? In this episode, Anne & Pilar cover it all. Since the pandemic, there has been a boom in content creation globally. Dubbing movies & TV shows into other languages, and creating audio descriptions for the visually impaired has made content much more accessible and given voice artists more work! Stay tuned for Pilar’s experience with voice dubbing + Anne’s tricks for lending your voice artistry to on-screen performances like a #VOBOSS. >> It’s time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry’s top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let’s welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Pilar: Hola, BOSS Voces. Bienvenidos al podcast, con Anne Ganguzza y Pilar Uribe. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza along with my very special guest cohost, Pilar Uribe. Pilar. How are you today? Pilar: Hola, Anne. ¿Cómo estás? Anne: Ah, tired. I am tired. Pilar. You know, why? Pilar: Why? Anne: Because I binged watched the entire season of "Succession" last night and ah, oh my gosh. Pilar: It's so good. Anne: So good. Pilar: So many cliffhangers. Anne: I know. Oh my gosh. Pilar: Yeah. I loved it. Anne: And I'll tell you what, sometimes I stay up later than my husband, so I'm always putting on subtitles. And when I put on subtitles, it makes me think of all these shows now that are coming out in streaming media, and dubbing, and ADR and all of these techniques that are coming out and really offering a lot of jobs these days to people in the VO industry. And I thought we should talk about dubbing and ADR for a little bit. What do you think? Pilar: Yup. Dubbing is very close to my heart. Anne: Oh my goodness, and it's just since the pandemic, just an explosion of so much content and media, and you have had some experience dubbing. I personally have not had much at all. I went to a training class on dubbing, but talk to me about dubbing because that's something I think you actively do, right? Pilar: Yes. Yes. That's where I got started in voiceover. Anne: Okay. Pilar: I did like two series in Colombia. There were animated, but I actually cut my teeth on dubbing. Dubbing is a skill like any other, and it requires being a good actor. Anne: Wait, back that truck up again and say that very important, right? When you watch dubbing shows and of course, what is the latest one? When people are talking about the quality of the dubbing, there is something that was recently released, and we don't have to name it, but there was talk about how the dubbing was not great. There was not great actors. So I think acting is so, so important to be a good dubbing actor. Pilar: Well, if you want to see examples of bad dubbing, just go to the Godzilla movies. Anne: Oh yeah. Pilar: It's hysterical. Anne: You're right. Pilar: Those are so funny to watch. But since Netflix has -- and HBO as well and uh, and Amazon, since they have entered the marketplace, uh, you know, over the past couple of years, and when I started back in two thousand... I guess I started dubbing in 2010, Netflix, wasn't really doing that much. They've been doing more and more in HBO, and Netflix is just all over the place. They have so much content. So one of the things that they look for is, yes, are you a good actor? Because you have to be able to portray what is being said in whatever language it is, whether it's, you know, German or Spanish or Portuguese, you need to be able to portray those same emotions. So it's kind of like, 'cause I used to actually teach dubbing. It's kind of like, you're like a one man band stand. You remember those little, those figures of the monkey where they have -- Anne: Yes, they play the tambourine. They play the drums. Yeah, absolutely. Pilar: All at the same time. Anne: You have to do it all. Pilar: It's kind of like being a drummer because if you look at a drummer, he's got one beat going in one arm, another beat going in the other arm, and he's got two different beats going in his, with his legs. Anne: Yeah. So Pilar, just to back up just a little bit, I want to make sure that, because we are going to talk about both dubbing and ADR, what exactly is dubbing? Let's just clear up the definition. Pilar: Yes. So dubbing is when you have got a telanovela, say, or a movie in Spanish, and they are speaking in Spanish. And they want you to put your voice onto that person's body basically so it sounds -- Anne: In another language. Pilar: In another -- in English, in English. So if it's in Spanish, they want you to dub exactly what they are saying in Spanish into English. Anne: Right. Or vice versa. Pilar: Or vice versa. Anne: Or any other language. Pilar: Or any, 'cause it doesn't matter. I mean, I've dubbed in Chinese, from Chinese to English, German, Swedish. It depends on the project. Anne: Do you dub mostly in English or in Spanish? Or both? Pilar: I actually do both. Yeah. I do both. Yeah. I do more other languages to English because that's what the demand is, but I definitely do a lot of times English to Spanish. Anne: Okay. Pilar: So basically when you walk into the booth, and you are given a movie or an episode that is in whatever language it's going to be, and I will say this, just because I speak Spanish and French, that doesn't necessarily help you when you're dubbing. Sometimes it can actually be a hindrance because you're listening and you're going, wait a minute. They're not saying exactly what they're saying in English, so. Anne: Ah, yeah. There's translation there. Pilar: Yeah. You do not have to know the language that you're dubbing at all for anybody who has that kind of question. Anne: We should clarify too, you said, when you walk into the studio. Now, this is typically done in a studio, right? It's not something that we can do remotely. Pilar: Yeah. I would say when we went through the past two years, and everybody had to go inside, there was obviously, it was only remote. So I did a lot of things remotely, but ideally they want you to be in the same studio because you are recording with the same mic and in the same environment. Anne: Got it. That makes sense. Pilar: And that's when it makes it really, really makes a difference. So a lot of times they would send kits out. Studios would send kits. So everybody would have the same exact setup in their booth. Anne: Got it. And you're talking about the same mic as what was recorded in the movie? Is that what you're talking about? Or -- Pilar: No, no, because this is voiceover. So, you know, whatever, whatever the movie is, you know, they have different mix for that. Although actually -- Anne: That's what I was thinking. Like they wanted to specify what kind of mic was being used. That's what I was. Pilar: Yeah. But that was, you know, more so for, for just voiceover. Anne: Got it. Pilar: So what's ironic is that, you know, the Sennheiser, it was originally a mic used on sets, but generally for dubbing, you know, they have their own extremely high powered mics. I mean, I was in a session the other day, and I was standing very far away from the mic technically 'cause here I'm, you know, I'm standing pretty close to the mic, and that mic picks up everything. I mean that mic picks up a burp. That mic picks up a little breath, and it's, it's just amazing. So yeah, they generally want you to go into the studio, and so you get there, you walk in. And of course now with all the protocols, everything is, you know, sanitized and wiped down. And usually you're asked to bring your own headphones. You go in and you watch a piece of copy, and the dubbing director will explain. And there's also the engineer. Anne: You mean you watch a video? Pilar: Yeah. You watch a piece. Yeah. So you've got the mic in front of you. You've got the video. And so you're seeing it in the original language. So you get to see it -- now, here's the thing. Out here in LA, you actually get a dress rehearsal. The majority, I would say 99% of the time when I lived in Miami, I didn't get a dress rehearsal. It was just like -- Anne: Oh wow, go. That's tough. Pilar: Get out of the stable and go. Yeah. Anne: Because you have to match the lip. Pilar: Right. And you don't know what's coming. So when you're doing a character, but because I was doing so much of it, what I learned to do is after like an episode or two, I would see what that actor's rhythms were. So then I could mimic and kind of go with her breaths and where she did sighs and where she stopped because I was always looking at her lips. But I also -- see, that's the thing. That's why I brought in the analogy of the drummer. So what are you doing when you dub? You are watching the screen. You are acting because you're doing what the other, what that character in front of you is doing. You are voicing, you're reading, and you're adding your own breaths. So you're also usually seeing the -- I mean, at least that, that was the case in Miami, not so much out here, but you're seeing the script for the first time. Anne: Right, right. Pilar: So you're doing all these things. You're employing more than one sense, and you're doing it without a dress rehearsal. Anne: Wow. Pilar: It's kind of intense. Anne: That's a lot. And I remember my class was just like that. I mean, we did not even really know the copy that was coming up when it was coming up. And we had not really, we did not have a dress rehearsal, so it's a lot of things to do at once. And so what are the prerequisites for you as a voice actor that wants to get into dubbing? What sort of things should you do if you want to make this part of your career to get good at it? Pilar: So the most important thing is listening, and observing, and putting yourself into that character's shoes for however long you are in the booth. So I played this character a while back, and it's out on Netflix now. And it's a terror series. It's literally terrifying. I said to my mom, listen, I'm going to give you the times that my character is there because I don't want you to see anything else because it's so terrifying. It's so, so scary. Anne: Oh, I'm gonna assume that you just did this one and that you had a dress rehearsal. So you had an idea of what the whole show was about. Right? And I think that that helps, right? Pilar: Well, rehearsal means you. Yeah. You get to see the scene, but you don't really know what you're getting into because you haven't seen the moments before. You're just looking at when you are speaking as a character. Anne: Got it, got it. Pilar: So it's up to you to -- Anne: Understand the vibe. Pilar: And not just that, but that's what I mean by you really have to be completely on because you are looking and you're listening at the same time. You're evaluating what that character is doing at that moment and why -- Anne: What happened. Pilar: -- are you doing it, right. Anne: And what might've happened beforehand so you can act, right? Pilar: Exactly. Yeah. And then you have to do it and you only get one dress rehearsal. So you have to be very acutely aware. You have to be present in the booth. So what they do is you'll do a scene on, they'll give you a pass of the entire scene and then you'll go back. You'll do another take or you'll do pick-ups. They do give you headphones. But if you have really good headphones, it's great to bring those with you. 'Cause you have to hear every nuance with that character -- where are they breathing? Anne: Now, are they doing sentences at a time? Or just periods of time when this character is talking? Is there back and forth between dialogue from other characters? Pilar: Oh yes, absolutely. Yes. Anne: They will do an entire, let's say three minutes of the characters going back and forth? So you have to also watch the other character and then react. Right? Pilar: Absolutely. Yes, exactly. And so here's the thing. Back in the day, I used to get pieces of paper, and then they switched to the monitor, and now there's this thing, that's, it's a band. And it was, I think it was invented actually in France, if I'm not mistaken. And it's a band that goes at the bottom of your screen, and most of the companies that I've worked for, the studios that I've worked for, they all use this. So it's a band, and it's in your specific color for that episode. So like my character, Anna, Anna's lines are going to be in green. They're going to have the highlight green. But then I'm also listening to the other characters and their lines are there as well. Anne: But not in green, obviously. Pilar: No, they're like in purple or whatever, but I have to be very aware of who's speaking when. Anne: So you have to look at the bottom of the screen, which has the band. Plus you also have to understand where the lips are happening and when they're saying it, so you've got to go, you've got to look from the bottom of the screen to the lips. Pilar: Yes, ma'am. Anne: And so that is fast focusing I'm sure. Pilar: Totally. Anne: And total focus and it's got to be exhausting. I can't imagine like when you're doing a dubbing session, how long are you doing a dubbing session for? An hour, two hours, five hours? Pilar: The standard time is two hours. Anne: Okay. But that has got to be an exhausting two hours sometimes. Pilar: It can be exhausting, but it's really exhilarating because you're in the booth, and I always stand. Anne: I can't imagine sitting when you have to be that focused and on top of things. Pilar: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. You have to use the whole body. But I rest, like when they're doing, when they're trying to decide between the dubbing director and the engineer, you know, do we do this? Do we do that? Um, and they're rewinding and they're trying to sync it up and everything. So, so that's when I can just take a little break, drink some water. They tend to be generally two hour sessions. I've done, you know, up to four. You know, it's, it's, it is work. It's a lot of work. Anne: But so now that you have the band that's running on the screen, right, do you have a copy as well of the actual script at all in front of you? Pilar: No, nope. Anne: Because I remember when I took my class, I had both. I had the script that was down in front of me, but I also had to keep my eye on the screen as well and the lips of the actor that I was dubbing. So it was a lot, but when they were doing whatever work they needed to do in the studio, I was kind of looking at the script coming up next so I could get a little familiar with it. Pilar: Yeah. It actually depends on the studio because there was a studio that did the paper. I don't know if they still do because you know, things have evolved in the past couple of years. It kind of depends. But sometimes you do, sometimes you do get a paper, which in a way is actually worse because you have to look farther down. I'd rather have it on the screen. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Pilar: But whatever it is that you're doing, whether you have a piece of paper in your hand, or you're looking at it on a monitor, or you're looking at the stuff on one screen and the script on another screen, 'cause that also happens, whatever it is that you do, you have to learn to read quickly. Anne: Yeah. Pilar: And so you're basically constantly evaluating and looking at getting the information. So then you can spit it out -- Anne: Yeah, right. Pilar: -- and then move on to the next moment that that character has. Anne: So dubbing is going into the studio and having the band and checking the lip movement of the actor that you're replacing, right, that you're dubbing. Now what's looping then. So that's dubbing. What's looping then? Pilar: Looping, technically it's called ADR, which is additional dialogue replacement. Like, so for example, let's say there is a scene where there are two people in a restaurant, and they're outside in a cafe, in a little restaurant cafe in New York. And you know, there are people going back and forth, and there are people walking on the street, and there are people inside. And then there's the person at the bar. All that noise, all that noise gets put in, in post. None of that is real because basically what they figured out, and sometimes you can get it, but there's so much incidental noise. So you're going to get a honking of a horn or somebody shouting that they can't control all those extra elements. So what they do is that they come back, and once the scene is done and it's ready -- or let's say the actress spoke really low. So she was looking at her food saying, "I don't love you anymore." So it's like, they didn't get that. They didn't get that from the mic, the boom that was hanging, you know, five feet above her. So the actors come back. So basically it's like background extra work but for voices. Anne: Is that not also called Walla Walla? Pilar: So Walla Walla is a type of ADR. Walla Walla is kind of like, you're just kinda like talking and it's like -- Anne: So many terms. Pilar: -- rhubarb, peas, and carrots, rhubarb, peas, and carrots. This is what I used to do on stage. You know, when you, when you weren't speaking, but you had to look like you were talking sure. Then there's something called call-outs where you say -- so each character sits there and says, "hey, I'm going to the store. I'll see you later." And so it's like, you're literally having like a pretend conversation. And so ADR has, you know, so many different -- ADR has its own genres too. Anne: So dubbing is not necessarily related to ADR and looping. Pilar: ADR, I would say it's like a, it's like a third cousin, second or third cousin, because there are aspects of it. So for example, I did a movie last year, which came out, I guess it came out at Christmas? It was called "Eternals". It was a Marvel movie. And of course, you know, when you sign up for something like that, you sign NDAs up to an inch of your life, and you can't say anything. And so the only reason I'm saying it is because I asked them -- Anne: Now you can. Pilar: - I asked them, yeah. Now you can, and now it's out. And so, you know, the person who hired me was like, yeah, it's okay. 'Cause I always check. And that's something that's really important. Whatever it is that you're doing, when it's like dubbing or, or ADR, they're going to make you sign NDAs. So in fact, at one studio, they make you put your cell phone in a little box before you walk in and lock it up because they don't want any kind of -- Anne: That makes sense. Pilar: You know, they bought the rights, it's their property. Anne: Absolutely. Pilar: And so to have some actors sit there and go, oh, I was at this studio and I was dubbing look at me is just, I mean, come on. You know, you've just ruined all their hard work. So -- Anne: Exactly. Pilar: -- in the world of dubbing, they're very, very demanding on that. You know, you can't say a word. Anne: Well, that makes a lot of sense. And I'm glad that you brought it up because how many times have we seen a voice actor, either bragging on social media, or here's a picture of me leaving and just thinking that nobody will see that, that is a big, big, big no-no. So yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense that you don't want to give away any, any secrets until they're revealed. I get that. Pilar: Because basically when you are an actor, you are lending your voice. That's what you're doing, or you're lending your acting to the project. The project isn't yours. You don't own the project. Anne: It's a great point. Pilar: You know, I remember one time I did this commercial. Magic, the big basketball player, Magic Johnson. I mean, I'm seeing him right now. And all of a sudden I had a brain fart in his name. So it was a commercial and he was, he's so adorable and he's so nice. And so we were all gathered around, and of course at the end they let us take pictures. And so of course I took my picture and I had it in my phone. And then literally a couple of weeks later, I see this actor post and like, "hey yeah, I got, I was, I was," and I was like, what are you doing? The commercial isn't out, that's not yours. That's their material. Somebody owns that material. And you have to respect that this is a situation. So for something like a Marvel movie, you know, you sign NDAs up the wazoo. Anne: Oh yeah, I've seen people get fired. Pilar: Yeah. And -- Anne: Hard. Fired Hard. Pilar: To be honest, I, I can't blame them because it's like, it's, it's not my material to come -- to go out and play with. So with ADR, and this all changed in the pandemic too, because with ADR, what you would do is that you would go with a group of people, and you would be in the same room with them. So that's where you have these things called donuts, which is you walk around and you do these sort of loops. And you talk as you pass by the microphone. And then the call-outs where you're "hey, let's go get some ice cream" kind of a thing. And "Dr. George Michael to line one in, you know, room 222," that kind of a thing. So that all went away. And so now when you go to a studio, we were all separated. So we were in the same studio, but we were all in different booths. So that's the difference. So it's all, you're not together. Anne: Right, during the pandemic. Pilar: Right during, yeah, exactly. Pilar: So they had to kind of change that the way that, that happens. Anne: Also, so not just that, there's also, if you need to replace a line, right. If they couldn't get the actor, if they couldn't get the line or they changed the line, and they could get the actor back in, sometimes there's just a line replacement. Pilar: Yeah. Right. Exactly. And that will happen, let's say, with a specific actor, but when you're talking about ADR, like when you're in that scenario that I said about the coffee shop, there are people talking. So you need to have, let's say, if you're doing a cop show, you need to have the lingo all ready to go, you know, and they encourage you to bring -- paper makes noise, but like iPads. And then you have your "Adam 24," you know, that kind of a thing or "nurse code blue," you know? So all the different genres have different language. So you have that ready. And then when you're called on, because you're just basically, it's like, okay, who wants to do this? And you just get up and you do it, and you do it in front of your mic. I don't know if it's gone back to the grouping. 'Cause I, I did something recently, and we were still in separate booths. So I don't know if that's actually gone to the group thing again, but ADR basically takes care of all that sort of subtle murmuring that goes on. And so whatever it is that you do -- and there's, there are a lot of rules. Like, you know, you never want to say, have anything to do with God. There's a lot of, since it is all improv, because you know, it is, you know, as we had mentioned before about, you want to be positive, that's another thing. That's another big thing; you want to be positive. You don't want to be negative. So there are, there are a couple of different rules you don't necessarily want to talk about the time of day. You don't want to say people's names or the actor or the characters' names in the movie itself. Anne: That makes sense. Pilar: So you're constantly improvising. And so flexibility is key in ADR. So you can just get up and, you know, in front of the mic and talk about this car that overturned in a tractor trailer and this and that. And you just, and you know, you have a little cheat sheet, so you have little sentences or, or themes that you can expound upon. Anne: So they give that to you. And you're just improv-ing off of that. Pilar: They give you the, the scene, but it's up to you to come up with the lines. It's like, they don't, they don't give you the lines. So I took a class, my very first ADR class when I got to LA was with Johnny Gidcomb. So, you know, for anybody out there who wants to do ADR, he's fantastic. And he teaches you the ropes. So we did as if we were blooping this one show that he had done, one of the many "Planet of the Apes" movies. And so, you know, we had to sit there and see, and it was sometimes it was difficult because you didn't know who was speaking. So you had to be, you know, eagle eye on these characters saying who was speaking when and, who was loud and who wasn't. So it's like a lot of, you know, observation comes in to play when you're doing ADR as well. Anne: And then if that's not enough, so there's the dubbing, there's the ADR and looping and Walla Walla. And then we also have audio description. Pilar: Yes. Anne: Audio description is something that's similar, but yet different. And that's also kind of, I feel like because there's more content out there, there's been a lot of work in this area as well with audio description. And there's just some really great instructors out there. I had Roy Samuelson is part of one of my meetups who came and talked about audio description. And there's some great groups out there that you can get involved in and learn from and lots of work out there. So let's talk about audio description now. Pilar: Yes. Let's talk about it because I will be honest with you. I am not that familiar with it. I know that it, audio description can be used for people who have trouble seeing, that that's a lot of it, but it does have many uses, correct? Anne: Yes, exactly. So audio description will be describing the scene. It kind of happens along with the dialogue, and that is something that will be describing the scene as it's happening. And so that is copy that is provided to you, but you know, it is a skill, and it is something that I think you have to be quick on your feet in order to do it well. And I think you also have to add in acting because you are really, for people who are not necessarily seeing the video in front of them, you are audibly describing what's happening in the scene, and you can't just be a robot doing that. I feel like you've got to bring the experience to the listener. And so there is definitely quality of acting for audio description as well. For sure, for sure. Pilar: Yes. And I'm looking at this. Yeah. And it is definitely for people who have low vision or who are visually impaired. So you definitely have to have acting chops because you are, you are the narrator for these people who can't see. So you are providing everything, you're being their eyes. Anne: It's like audio drama in a way. Pilar: Exactly. Anne: But you don't want to be overly, right, dramatic because -- Pilar: Yeah. Not emoting, right, either. Anne: Right. Exactly. Because obviously you're not overtaking the acting that's going on that they're listening to. You are simply describing the scenes and what's happening. So while you need to act, you may not need to act as if you are a direct character in the scene. That's for sure. Pilar: Well, and also because in -- when there are gaps in the dialogue, you will be describing visual elements. So you're going to be describing costumes, the action, the setting, the mountain in the background. And so you have to make that interesting, but you're not going to make it monotone picture. And you're also not going to go crazy talking about the mountain. Anne: Exactly. Pilar: You know, so exactly it has to sacrifice to be some kind of middle ground. So you're making it because you are the eyes for that person. So you have to be able to transmit the emotions that are going on. Anne: Yeah. So I'll tell you, all of these things that we have been talking about today really require someone who has acting experience, right, or who is an actor. And I love that because that just really broadens the scope of what we can do as voiceover artists. And it really pinpoints the importance in everything that we do, that acting is a part of it. And so there's a lot of areas in which as a performer, if you want to improve and up your game, you can have these opportunities if you just keep developing those acting skills and improv skills. And I just love that we're talking about where all these skills, we just had our episode on improv, you know, how they can help you to really grow your business as a voiceover artist. So thanks so much, Pilar, for chatting with me about this. I love you've just brought so much to the table for our listeners. So thank you for that. Pilar: No, thank you. This was so much fun. Anne: Awesome. Well, I'm going to give a great, big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can network and perform like a BOSS and find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys have an amazing week and Pilar and I will see you next week. Pilar: Ciao. Anne: All right, bye. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

Acting is more than just using your voice. It requires whole body movement, agility, and engagement. In this episode, Anne & Pilar share their favorite stretches, exercises, and warmups that can be done in and out of the booth. From Pilar’s jaw release warmup to Anne’s neck stretch, by the end of this episode you’ll be warmed up + ready to perform like a #VOBOSS. More at https://voboss.com/move-in-the-booth Transcript >> It’s time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry’s top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let’s welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Pilar: Hola, BOSS Voces. Bienvenidos al podcast, con Anne Ganguzza y Pilar Uribe. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza. And I am so excited to bring back to my booth, my special guest cohost Pilar Uribe. Pilar, how are you? Pilar: Hello, Anne. Anne: Look, I feel I'm very spry. I'm very spry today in the booth. And you know why? Do you know I'm spry? Pilar: Why are you spry? Why are you spry? Why are you spry, Anne? Anne: Because I did a little warmup, so I'm kind of feeling good in the booth. And I think it's important that we always do awesome warmups and move around in the booth so we can have good energy going forth into our voiceover. Pilar: I totally agree. Anne: Thoughts? Pilar: That that is something that I, something that I just did. Do as I say, not as I do. Try not to do what I just did, honestly. VO BOSSes -- Anne: Drink dairy? Pilar: Because, well, that's one thing. Yes, of course. I had dairy. I had yogurt this morning, so of course I'm all phlegmy. Anne: Me too. Pilar: That's not, that's not fun, especially when you're going to do an audition. That's not great. So drink your water. But one of the things that I was told by a professional is it's really bad to clear your throat. You know, like when people [clear throat noise], that is like the worst thing you can do. Drink water, wait till it passes, stop doing that. But that's literally like putting sandpaper on your throat. It's the worst thing you can do. Anne: Yes, I have heard the same, and it's very hard because I think it's like a habit from before voiceover. That would be BF -- BFO, before voiceover, before voiceover, when I used to scream and do all sorts of harmful things to my vocal cords, before I realized that we need to treat this like gold, because it is our livelihood. Pilar: Okay. I have one question though. Did you say BFO? Anne: Did I say BF -- Pilar: You meant BVO, BVO. Anne: BVO, okay, okay. I was thinking like best friend in VO. So I kind of combined -- Pilar: Anne, Anne -- Anne: Pilar, that's how I think of you. Pilar: Anne, will you be my BFO? Anne: My BFO. there's -- Pilar: Will you be my BFO? Anne: -- best friend, best friend in VO. So hey -- Pilar: I love it. Anne: So being best friends, I think I want all of our BOSS listenership -- they're our friends. And I think it would be a really great episode if we talked about how moving in the booth and how warming up and just physicality in the booth can really help us to perform better and just be better all around, better mental, spiritual, physical to improve our performances. Pilar: Okay. So since we are starting our day, Anne, I invite you to do something with me. Anne: Okay. All right. Pilar: We're going to do it all together. Anne: What is this, a warmup? Pilar: This is a warmup exercise. It's a jaw release. Anne: Oh yes. Pilar: Which we don't even realize half the time how much tension we're carrying in our jaw. Anne: You know what's so funny, that I actually really need this because the other day, I woke up, and my ear was hurting, but it wasn't like an earache kind of hurt. It was an ear hurting because I might've clenched my jaw at night. And I, I know so many people that clench their jaws at night, and anything to relieve this ache in my jaw will be very helpful. Yes. Pilar: Okay. Cool. Anne: I'm ready. Pilar: All right. So I want you to place your palms on the sides of your face. Okay? I'll hold it on my headphones. You can still hear me, right? Okay. So you're going to place your palms on the side of your face and slowly massage the jaw and the cheek muscles. Okay. So you're taking the palm, and you're massaging the jaw line up and down the jaw line and also your cheekbones and, and with small circular motions. Anne: Good for when you have sinus issues too. Pilar: Yes. Anne: Or you feel it. Can you hear me going, can you hear it? Like, I'm very close to the mic. I am in circular motions. Pilar: So you can, you can go all the way up to where your cheekbone is and massage there, and you can go all the way towards the ear. Anne: Okay, BOSSes, you're doing this, I hope you're doing this with us, BOSSes. Pilar: Absolutely. Just try it. And then you go all the way down to your jaw line and go way up almost to your, your ear, almost to the ear. So continue to massage while lowering and raising your jaw. Now -- Anne: You're lowering and raising the jaw while you're doing this. Pilar: Yeah, so you're going, ahhh, in the jaw. Anne: Are we saying anything when we're doing? Pilar: No, not yet. Not yet. Just lower and raise your jaw. I can't speak right now. Anne: But you're my -- you're instructing us, so. Pilar: I am instructing you. Okay. Now -- Anne: I don't know if you can do it while you're instructing. Pilar: I will. You're going to hear it in a minute. So now keep lowering and raising your jaw while you're massaging. And now you're going to add the sound ma ma ma with a very light lip contact. So it's not, mmm. It's just a light lip contact for the mic. Anne: Now what is ] that doing? Pilar: And then you're going to change to whoa, whoa, Anne: Wait. I'm still massaging, right? Pilar: Yeah. You're still massaging, and you're changing from ma ma to wa wa. Anne: Oh, I can feel the vibration. Pilar: VO BOSSes, if you're doing this, you're hearing the resonance. That's really important because that means that you're using all those muscles. Anne: That's awesome. Pilar: We tend to think that we're just using the vocal box and that's it. And sometimes we can hear the chest. Anne: No, it's our entire it's like facial jaw. Pilar: Exactly. It's that whole, and it goes up practically -- it's like, like you're using all those muscles and all that movement there, and that will help your sound as it comes out. Anne: Love it. Pilar: So do you wanna try another one? Anne: Yeah, let's try another one. Let's try another one. Pilar: It's a lip trill. Okay. So this releases lip tension, which we tend to do and we don't even realize it. And it also helps you to connect your breathing and speaking. So place your lips loosely together. Okay? And you're going to release air in a steady stream to create a trill or a raspberry kind of a sound. So it's like [whistle-like breathing] Anne: That's a raspberry sound? Pilar: I'm not really sure what a raspberry sound is. Anne: [lip trill] Isn't that what it is, the trill? Pilar: But that's what I say -- yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can also do this. [whistle breathing] What is a raspberry sound? That is a raspberry sound, but it's like, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to get the sound out without moving my lips, which is really cool. Hold on. [lip buzzing] That's a raspberry sound. That's a raspberry. [lip buzzing] So first try. So our microphone is getting a lot of action here. First, try it with an H sound. Then try it with a B sound. Anne: Oh my God, that tickles. Pilar: Yeah, it does, it tickles, right? Anne: I can not, I can not do it. It's like when the dentist does the teeth cleaning, the polishing, and it gets on my lip, it just, I can't. It makes me tear up. Pilar: So first try it with an H sound and then repeat with a B sound. Okay? And then [sound]. And it seems like it wouldn't be, but it is different. It's a different feeling. So now I want you to try doing the B trill. It can be either [lip trill] or it can be [lip buzz] and go up and down the scales. Okay? And whatever's comfortable. You don't have to go all the way -- whatever's comfortable at the top or the bottom. Anne: I really think for the trill, you have to let your lips just trill like that. Pilar: Because there's two ways to do it. There's [one way] which is more the H sound. And then there's the [lip trill]. Anne: That's easy. Okay. My lips are relaxed now. Pilar: Yeah. Don't they feel kind of like, they feel like you can kind of feel the reverberations. Anne: Well, once the tickle goes away, I'll, yeah. I'm not sure I can do this everyday 'cause it just tickles. I wonder if I'll get used to it. Pilar: Yeah. And there's more, there, there are other things, there's tongue trills. There's lip buzzing. We kind of did the lip buzzing, and here's one thing that's really important: humming. You can do this anywhere. You can do this while you're walking. Humming is really great. So [hums]. Anne: Oh yes. Pilar: So if you do humming and you concentrate, you will feel it in different parts of your face. Anne: Oh yeah, absolutely. Pilar: You will, you'll be able to feel it in your teeth, in your lips, and in your facial bones. So let's just try that really quickly. Just the humming. Anne: BOSSes are humming. Pilar: And if you go low, It's a different feeling from when you go high. And in your nose, if you concentrate on feeling it in your nose, you're going to feel all this vibration. Anne: Yep. I feel it my nose. And I think if you visualize where it's coming from, that helps, that helps. Now this is doing some vocal lip, trills, and hums. Now I also think any exercise around your head, neck, muscles, shoulders is very helpful in the booth. So I feel like I do a lot of the neck stretches where you take your right hand, place it on your left ear and tilt your head to the side. Right? So right hand -- Pilar: Hold on, right hand, left ear. Anne: Right-hand, left ear. Pilar: Is your hand over your head or is it under? Anne: It's over my head, over my head. And so as you breathe in through your nose for three seconds, then exhale, pull your head more to the right. Breathe in for three seconds. Hold it. And as you exhale, stretch your neck further towards your right shoulder. Breathe in for three and then exhale and stretch even further to your shoulder. And then you basically take your head and do on the other side. So take your left hand, put your left hand over your right ear. Pilar: I was doing it, I was doing it the wrong way at first. I'm like, she's crazy. And then I realized I was doing it wrong. Anne: Yeah. Breathe in through your nose. And then when you exhale, bring that head down towards your shoulder, toward the left shoulder. Exactly. Then breathe in again. And then as you exhale, bring it further towards your left shoulder. So you're stretching that neck. Pilar: Oh, that feels good. Oh yeah, you can feel it. Anne: Yeah. And then you can do that also forward. So take your hand, your right hand, put it on the top of your head, and breathe in for three through your nose and then exhale and then pull your head down to your chest. So chin to your chest. Pilar: Oh my God. I can feel it all up and down the back of my neck. Anne: So yeah, those muscles around your neck, when you warm them up, right, your vocal cords are right there. So it's super that that's warmed up as well. And in addition to the physical, like, and I also do head rolls, right? So from left to right, roll your head around the back 'til it reaches your right shoulder and then back again towards your left, and that will help you to relax those muscles around your vocal cords. Pilar: Okay. Very important. Yeah. And one other that I will suggest is interlocking your hands in front of you and then twisting them and pushing your palms out. Anne: Oh, forward, yeah. Pilar: Forward. So you're stretching those, those shoulders. Anne: Shoulder muscles. Yeah. Pilar: And then you can bring them up and, and then, and you can actually pull your left -- Anne: Over your head, right? Pilar: Over your head and then pull your left wrist with your right hand and then go to the right. Oh. And you can feel all up and down the arm. Anne: And so you're stretching to the left. So you're doing that -- Pilar: Your side. Anne: Yeah. You're doing a side stretch. Pilar: You're doing a side stretch. Right. And you're doing, yeah. And then you go to the other side. You can feel all the way up and down the side of your body. Because when you're in the booth, you're using everything. I know that a lot of people sit in terms of moving in the booth. That's an important part of this. People ask me all the time, do you sit or do you stand? And it's like, I do both. It depends on the read. However, whatever it is that you do, make sure you don't -- if you're standing for a very long time, make sure you have a chair that you can sit. And if you're sitting for a long time, make sure you get up, move around, touch your toes, raise your arms up, you know, lift your knees a little bit, because sitting or standing in the same position for a very long time will lead you to feeling tension and -- Anne: Exactly. Pilar: And so, you know, it's like, you want to be flexible. You want to be easy. Anne: So we've warmed up, and we're moving in the booth as we sit. And literally this takes a few minutes. You don't even have to spend an hour doing this, but every little bit helps. And I think that not only just warming up in the booth by moving around, 'cause now I'm like, wow, I've got some heat going on in this booth. Maybe you do it outside the booth if you don't have any ventilation, but wherever you do the, the exercises and the movement, the lip trills, and the head rolls, and the neck rolls, and all of the side stretches, that's wonderful before you get into do your auditioning for the day. And once you're there too, you can physicate while you're performing your script. And that actually is something that I tell my students every single day, get physical behind the mic. Because number one, it helps you be much more believable because it's taking away all of that energy that you focus specifically just on the words coming out of your mouth. And a lot of times that doesn't make things realistic because if all you're moving is your mouth and your vocal cords, things become very consistent, right? There's no other energy coming out of you to kind of move or shape a rhythm. That would be something that we do when we're talking to one another, right? When we talk to one another or we converse or we're interacting with other people, which is kind of what you're doing with your audience behind the mic, right, you're interacting with people, you're moving your arms. You're moving your body. You have facial expressions. There's all of this movement happening behind the mic or behind your voice. And that helps us to sound the way that we do. I mean, it, it has every bit of influence on how we sound. So if I'm just standing or sitting or standing here and I'm just here, I'm just moving my mouth and that's what I'm doing, you can notice that I sound a little bit more staccato. I don't really have a lot of, I don't know, depth or feeling. Right? So now I'm just going to like, I'm going to move stuff around. I'm going to move my hands because I really love to move around because that's what I do when I talk to people, like that's that Ganguzza, you know, moving the hands around and, and all of the expression. And if I want to really convince you of something, you can tell, you can hear it. Right? You can hear it come out in my voice. What do you do, Pilar? Pilar: I'm all about, of course, I want to use my imagination all the time. But for example, even something as simple as a raising an eyebrow, like, I'll, I'll be like, oh yeah, right. Instead of saying, oh yeah, right. But if I raise my eyebrow, I've already changed the expression. Oh yeah. Right. And it can be an ironic raising of an eyebrow. Anne: I'm confused. There's my furrowed eyebrow. Confused eyebrow. I have a confused eyebrow. Pilar: Or it could be like, I'm confused. That's like an ironic raising of an eyebrow. I'm confused. Anne: No, you're not. That's a sarcastic eyebrow. Pilar: Exactly. Anne: That would be a sarcastic eyebrow. Pilar: Right, right. It's a sarcastic eyebrow. Anne: Eyebrows, they really help. Pilar: They really do. They really do. Anne: They really help to give you that point of view, to give you that little bit of nuanced emotion about that read, and I'll tell you over and over again, that's what we keep hearing. Right? It is that kind of emotion, that point of view that, the you that you bring to the script that helps you to bring yourself to the script. Otherwise we're just spewing words into the microphone. Pilar: Exactly. Anne: We don't want to spew words. Let's not spew. Pilar: Like an inward chuckle, like -- Anne: Yeah. Pilar: You know, just the shrugging of the shoulders that we, that you know, that you mentioned in your minute. And like, for example, when you, when you say your name, you can say your name, Pilar Uribe, or you can say Pilar Uribe. So I just shrugged my shoulders Pilar Uribe. Anne: Pilar! Or Pilar Uribe. Pi-lar. Pilar: Yeah. And so we have this whole stretch of body, which is our shoulders that we can do so much. We can shrug one shoulder. We can shrug to shoulders. We can shrug kind of just like a little kind of a yeah, right. We're just kind of like a little inward chuckle. I just raised my shoulder. So you've got all these parts of your body that you can use that can help you when you're doing a read. Like right now I'm using my hands. You know, what you were saying before, I can be pointing to somebody. I can be gesticulating. I can be raising my arms. You know, another one we were talking about earlier is just when you do a read and you put your hands behind your back. There's kind of like -- Anne: Yeah. Yeah, here I am. Pilar: Hands behind your back. Anne: Or hands behind your head, right? So you're just, you're casual. If you happen to be standing or sitting, and you want to relax a little bit -- because sometimes when people are trying hard to sound a particular way, their focus is all upfront and it's all here, like in their mouth and in their, like, I feel like it's all around their face. And when you are moving your hands, moving other parts of your body, it just dissipates that energy and really reshapes the tone of what you sound like. Because we're very physical people when we talk, I think, just to each other, when we engage with one another, we're using those hands. And so why should that stop once we're in the booth, right? Because we want it. We're still engaging with our audience. Pilar: Yeah, exactly. And it's something as simple as putting your arms on your shoulders if you're playing a character, that's in a protective stance or is scared and it's like, this is the way I am now. Or if you've got your hands on the side of your waist, and you're just speaking like this, and you're sticking your chest out, that's a completely different read because you've put something in front of it instead of just speaking here and being really intense. It's almost like you have to trick your mind and you have to give your body an assignment. And then that way, when you give your body an assignment, the tension kind of dissipates as we were talking about. And then you can give a more interesting read and then that's what stops the monotony. You know, even just when you're like, when you're doing long-form, just changing your body stance because it's very hard sometimes to keep the momentum and not be boring. Anne: Well, exactly. I'm so glad you mentioned that. Because a lot of times I work with a lot of students on, on long format narration like e-learning or corporate narration, something that, anything that's longer than even like 30 seconds, right? We have such small attention spans these days. And so you need to really be conscious and focused on keeping that audience engaged for longer than a minute, in between the periods, in between the sentences, right? There's still things happening. And if you kind of forget about that scene and engaging with the person who's listening, then it becomes a monologue. It just becomes you speaking out into the air. A lot of times I'll refer to you're reading the PowerPoint, and that does not engage with us because you're no longer speaking to me, the listener behind the mic, you're speaking off into the air, and it's only serving yourself. And that, that comes out in the read, that comes out in the emotion that -- well, are you really talking to me? Are you concerned about how I feel? Not really, because you're reading that PowerPoint. And when you introduce physicality behind the mic, what happens, it will take the focus off of the monologue and bring it back hopefully to where you're engaging or you're not giving a consistent metronome-like read where we all become bored. It becomes more engaged on you. So I would think the only thing that you don't do when you are physicating behind the mic is take your eyes off the page because that's the one thing that's different, right? Unless you're an actor and you're on stage and you've memorized your lines or on camera, then you can obviously not use the piece of paper, but with us, we're not memorizing.   So if we play the paper -- I was told that a long time ago, play the paper. So the person you're talking to is the person right behind the words on the paper. So if that paper became a transparency for us people who are of a certain age and know what a transparency is, you can see a face or think of it as like a teleprompter with you. You can see faces behind it. You're talking to the people behind it, but you are never taking your eyes off that word or the words, because a lot of times, if you do, and I know with my actor students, I know exactly when they're taking their eyes off the paper, because they're missing words. They're stumbling and that's, that's a telltale sign, but play the paper and physicate like crazy. And nobody's, I mean, we can all be silly, right? I mean, nobody's watching you. I mean, maybe they are. Pilar: Obviously, as long as you don't make noise, there are things that you can do. Like, for example, this is just something that I've done. And then I was thinking, how could it translate to a man? So sometimes what I'll do is I've got my hair up in a ponytail, and I'll just kind of whip my hair out. And just the movement of my head, you know, like a slow motion, like, you know, those hair commercials when they move their hair slowly, that'll give me a different reason. Anne: I've got a visual now. The brat girl, she's like the brat girl. Pilar: Exactly, exactly. So that'll give me a different read. And so for men, you know, if you have short hair, it's harder, but like just even putting a hat on and taking the hat off, just like the slow motion of it. Because a lot of the times when we're doing reads, you know, we want to get it done -- Anne: Yes, quickly. Pilar: -- or not that we want to get it done quickly, but we want to get it over with, and it's in that moment, it's in that present moment that it's so important to be feeling, yes, you're reading, but you can also be doing other things with your arms, and your shoulders, and your head, and just give it that full body because that will -- even though we think it doesn't, it's going to come out in the read. Anne: I like the full body. Yeah. And I'm glad that you said that because I tell people when they're making movements behind the mic, right, in order to make a point, sometimes it takes more of an effort. Like, 'cause I could just sit here, like here I am behind the mic, and I want to demonstrate a large circle. Right? So I use my hands and I draw a circle with my hand, right? So I say here's a large circle, but I didn't really draw a large circle. I just drew a circle in front of me. What I want to do is I want to draw a large circle. And so if you can hear what just happened is I actually drew a larger circle, and it just kind of drew my voice into a different sound and a different tone. And you may not want to go that large, but a lot of times you have to go a little bit larger than the immediate inch or two in front of your face. Pilar: If you're doing video games, you definitely have to go larger. Anne: Even narration. As a matter of fact, narration, because God, you've got to make sure that those nuances come out. They may not be grand emotions, but they're going to be -- I really want you to listen to this next line. It's really important. And let me talk about the circumference of this large circle over here. And so, as opposed to let me talk about the circumference of this large circle over here, right? There's a big difference when I don't move versus when I do move. And so you need to make that corresponding physical movement that gives it enough point of view, enough emphasis enough passion, whatever that is. I just -- see, I got so passionate. I plosived on my mic. I heard that. And so, or I might've hit the mic with my hand, but you've got to give that performance behind the mic that allows you to express something that people are listening to because remember you're reeling them back into the story because they don't have to listen to you. If you're in front of someone and you're actually engaging with them, right, they're physically in front of you. And so you've got your body that you can use to help like control the conversation. Maybe not control, but use your body and your face and your hands and your voice to keep people engaged. But behind the mic, it's an imaginary audience that we're playing to, so. Pilar: Well, and I think it's really important because along the lines of what you just said, what are we doing as voice actors? Whether we're doing long-form or we're doing an audition, our goal is not to get the words out or not to say the words in the pretty way. Just like in a conversation, you are engaging the person who's in front of you. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Pilar: That's the whole point of it. You're doing it for the other person. You're not doing it for yourself. Anne: Right. Pilar: So in that sense, you have to be as if that person were right there in the booth with you. So you have to engage, and whatever it is, you can be physical about it. And the great thing about being in the booth is that nobody has to see you making these silly faces. You know, so if you're doing your exercises, you know, and it's like -- Anne: It's so true. Pilar: -- you're going by them as -- this is a great exercise -- my name is -- and so you open your mouth wide and you go "my name is Tommy, the wide-mouthed frog." And that -- Anne: Tommy, okay, Tommy. Pilar: "My name is -- hi! I'm Tommy!" And you just opened your mouth so much. And then when you go to do the normal stuff -- Anne: Yeah. Pilar: -- also those kinds of silly exercises, you know, the big black bug -- Anne: Break the tension. Pilar: Yep. Yeah. And then they bring you to another space if you're stuck and you're going, my gosh, this sounds the same. What am I going to do? You know, it's like, you turn yourself around, and then boom, you're in a different space and you can continue. Anne: Yep. So you didn't think that voiceover was so physical, did you, BOSSes? Because it is, it really is. Whether we're warming up our vocal cords, whether we're warming up our muscles around the vocal cords, or whether we're performing in the booth and expressing physicality behind the mic, it is extra, extra, super, uber important. Pilar: Agreed. Anne: Then it really can help your performance. Pilar: It's a lifelong thing. Anne: That's right, that's right. Pilar: Really and truly, if you're a voice actor and you're just starting out or you've been doing it for 20 years or you've been doing it for five, you can always pick up new tips and incorporate them. And that's going to make your voiceover time in the booth that much richer. Anne: Yeah. Great stuff today, Pilar. You guys, you BOSSes, get moving in the booth. Big shout-out to our sponsor ipDTL, where we can connect and move in the booth with our colleagues and clients. Find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week and keep on moving. We'll see you next week. Pilar: See you next week. Anne: Bye! Pilar: Bye. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

A peaceful life is one where your work and personal lives are balanced yet separate…but how does that translate to finances? Anne & Pilar have done it all: from TurboTax and nerve-wrecking audits to having an accountant on retainer. There is no one-size fits all plan for business finances, but keeping things organized + separated is a good start. Be ready to evolve your strategy as your business does and tackle tax season like a #VOBOSS! More at https://voboss.com/tax-season Transcript >> It’s time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry’s top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let’s welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Pilar: Hola, BOSS Voces. Bienvenidos al podcast con Anne Ganguzza y Pilar Uribe. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I'm excited to welcome back to the podcast very special guest cohost Pilar Uribe. Pilar: Hi, Anne. Anne: Pilar, Pilar, I, ugh, it's that time again. Pilar: It's tax time. Anne: Pilar, I think this might be the time of year where every voiceover artist entrepreneur says, oh, 'cause we got to start the process or at least forms are coming in. We're gathering receipts. We're doing all of that good stuff to prepare for the tax season. Pilar: It's a communal flip-out. Anne: Yes, it is. Pilar: It's a hootenanny of flipping out. Anne: It is. And it's always like, oh God, I don't want to, oh. Or I want to just get a nice refund. And it's been kind of crazy with the extension last year with the pandemic and things got all out of whack, but I'll tell you, I've got a few things that I've learned along the way that may help BOSSes out there. And I'm sure you do, Pilar, may help you guys when it comes time to getting ready for tax season. Pilar: You know, I think the most important thing, Anne, is to start looking at what you've spent, how you've spent it, how you've earned it. And you know, there are people who are listening to this podcast who are going to say, oh yeah, I've got it all together. And then there are people who are just beginning their career. And so for those VO BOSSes, whatever stage you're in, it's really important to, to start it. And it doesn't matter if you don't have it all together because every single person started out not knowing what they were doing. Anne: But, but I will tell you what helped me immensely right away for my business, whether I was part-time or full-time. 'Cause I started and I did a couple of years part-time before I went full time, was getting a separate bank account, a business bank account, so that I could separate the monies that I was using for my business in and out. So that was the single most important thing I think I started, I mean, outside of researching, do I create an LLC? Do I create -- I actually started as a DBA. Do I create an LLC? Do I have an S Corp? And I think for everyone that is just starting, that's something that you want to research. You may not need to start an LLC right away, whatever it takes. I guess it depends on -- it does depend on the state. I only required a DBA when I first started. So that's what I did. And I followed the rules and did what I needed to do. Got my DBA, and made sure I had a separate bank account so that I could account for all the money coming in and flowing out as well. Pilar: Yeah. I completely agree with that statement. So here's something that I did. So all you VO BOSSes listening out there can do the opposite. I did actually, because my bank gave me that option. I had my regular checking account and my business checking account. Anne: And you didn't have to have a DBA or a -- Pilar: No. Anne: -- something that proved your business? Pilar: No. This was when I first got to Miami after Colombia, and it was, um, Wachovia, which is now Wells Fargo, but they, they just offered that and I was like, sure, I'll take it. So it was two, two different savings accounts, two different checking accounts. But here's what I didn't do. So I really wanted to get my frequent flyer miles. So I thought I'm just going to use my regular credit card for everything. Big mistake, big mistake. So I, and I didn't do it until relatively recently that I got a separate credit card for my business. So nothing that I put on my business has anything to do with my private life and what I do when I'm buying groceries or whatever has nothing to do with what I put on the expense credit card. And that is so important because what ends up happening is if you say, oh yeah, I can just put everything on one credit card and then I'll divvy it up at the end of the year, like right now, then you're just basically pouring over and over through all your statements and it becomes a nightmare. Anne: Well, that's just as bad as not having a business bank account. Pilar: Yes. I agree. Anne: And it could be worse because you tend to spend more on that credit card. Yeah. A business credit card is, I absolutely agree, one of the best things that I ever got, and you know what, I limited it to one. I actually went with American Express, and most, most places take American Express. So if I'm going to buy equipment or I'm going to make an investment, buy office supplies, whatever it is, office supplies, nice mics by the way. Those are the office supplies, Hey, a new studio, nice. Everything went on that business credit card. And it was so easy to categorize, because a lot of times they do that for you. And the other single most important thing I did, and I say this constantly, so if you guys have listened to at least one VO BOSS episode, you probably know that the accountant was the best thing I ever did. I have her on retainer. So every month she balances my accounts. She's very familiar with my company's spending and ins and outs. And we meet every other, once every three weeks or so to go over things. And she keeps my books up to date and that makes tax season super simple. Pilar: Right. Instead of a huge headache where your, like, heart is palpitating every day -- Anne: But I have had that happen. Pilar: -- which is what used to happen to me. Anne: I have had -- Pilar: Oh, I had that for years. Yeah. Anne: And it was one of those things back -- remember when there was paper with paper receipts. I mean, I'm kind of happy now that things are electronic and at least digital, because it's easy to go recover those receipts because remember when you would put those receipts in the box, and they would be those thermal paper receipts. And so at the end of the day, they would all like wear off and you're like, what did I even buy? What is that number? What does that say? So. Pilar: What a nightmare. What a nightmare. Yeah. Or you write something in pencil, remember the days of pencil, and then you can't read your writing for crying out loud. Anne: Yeah. Yeah, so I would say first tax tip is figure out what your business is. And I always say if after you make a certain amount of money, yes, you need to like incorporate. You need to look at options for your business. But I was a DBA for quite a number of years, actually, Pilar. And it served me fine. I didn't have to pay a ton of money, and up to a certain amount, if you're not making over a certain amount of money, it worked really well for me. I did have to start prepaying taxes. But again, that helps when you have an accountant on your side, that's helping you do your books every month. And once I started making more money, I had to start making prepayments. And so I kind of evolved over the years. And then most recently I think you and I were discussing, and we can talk in a minute about that, I'm now an S-corp. So I pay myself and that becomes a little more complex. Pilar: Yes. Agreed. Now, just for those of you who may not know what a DBA is -- Anne: Oh yes. Pilar: -- what it means is "doing business as," so it is actually your registered, you register your name, your business name with whatever state you are living in, and you become like your own organization. So it, it actually, it really depends on the state that you're in because every state works differently. And so you create this entity, so you can have a way of collecting checks and payments. And then when people come to your business, you can give them that name, whatever it is. And that is your business name. You're not just Anne Ganguzza. You are Anne Ganguzza, a company. Anne: Yep. Anne Ganguzza is a company name, like Voice Productions. And so a lot of times that does a lot for indicating to your clients that you are truly a professional, and you're not just a hobbyist here. Pilar: Yeah. It's the official, it's official, it's an official registration of your business name. And that's really important when you're doing business and you're not just saying, oh yeah, well, yeah, it's like $.25 a word. And here -- you have to be able to present yourself as a business because we are a business first and foremost. Anne: And at the end of the year, right, or when you have to provide w nine forms for people, you can use an EIN number instead of your Social Security number, which is a big advantage. So that EIN number is your federally assigned employer identification, if I remember correctly. Pilar: Employer Identification Number, yes. Anne: Employer Identification Number. So you don't have to share your Social Security with every Joe that you work for. Pilar: Tom, Dick, and Harry. Anne: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Pilar: Yeah. And that's also, that makes a big, huge difference further on down the line. Because I became an S Corp as well recently, just very recently, and this has taken me years and years to understand. Anne: Did you get help from a lawyer or an accountant or? Pilar: I got help from an accountant. My accountant is my go-to person. I have a relative, who's also a tax lawyer. So that helps. But really, and truly it's, it's so important. And what you say, what you were saying gives me a great idea too, is to really have a close relationship with your accountant. I don't have her on retainer, but that's a really good idea. I call her for anytime I have to sign a paper that my agents send me. I always call and I check with her first. So we know what it is that I'm getting into because there are lots of things I don't understand. I mean, before, when I said, yes, you are first and foremost a business, we are voice actors, but that is our business. So we have to be able to do both. We have to study the craft, which is what we were talking about, you know, over the past couple of weeks. But we also have to know how to conduct ourselves in a business-like manner. Anne: Absolutely. Pilar: And that means knowing what you spend, how you spend it, having a competent CPA who will be able to help you and go over things with you. So for example, one of the things that I didn't know was that there are a lot of expenses that we have that we can deduct. Anne: Yes. Pilar: But you have to know which are the ones that you can deduct. You can't just deduct everything willy-nilly. That's what you check with your accountant for. And so my accountant every year gives me an organizer, and it's really helpful because it just, there are categories of expenses that I can look at that I may not even have realized that I can deduct. Anne: Does this change yearly? Do you get a new one every year? So -- Pilar: I do. Anne: Because the tax laws change every year. So my accountant has to stay up to date. And of course that's why I pay her. So she knows the latest. How much can I donate every year? How much can I deduct for this? How much can I deduct for that? And is this a deduction really? And so the cool thing about having one on retainer, and it's not as expensive as you might think, because she just, she's very good at it. And she does it. She just does it for a set number of clients. I'm not that complicated in reality. My business is not that -- it's not like I have retail that I'm shipping out every day and I've got all sorts of vendors that I'm purchasing from. Literally it is essentially my expense is buying equipment and things for the office and things for my business and literally people paying me. And that is a simpler business than let's say a corporation that has employees and all that sort of thing and health benefits. And so for her to manage my account, it's fairly, for what she does, inexpensive. And the nice thing about it is that because she manages it monthly, by the time tax season rolls around, usually most accountants are crazy busy. And I remember like panicking because before I had hired her on a monthly retainer, it was the end of the year, and I was scrambling, right? Oh, here, here are my forms. And I would make copies, scan my copies of everything, and send it to her because she was not local. I used to go to a local one, but you know, now she's, she lives in another state. And so I would make sure I, back in the day, faxed it, sent it securely to her so she could do the taxes, but then it was like, you know, nail-biting because she was working on other clients as well. And there was that deadline. And so she would be so crazy busy that I would be like, oh my God, did you get, you know, and then -- do I owe, do I owe? And if I, oh, I have to prepare or am I getting anything back? And so that's whole that nail-biting period of time, where a good month or two, even if I started at the end of January, here are all my forms. She was insanely busy. So she got to me when she got to me. And so sometimes I'd be waiting a month and I'd be like, do I owe money? So ultimately it's so much nicer now that she already knows my accounts well, and we meet periodically so I can explain, you know, things, money that comes in. What was that for? Where should I categorize that? And basically that's it. And she manages by the way, not just the income coming in in one payment, because I allow my clients to pay me either PayPal credit card, ACH. There's multiple ways that my clients can pay me. And she handles all of those accounts, including my personal account that comes in so that we can make sure that I get the best tax advantages that I can for the year. Pilar: Yeah. That's really important. One of the things that I think is for me, so my brother-in-law used to do my taxes way, way back when, and then one day he basically said, okay, Pilar, you're all grown up. You need to start doing your own taxes. And I was like, what? I was incensed. I was so hurt. And then I was like, yeah, it's called being a grownup. So I went to TurboTax, and I think I might've done one year. Anne: Yeah. We tried that too. It gets complicated when you're personal. And then business. Pilar: The reason why I mentioned is because that's exactly what happened to me is that I thought that I could do it all because -- I know a lot of people who do their -- I know a lot of actors who do their own taxes. And I think that that's awesome. And if you are really good with numbers, and you understand bookkeeping, good for you. But if you don't, and this is something that a really good friend of mine taught me, if there is something that you can't do when you're just butting your head against the wall, there are people who know how to do it better than you. Anne: Oh my gosh. Pilar: So stop be trying to invent the wheel. Anne: Be smart, outsource. Pilar: Exactly. Go and get an accountant. There are plenty of accountants who are specialized, and that's important, to find an accountant who is specialized in the kind of business that you have. Anne: Oh yeah, absolutely. Pilar: And so they know what to deduct, and they know that they can -- you know, so if you have a business, and you're inside your house, they can figure out, you know, I can take this much for, in terms of using my business in the home, because there are ways to structure that, and they know how to do that. Anne: Right. Pilar: But trying to do it on your own when you don't know what you're doing, and you're using a platform, I can't tell you the amount of times I messed up on TurboTax. Anne: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Well, and us too, it's a nightmare. It is a nightmare. Pilar: And it can cost you a lot of money. And luckily my brother-in-law would, he would like, you know, drag me from the edge. And finally I said, okay, that's fine. I get it. I'm hiring an accountant. Anne: Yeah. Well, it's like one of the, I can do it. Yeah. I'll save money if I do it. In reality, by the time you've finished doing it, you've spent so many hours trying to learn -- Pilar: That you can't get back -- Anne: -- and then do it -- Pilar: You can't get back those hours. Anne: And plus you're not up on all the tax laws. That's the other thing. You could be making deductions that you did not, or you're, you may not know about deductions that you can take. And that is so, so important, which is why for me, I'd rather invest it. I consider it an investment. My accountant is an investment in my business ,and she helps to -- she explains things to me and has to tell her, like, what does this even mean? And I'll just say, hey, look, I'm not proud. We are entrepreneurs. We own our own business. If you do well at that business, I remember the first few years, of course I showed a loss, right? And the government expects that right for businesses. So you can have a loss and I actually did have a loss, but when you start making money, and then if you start making a certain amount of money and you are a self-employed, they look harder at you. And so it is not inconceivable that you will get audited, even if, you know, I mean, look, I'm on the up and up. I mean, my accountant's on the up and up, and I got audited a couple of years ago, and it's not fun, but because we were organized, and she had done my taxes for so long, it was super easy for us to submit, like they thought we were missing paperwork or they wanted proof for some donations or whatever it was. I can't even remember what it was, but we had it. It wasn't a big deal at all, but anything that goes through the government, as you know, takes that amount of time. And she was able to like send the certified letters, send everything that they needed. And then of course they didn't receive it. I got another letter that said, blah, blah, blah, or I owed, and I needed to pay. Whatever that was, she was able to take care of it for me. And it was just, uh, it was, oh, it was just a godsend because otherwise I would have had to do it myself. And it's scary when you get audited. You're like, oh my God, did I do something wrong? Of course I didn't do my, you know, she did it for me. I'm like, oh my God, did something happen? Did we take a deduction that shouldn't have happened? Of course not. So, but you've got to prove it. You've got to prove it to them. So. Pilar: And they know, because they've been doing it for so many years, they know how to go up against the government and say, no, no, it's right here. Anne: Line here. I deducted this. Yup. Pilar: Yeah. They know the lingo. They know how to do it. And also something that I learned this past year is that they are behind a good six weeks. Anne: Always. If, if not more. Pilar: If you ever get a letter from the government, they're responding to something that happened six to eight weeks before this. And so if you're like panicking going, oh my gosh, I don't know what to do, that's why it's always great to have an account in your corner, knowing what's going on, because then everything is up, and it's out in the open. Trying to be underhanded is not great. And if you make a mistake, you're setting yourself back and you're giving yourself a headache when guess what? You could be spending time in the booth. Anne: Sure. Pilar: So like, for example, in this organizer that we were talking about before, it gives you ideas and things that you can deduct. So let's say you haven't really paid attention to your stuff. You can go ahead and look back. That's why a credit card is so important because that's where you see the spending, and you can see, oh, I spent this money on that. Or, oh, I can actually deduct this, but you have to have your receipts all in one place. That's why you want to have a separate credit card. Anne: Oh. And I try to use that credit card for every single transaction. And that includes healthcare as well. Because as part of my business, right, taking care of my health, I have a deductible. I have a healthcare plan through my husband, but what I pay that's not covered by that is also deductible. And that can be towards my tax year. And so if I pay for everything on that credit card, it's super simple to organize for my accountant. Just almost everything goes on the credit card as a matter of fact. I think I only write, I only write checks and that and checks really, the one credit card and checks, and it's been probably the easiest thing ever. I think the fact that I accept multiple credit cards coming in and checks coming in and PayPal and Venmo, I accept all these other incoming pathways of income, that's harder for her to organize than the fact that I only pay out on my credit card or I write a check once in a while. It's funny because I almost don't know how to write a check anymore. Pilar: I know I never do. I almost never do. It's really funny. Anne: And who mails a check? I mean, like oh my God. Pilar: Well, what about when you're sending it to the IRS? Anne: Yes, exactly. Pilar: Then you have to certify it and make sure they get it and return receipt. That whole business. Anne: Goodness. Yep. Pilar: Something that I started doing too for myself, even though I hand everything over, but I like having my stuff organized. So this is, and I'm going to tell the VO BOSSes, this is how I used to do my taxes. Just so you realize -- Anne: The shoe box. Pilar: Practically. Anne: Yeah. Pilar: So I would have different folders. I had different folders, but I mean, we're talking less than three years ago, I was still doing this. All right? We're not talking like 10, 20 years ago. And I would use either my laptop calculator or I would use my iPhone calculator to add up all my gas. Okay. That's how backward I was. Anne: Oh. And mileage too, remember mileage like, when you would travel anywhere, to a studio. Pilar: Back then. Yeah. But back in the old days. Anne: Before the pandemic. Pilar: Right, exactly. Before the pandemic, but I would literally add everything up, and then I would give her the totals, you know, how much I spent on clothing for auditions, on headshots, and resumes, blah, blah, blah. And there's so many now on the market, but the one I use, and I'm actually thinking of changing to QuickBooks, but I use Quicken. So Quicken is great for you to -- and it's basically, it doesn't really matter what the program is. It's basically for you to be able to see A, you can balance, you can balance your budget that way, which is really important, but you can also see, and it can give you summaries of what you spent over the year. So then you go, oh, okay. This is how much I'm spending on groceries. So this is how much I'm spending on takeout, since you've got all these categories and then you can sit there and you can look. Okay, do I really need, you know, in terms of creating a budget for yourself, because you know, we're still kind of going through this situation and where people, jobs and whatever -- the whole market has changed. So it's really great to keep an inventory of what you're doing, and for tax time, then you've got it all in one place. You just have to say, oh yes, okay. This is how much I spent on classes. This is how much I spent on new equipment. Anne: Yep, coaching or yep, new equipment, studio costs. I have an entire folder when I built my studio for just studio costs. Pilar: Exactly. And all of that of course is deductible because it's your business. And so that way, when you've got a program like Quicken or QuickBooks and there's, you can keep track of it through waves. There's the waves app, the Mint, there's, there's so many, Next Wallet, you just keep track of what you're spending and also what you're earning. And I think it's really helpful because really, and truly, we are voice artists. We're also entrepreneurs. We're also our own business. If we treat ourselves like that, if we treat ourselves like serious business people, other people are going to, when they look at our business, they're going to go, oh, okay. She knows where this is. She knows how to, you know, the invoice, this, this is how I do my business. And that is something that, you know, you can go home at night and go, yeah, I'm a business. I'm an artist doing my business. And that's really important. And then when tax time rolls around -- tax time -- you're not freaking out. Right? Because you've got your stuff organized. Anne: That's the biggest thing. BOSSes, if you take anything away from this, it's being organized sooner rather than later, all through the year, every single day. Be organized, track those expenses and have that account, try to keep it as simple as possible. And like I said, we're actually kind of lucky. We're not as complex as some corporations that provide healthcare and hire employees. I mean, I outsource, so that's a whole other thing because I pay people as well. But honestly, compared to like a normal corporation, it's fairly simple what we do and what we need to keep track of. So I think that if you can give yourself a certain amount of time each week, each day to just make sure those expenses are categorized, they're organized, they're put into financial software, you talk about QuickBooks or Quicken -- I used to use Quicken, but now I use QuickBooks online with my accountant. We can both go into the same account and look and try to reconcile. If she has any questions, she can ask me. And it's a really great way to just keep on track with things. That's the best thing you can do is keep on track because by the end of the year, the last thing you want to do is to be scrambling. Pilar: Yeah, exactly. It really is great to be able to see what it is that you do in your daily life. We couldn't really do this before the age of digital. And so it's really nice to be able to see, because we're freelancers at the end of the day. Unless you have a nine to five job doing this, you don't really know how you're spending your money. So it's, it's a really nice sort of bird's-eye view of seeing, okay, this is what I spent on gas. This is what I spent on takeout. Maybe I can cook a little bit more at home if the money situation, if it's that time of year, when there're not a lot of auditions coming in and you're not booking work as much as you'd like to, then you can say, oh, okay, I can shave a little bit off of this. Because you see, and you have your totals and you see what you've spent for the month. You've, you've already figured out what your budget is, so. And it takes time. I didn't come to this, these realizations overnight. It took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to figure it out. Anne: And tears. Pilar: You know, but there're great resources online. You know, I don't know if people are aware, there's this organization called actorsfund.com and you just have to basically, you know, you can do orientation sign up as an actor because we are actors, and they have all these great courses like budgeting nuts and bolts, how to create your own budget. Anne: Oh, nice. How do people get there again? What is that, actorsfund.com? Pilar: Actorsfund.com. Anne: Awesome. Great. Pilar: There're all sorts of programs. I mean, if you live in New York, there's ways you can, they talk about housing. They talk about mindfulness meditation. Anne: Because after we do our taxes, we need that. Pilar: We need to lay down. Anne: We need mindful meditation to calm down. I also want to say though, that not just for full-time entrepreneurs, but for people who are doing this part-time, I remember when I did it part-time, I didn't at the time have enough opportunity to make a certain amount of money so that the taxes were simpler. If I made a thousand dollars in the year, did I actually report that as a business income? Not necessarily, but if you are part-time, and you intend on either you're getting enough work, and you're intending on going full time, getting that business bank account, figuring out if you're going to be an LLC or an S-corp or DBA, whatever that is, I think the sooner you start that, the better. And it's always good to be mindful of keeping your accounts separate. So if you are doing this part-time, maybe get, if you're not incorporated yet, or you're not a DBA yet, just get a separate credit card and only use that. And then maybe see if you can get a different bank account. Hopefully your bank will allow you to get a business bank account so that anything that comes in or goes out, goes through that account. So start early with that. Pilar: And check out, I think it's, Next Wallet. You can actually do comparison of credit cards to get really good deals. So you can get a credit card that can give you points, and you can even pay for some of your bill with the points. Anne: Yeah, that's, that's what mine is. So whenever I use to buy, I get money back at the end of the year. I get like 2%, 3% back. And that's typically what I do because I don't want to pay my full bill. Right? Pilar: There are a lot of resources out there. You just have to look for them to help you. And it does get easier with time. Anne: It does get easier, guys. BOSSes, you can survive tax time. Pilar, and I are here to tell you that. Get yourself organized. Pilar: It'll go from "it's Tax Time" to "it's tax time, yay." Anne: There you go. There we go. Wow. Good topic. Not always one that I love talking about, but hey, it's a necessary topic. And to be BOSSes, we have to move forward and get prepared and pay those taxes and survive the season. So BOSSes, we have the faith that you can do this. I'd like to give a great, big shout-out to our sponsor ipDTL that allows you to network and connect like a BOSS. Find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Pilar: See you next time. Anne: Bye. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

Have you ever wanted to be someone else (or maybe just sound like someone else?). Expand your performance reach with speech-to-speech technology and explore new options as an actor! Anne & Alex Serdiuk from Respeecher discuss how voice actors can benefit from incorporating digitized voice options into their repertoire using the Respeecher platform. They chat tech, marketplace, usage, and just a few of the possibilities available to VO talent using speech-to-speech to enhance their acting range. Winner of SOVAS Outstanding Podcast: https://www.sovas.org/2022-winners/ More at https://voboss.com/voice-and-ai-growing-respeecher

Have you ever tried singing your audition copy? Anne & Pilar do! This week, your hosts will teach you how to let go in the booth and approach scripts using a musical edge. All copy has a distinct flow and requires proper pacing, a distinct rhythm, and hints of uniqueness that keep listeners interested. Get ready to listen, sing, and most importantly, break down copy like a #VOBOSS! More at: https://voboss.com/singing-and-vo Transcript >> It’s time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry’s top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let’s welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Pilar: Hola, BOSS Voces. Bienvenidos al podcast con Anne Ganguzza y Pilar Uribe. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, along with a very special guest cohost Pilar Uribe. Hey, Pilar. [Pilar humming] Anne: Hey, I recognize that. Hey, is that this song? [song playing] Ugh, Pilar, I love, love, love this song. And you know what? Even if I didn't know what it meant, like, I feel like the title just says it all, "Attacks of Happiness." Like honestly, like that's just a joyful, happy song. You are so multi-talented -- again, I say the triple, quadruple, multilevel threat. I think there's a lot to be said about singing and musicality in voiceover. And I'd love to chat with you about that today. Pilar: Yeah, it's funny because a lot of people think that singing and acting aren't connected or they say, oh, I can't sing. You don't have to be a singer to have a sense of musicality and incorporate that into your work. Anne: Or a musician. We'll just say musician, right? I think there's so many parallels in voiceover. Pilar: Absolutely. Because the thing is is that when you're given a script, whether it's 30 seconds, or it's, you know, an audiobook, or it's 10 pages of e-learning there's beats and there's rhythm to it. Anne: Absolutely. Pilar: You have to find that, you have to find the musicality of whatever it is that you're talking about. Anne: Absolutely. Pilar: And so it really doesn't matter what the, what the length is. You need to break it down and create beats and find the beats and find where there are the parts where you can slow down and speed up. Anne: And the rhythm. Pilar: And the tonality of it. Anne: Well, you know, what's so interesting, and I teach conversational melody to my students, and what's so interesting -- yeah, what's so interesting -- Pilar: Oh, talk about that, that's so cool. Anne: -- we don't -- thank you -- we don't ever really listen to our own conversation and break it down into melody, but all the time we're getting specs that say conversational or talk to us like it's your best friend. Right? And so, because we don't think about what we sound like melodically when we're talking conversationally, over the years, I've broken it down technically. But again, you can't spend too much time thinking about the technicality of it, but just know that we're organically thinking about what we're saying, right? So that has everything to do with the pacing and the rhythm of how we talk, because I'm thinking of things to say in my brain. And then they come out my mouth, and when that happens, I'm thinking, okay, now I know what I'm going to say. Right? So I'm thinking, here's my rhythm and my length of what I'm going to say. And then I know what I'm saying. And ultimately, when it comes to important words that I want you to hear, I'm basically making those whole notes or holding the notes longer. So I really want you to listen to this. So I've really like emphasized that. And so that becomes part of a melody. It becomes part of music. If you read music, think of it as your whole note, and all the words that lead up to the important word as your half notes, your 16th notes, your 8th notes, whatever that is. And then you also need to think about like, phrasing, right? Because I don't breathe in the middle of what I'm saying to you. I don't do this and then breathe and chop my phrases like this. I do this. I just -- all my words are kind of flowing along, and I'm creating a phrase or a thought or an idea in one breath. So it's similar to singing, right, and singing phrases because you don't stop and breathe in the middle of them all. You basically have one breath and you're like, hey, this is what I want to say to you. You're not going to go, hey, this is what I want to say to you. It's no, it's, it's really very different. And I think what people might tend to not think about is when you're being conversational and believable, it's all about the pacing, all about the rhythm and the pacing, which makes it more believable. And if you're too consistent in anything that you do, right, in your melody, in your beat, in your rhythm, it becomes like white noise. And so that's where people tune you out, right? It becomes like a metronome. Pilar: Yup. Anne: And now I've heard that enough. And so I tune you out. So I think that rhythm and the melody is so, so important to the musicality. And like you were saying, I mean, it's almost like with voiceover, it is a song. Your script is a song. Pilar: I love that you teach that. I think that that's awesome. And for those VO BOSSes who think, I don't know how to carry a tune, and I don't know about beats, if you've ever sat in a restaurant or a bar and you've tapped your foot to something, or you've been watching television and you're kind of like, you get into it, you're holding the beat. You are carrying the beat in your feet. So it's part of us. Anytime we hear music and any time something strikes us, and we, we start moving our shoulders, let's say, or we start moving our bodies or just our torsos, we are holding rhythm. Anne: Oh yeah. Rhythm and energy. Pilar: Yeah. Rhythm and energy, absolutely. So when you are looking at a script, let's say a 30-second script, you have to figure out where that is. And by musicality, doesn't mean that I'm going to be talking like this. I'm no, it's not about -- Anne: And you don't want to be sing-song either. Pilar: No, absolutely not. Anne: Right? Exactly. Pilar: But there is a rhythm. You know, if you listen to like a lot of the times, I, I love to listen to the Superbowl commercials, but I close my eyes, or I will look at a commercial and I'll turn the sound off because you will see the rhythm in the movement, as well as in the vocal quality of it. There's a very specific rhythm to certain products. And they're very, very aware of this. So as voice actors, we have to become aware of it as well, so we're not, as you said before, you know, we're not the same all the way through. Because it's really easy to get into that flow. And you're like, oh, this is really great. I'm in the flow. So I'm just going to keep talking the same way. And it's like, mm-mm, that's not the way we talk in real life. Anne: Right, right. But I love how you brought up that there's to, any particular script or any particular commercial, if you listen, there's a musicality. And then there's something that they call sonic branding. Right? [McDonald's jingle] you know, that kind of thing, or "we got the meats, "that kind of thing where it becomes part of the brand, that melody, but you want your melody when you're voicing something to be something that draws the listener in. And that usually means something that is not consistent or musical in any kind of consistent pattern, because that then becomes predictable. And the last thing that we want to do is to become predictable in our voiceover acting. Pilar: Yeah. It's really important to, when you're listening to voiceovers, because that's where you do the homework. That's when you find out, oh, what is it that these people are getting, you know, paid the big bucks, let's say for super bowl commercials, what is it that they have? And you'll find this little irregular heartbeats, shall we say? And you'll find little pieces of humor and little turns of a phrase, and it's not about copying it. It's about -- a big part of finding the musicality is also feeling it. Anne: Yes. Agreed. Pilar: You have to be able to kind of feel the rhythm because when we're sitting there and we're tapping our feet, if we're in a bar or we're in a restaurant, we're feeling the rhythm and we're like, oh, okay. "I'm having attacks of happiness." So, you know, you can sit there and you can find that rhythm. You can do that when you're speaking, but you have to find the rhythm. Anne: I have to tell you, and we're talking like all areas of music that can help you in voice over, I have an app called Appcompanist. And actually that was introduced to me by my singing teacher. I do have a singing teacher, and what I love about singing. And even if I don't think, look, I'm not going to go out on the stage anytime soon and sing at the bar down the street. No, but it's all about being able to control, also warmup. I mean, singing is a great warmup for your voice, and also figure out where I can place my vocals. You know, there's a lot to be said for placing vocals in different places. And that becomes a way that we can explore our range as a voice actor and range in terms of pitch. But I don't think we should ever become like, oh, I just need to pitch up in this particular note for the rest of the copy. It just gives us a place to start from. And that is very, very helpful in getting different ranges in your vocal footprint. Pilar: Yes, I totally get what you're saying. An image came to me as to, because obviously as we grow older, our voices get deeper, and I've found that I've found a deepness in my chest that I -- I was always up here talking here. I was sort of like up in my throat. Anne: Yeah, me too. Pilar: And then when I started concentrating on my chest, I have found different levels of my chest voice. So it's right here, and it's really, really intense. Anne: And the cool thing is, is that it becomes a place where you feel where the sound is coming from, rather than trying to mimic or trying to like get to a particular note. It becomes, oh, I feel the vibration in my chest. So that's all I care about thinking about when I'm voicing this, just make sure that that voice is coming from my chest. Or, and I actually saw this -- Debbie Derryberry, who's a wonderful character actress, she has a TikTok channel, which she has quite a few followers. She just reached 1 million. But she talked about how she created some of her character voices. And so one of them was like, she would actually be talking, say, okay, so she's a little bit younger. So now I feel like her voice is coming from her eyes. You know? And so, as she was saying it, she was pointing to the different places where her voice was coming out. And that really helps to change the pitch of the voice. And also she added the emotion and the feeling along with it, and that really created a believable character. It was really a fun thing to watch, but that is the idea of a vocal placement and how singing can help your voiceover to really evolve and expand your repertoire of characters. Pilar: Absolutely. One of the things that I do, and I, I need to do it more often, but it happens more when I'm stuck. I'm looking at a piece of copy, and I'm like, ah, I don't know what to do with this. I start singing it. I sing the whole thing. Anne: Oh, interesting. Pilar: Yeah. So if you've got "plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is," you know, that kind of a thing, or so I will do the reverse, if I'm hearing a song. So for example, this is a script that I did a couple of years ago. "When it comes to finding quality care for your kids, you can't make any compromises. [sings] When it comes to finding quality care for your kids, you can't make any compromises." Just something as simple as that will completely change, if you go through the entire script, it'll completely change the way you thought something could be. 'Cause here's the thing that I found about voice. I've always seen my voice is kind of like a race horse. And sometimes it just shoots out of the stable, and it's like, I don't know where it's going because it's like completely wild. And I have to rein it in. But sometimes I need to give it like a little push. So I'll sing my copy. And it's like, when a dog turns around three times and then settles himself down -- my cat, my cat does the same thing, of course, because she copied my dog when he was alive -- but it's kind of like, if you don't know where to go with something and then you kind of distract, you distract it. Anne: I think it leads obviously to a different melody when you voice it. And possibly, I think it leads you to thinking about it in different emotions. Pilar: Exactly, exactly. Anne: Which I'm always like, if you want to create you know the ABC takes, which I think everybody in the world just goes, this is take one. This is take two. This is take three. Right? And all they do is change the first note. Right. So if you think about that, that's so predictable. And we really need our takes to be completely unique and different. So I love that you lead with singing it because that can lead you to a different sound. And then that sound can lead you to a different emotion, and that can lead you to a different place in your imagination. So that really takes you almost into a different scene and a different reaction to the scene, which then gives you a completely different take. Bam. Pilar: And also -- exactly. Because the thing is, you're looking at the script, but you -- myself, I don't know what -- I may read the script, but I don't really know what it's about because I've spent exactly 30 seconds on it. You know, a copywriter has spent days or even weeks on it. Anne: Which is why we should all spend a little bit more than 30 seconds. Pilar: Exactly. It's my job to become familiar with it. So if I don't really know, let's say about care.com. Care.com... "Care.com understands this better than anyone." Well, do they really understand it better than anyone? Anne: What do they understand? Pilar: Exactly. They know that you want to find someone great who can bond with your kids and take care of them. And then if I do different things, if I go to different places, so let's say I'm stuck with this. And I'll, "when it comes to finding quality care for your kids, you can't make any compromises." I'm not going to do that for the actual thing, but that'll bring me somewhere and I'll go, oh, that's really interesting. I did it sort of like an older person like this and Care.com -- "when it comes to finding quality care for your kids" -- that just gave it a whole different range. I mean, I don't know how different, but I felt it different when I went back and I did it quickly just as an example, because I got to a different place. Anne: Yeah. I get that. Here's a thought, you know, it's so funny that you say you sing it because a lot of times when I come in my studio getting ready to do an audition, I'm singing because I'm like, "hello, and here I am," you know, "I'm in the booth now." And so I'll just start singing it and I'll sing my script. It's so funny that you said that. And I consider that a little bit of a warmup, but here's a thought. What if we just started singing script while we then did a quick Google search and went to the website? Because I think then again, I think there's a visual branding that you get from that company that can tell you how they want to portray themselves to the customer. And I think that would help a lot in terms of giving you a different scene, a visual plus your singing, and then go back to the copy and see what happens. Pilar: And there's a big part of this that -- I can only speak for myself. But when I'm looking at a script for the first time, I have a built-in skeptic, and I have the adult that has to do her homework, and she has to get the audition done. And what I do when I sing, and I also do exactly what you just said, which is I look at the copy and I'm sort of distracting myself. It's almost like I'm fooling the adult part of me so I can kind of say, okay, it's time for you to take a step back and then let the child enter and play with this script. Anne: Absolutely. Pilar: That gives it more flavors too, because if you're looking at it with the eyes of an adult, like, okay, I have to break this down, and I have to do this, which is important. Breaking down the script is really important and finding the beats, but it's also being able to say, okay, let's put the adult aside for a second and let's just play with it. Let's sing, let's be goofy. Let's put on a boa and the -- you know, that's why I talk about using props in the booth when I'm doing auditions, and let's be a diva. And I have a teacher who a lot of the times I'll be doing characters, and then he'll have me go way, way off on a tangent and give me just, just to go completely over the top. And then he's like, okay, now go right into the character straight. Anne: Yeah, yeah, you do the wild take and then completely over the top, then bring it down. Yeah. That's an excellent piece of advice too. And by going over the top, you can be singing, right? Again, I feel like just taking yourself out of that like metronome of here's, what it should sound like, and then getting yourself off of that melody, whatever it takes, singing, to get yourself off of that melody. There's so many people that have, they come into the booth with a melody in their head because they've heard it for years, a particular announcery way. This is different. What you need to do is to, again, make it that authentic believable and take it to a different note, really. I have a blog that I wrote that's called Perfectly Imperfect and the voice artist is one of my favorite doing this corporate piece, which is about two minutes long, talking about how technology should be made for all of us, right? She's a beautiful voice, but it's imperfect. It cracks, it splits. It's a little raspy. And she ends up talking on notes that we wouldn't anticipate, meaning she's very much in the scene, very much talking and thinking as she's talking. And it leads her to these notes in the copy, which are beautiful and so unique that it makes me listen. And I think that that is where we want to strive to be. Like, we can't just say the words in a melody that is like, we've already rehearsed it. We already know the ending of the story. We have to work in that melody that surprises us, that as we discover what's happening, it's evident in our melody. It's evident in our emotion. And I think that a lot of times, that melody doesn't have to be all over the map. You don't have to be an opera singer. We don't have to be singing scales that are crazy. It can be, again, very nuanced. In our conversational melodies, we don't really, if you're talking about music, we don't really go thirds. Right? We aren't talking about this because we're not that excited all the time, right? Or maybe we're only excited for a few, a few words, which in case you can advance that third. You're almost never going between a C and a C sharp, right, or a C and a D in conversational melody, a C and a D. I didn't say C and a D! I said, C and a D. If you're musical, you're hearing that C and a D, I went up just a touch. And so musically, you're not creating crazy riffs or crazy splits, unless maybe you're a character. Right? And you have a more dynamic personality. So I think that the musicality changes with the character, changes with the emotion. Pilar: Yes, absolutely. One of the things that I think is so important is to recognize, because I struggle with this. When I look at the copy and the reason why I'll go out and sing it is because my first instinct is to play it safe. It's like, I'm going to be a good little girl and read the specs. And I'm going to follow the specs to the letter. And I'm going to do my little homework and do my beats and everything. And there's a moment where you have to just get out of that box. Anne: Be the naughty girl. Pilar: Yeah. Anne: You've got to be the naughty girl. Pilar: Oh Anne, now we got some, we got a little insight in here to Anne Ganguzza's private life. VO BOSSes, take note. Anne: Oh my goodness. But isn't that what they tell us all the time? Pilar: Absolutely. Anne: You've got to catch the casting director's ear who has just listened to the same melody 200 times. Think about it. Pilar: Exactly. Exactly. So they're looking for the raspy. Anne: What does that melody that they expect? They're looking for the unexpected. Yeah. Pilar: They're looking for the imperfect. So when you hear something, this is something that's really important in acting that I learned many years ago, you do your beats, you do your homework, you rehearse it, you rehearse it. But then when you do actually do the copy for a take, you're allowing the words to speak as if it's for the first time. So you're acting for the first time, because you know, the one thing that I hear when I'm in workshops is, you know, people they're reading the script, and it's like, you cannot read the script. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Pilar: You, you can read the script when it's the first time. That's awesome. It's great. But if you're going to do that for an audition, you better have a whole world behind it. So it's like, and that's where employing something like music comes into it. I mean, this is something that someone else me in doing promos. It really helps to have something like a song in the back. So for example, I'll take my headphones off, and I'll put my iPhone headphones in so it doesn't bleed, and I'll be listening to music on my phone. And then I'll just listen to a piece of music that is going to help me out for this particular audition. And that will kind of get me into the rhythm of it. And that, it's just really funny, 'cause I'll listen to when I first read it and then I'll listen to it the second time around, and I'll be like, oh my God, this is a completely differently read. It's the funniest thing. Anne: It's completely different. I love that for a tip because you know, it's funny. I remember like, and sometimes I'll do this. I'll do an example of here's why, if you're just simply yourself telling a story and you're focused on that, that melody fits any kind of music underneath you. You could have something strong and dramatic, or you can have something that's quiet. And just look, I'm talking to you from the heart, and you could have swells of music when you're just like, I'm talking from the heart and then you could be dramatic and loud underneath you, that fits. And it also fits with a calm piano piece. And it's so interesting when I do that example, I'll actually put different music underneath a very conversational voice and show how it really works. So that authentic, real sound, that melody goes with any type of music. And I think that's why it's really requested quite a bit. Not only for that reason, because you can put any kind of music or maybe visuals with it, because it works, because you're telling the story. But also just because it's effective. Like if you're fighting with the other elements of the piece, which would be music and visuals, then you're fighting, and that is not effective in engaging your audience, plus it sells, right? That's like the bottom line. Most people want that, because a real authentic person is going to sell more than an announcer or somebody that's mimicking or somebody that doesn't sound believable. And so therefore you have to understand that melody of being engaged in a conversation without really trying to follow any other type of melody or mimicking a melody. I love the talk about music today. Pilar: The one thing that I will say, especially for the people out there who don't sing, don't censor yourself. Even if you're off key, it doesn't matter. You're in your booth, you're in a safe place. Anne: That's right. Pilar: Sometimes, 'cause I have a, I have a really good ear, so I can always hear when I'm just a little bit off or when I hear any other singer, that's like literally like a sharp over or a sharp or a flat under, and I can hear it. And it's like, unh, but the important thing is, if you're on a roll and you're going at it in the booth, don't stop yourself. Follow through on that idea, even if you're not really sure where it's going. A lot of the times as voiceover actors, we want to get it perfect, and we don't let ourselves go through the entire phrase of that. So if you feel like I'm not really where it's going, keep going, because your voice, again, your voice is like a race horse. You have to keep going with it even if it might not be going in the exactly the direction that you imagined, don't stop yourself because you may find some great nuggets. Anne: Yeah, let it, let it flow. Pilar: Yeah. You may find some great nuggets in there. Anne: Yeah. Let it flow. And what's so interesting is I'm going to say -- Pilar: "Let it flow. Let it flow." I just had to bring that in. Anne: As we round out the end of this episode is try then, and this is a hard one. So understand your melody, let it evolve. Let it come out of you naturally without trying to listen to it. Because once you try to listen to the melody, as you're speaking it or voicing it, you then distract yourself from telling that story. And it's, it's another layer of your brain that doesn't need to be invoked with listening to what you sound like. Because when you listen to what you sound like, then you're listening to what you sound like. And you're not concentrated on letting the music flow out of you, letting the script flow out of you. And that's such a tough thing to grasp. And I want BOSSes out there to know, this does not happen overnight. This is something that all of us as actors, we work on this and hone our craft for years. We're constantly honing our craft. So I know there's so many people out there, they get very frustrated. And when you're building an ear, like you said, you have an ear, and that's could be a whole other podcast. Like how do you build your ear? It is not an overnight thing. Building your ear takes time. And it's very difficult to detach yourself while still hearing yourself. As I was just saying, don't listen to your melody; just let it evolve and let it flow out of you. And that's a tough thing to do. And while you're developing your ear, all of a sudden you can hear all sorts of weird things. And you're like, I don't even know what I'm listening to anymore. That's the person who does 15 consecutive auditions in a row. By the 15th, you don't even know what you're listening to anymore. It's then become a repetitive rut. Pilar: Yeah, no, absolutely. And, and something really to keep in mind is that there's only room for one role in the booth. You cannot be the actor, the director, and the critic all at once. Anne: Yeah. That's an excellent point. PIlar: When you're doing the piece or, you know, beforehand, you can direct yourself, and then you have to let go, put that one to the side, the director role to the side, do the piece, stop, and then edit, but really try not to do it mid-sentence because you're just, it's like, that's like the death of creativity. Anne: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Wow. What a cool episode. Thank you, Pilar. This is so interesting. Pilar: Yeah, it was, it was great. And I learned a lot from you too. It's like, now I want to take your conversational melody course. Anne: Thank you. I took piano when I was younger and I did sing a little bit to the point where I think that's where I base a lot of where my voice and my words come out. I mean, everything's a melody, right? Pilar: Yep. Absolutely. Everything is a melody. Anne: That being said, I'd like to give a huge shout-out to our sponsor ipDTL that allows us to explore our melodies with friends and peers and coworkers near and far. You can find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week. and we'll see you next week. Bye. Pilar: "Ciao, bella mia." >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

Microphones are microscopes. They pick up everything, including thoughtful acting! In this episode, Anne & Pilar discuss why acting is essential to a successful VO career. Acting requires imagination, creativity, and using much more than just your voice. Tune in for advice on involving your body in your read, the intimacy of voice acting, and why you need to develop a character for every genre… More at https://voboss.com/the-art-of-voice-acting Transcript >> It’s time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry’s top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let’s welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Pilar: Hola, BOSS Voces. Bienvenidos al podcast con Anne Ganguzza y Pilar Uribe. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, along with special guest cohost Pilar Uribe. Good morning, Pilar. How are you? Pilar: I am great, Anne. I'm doing well. How are you? Anne: Oh, you know, I'm doing all right. Except I, I've already spilled half a cup of coffee. Oops. I just -- Pilar: Did it again? Anne: -- I admitted that I drink -- no, I admit that I drink coffee. I love my coffee, and people that listen to this podcast know how much I love my coffee. So I have to chase it with lots and lots of water so it doesn't dry my mouth out. And hopefully you're not hearing mouth noise at this point, but anyway. Pilar: I just heard one. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. Anne: So there we go. So then, I'm going to have you talk so you can hear less of my mouth noise. Pilar: Okay. Anne: But I love our conversations that we've been having. And in our last couple of episodes, we talked about what it was like for you to be a bilingual VO in the industry and what it takes to be successful. And I want to kind of step back because you've had such an extensive career in all sorts of things. And I think something that's really important that I want to kind of reign in and talk a little bit more about is your acting experience. And I know that there's a lot of voiceover artists out there that are like, oh my gosh, I've never really acted. At least I came from the corporate side of things and didn't have an acting background, but as I went along, I learned acting. And I don't want people to be afraid that well, just because they don't have a ton of acting experience that they can't do voiceover. However, I do believe it's important for us to talk about how important acting is in our career. Pilar: It is, I would say, fundamental. Anne: Yeah. Pilar: That's why the word acting is in voice acting. Anne: Yeah, I agree. Pilar: You know, this is something that also happens. Sometimes people think that you're like a talking head when you're on television, because you only get to see, let's say shoulders or chest, shoulders, and face. But when you're acting, you're acting with your whole body, and that goes for voice as well. So when I started acting in high school, when I started getting formal training, I majored in theater and we had acting classes. And you know, you do the proverbial, you know, act like a teapot, act like a tiger, and all these sense exercises. Anne: I was a dog in my third grade play. Pilar: Exactly, exactly. You know how to go bow-wow. Anne: I'm just saying. Pilar: But those things are important. What does it feel like to be on all fours rather than to be upright? And it's something that I think that a lot of voice actors don't think that they need. And you need to have those sensory experiences, however you're going to get them. So a lot of the work that I did when I was in college and later when I went down to Colombia, for example, I kept taking acting classes even while I had a television career, because I had to keep the body trained, because the body gets rusty, and we're, we tend to be lazy. And I'm the first to admit it. Anne: I think to be said for -- you made me just think about when I was a little girl, right? Remember when we had all kinds of imagination or is it just me? It's like, I used to imagine -- Pilar: Yes. Back then. Anne: Back then I had so much imagination, and I would play with my dolls. I would teach my dolls. I had my stuffed Mickey Mouse. I dragged him everywhere. And we became like acting partners if, for nothing else. Right? Pilar: Totally. Anne: I had all sorts of adventures with him. And I think that there's a lot to be said for that. And somehow when we get older, sometimes we lose that unless we're actively going into acting like you were. And I think that we need to readdress that as we become adults and find areas or times when we can go back to that time to create scenes and use our imagination. And I think there's a lot of that in voiceover that we have to do behind the mic because we're acting in front of a non-existent audience. Pilar: Do you remember, did you ever make forts? Anne: Oh yes. All the time. Pilar: Okay. So making forts, you're making forts out of pillows, out of blankets. You're making up a scene, a place, a cubby hole, a cave that basically doesn't exist. Anne: Right. Pilar: And that's what we have to do when we step in front of the mic and we're doing, let's say, a video game, and we have to imagine that we are a warrior or we are a computer game. I did a video game last year that came out, actually it was in 2020 or 2021. And it came out a couple of weeks ago where I played, I actually played a computer voice. That was one of my characters. And then the other character was an old woman. And so for the old woman, I changed my stance completely. So I was hunched over. I always have, since my voiceover booth is my closet, I basically just took my clothes -- I did leave some clothes out, but I just padded the whole thing. And I have a couple of scarves handy. When I would play that character, that older character I would hunch over, and I would put a shawl over me over my head, over my shoulders. Anne: So you got props. Pilar: Yeah, oh, I always have props, always have props. Whether it's a cell phone, I have, I actually have a toy gun on my desk, a little plastic toy gun, because so many of these characters, we know when I'm auditioning or when I'm doing them, they require, let's say the older lady, she was hallucinating. And so she was seeing things, and she was just immersed in grief. So I had to go there with her in order for my voice to register. It wasn't that I was manipulating the voice. I had to feel her sadness and her grief and her seeing things, which weren't really there because she was so enmeshed in her grief. And so the only way that I can do that is if I imagine it. So you're absolutely right about going back in time. If there is a time that you can go back to. And I did this all the time when I was in Colombia. There were so many characters that I did that I had no previous experience in playing. Anne: Well, I was going to say, I say, Pilar, I know you, and you're not evil, but yet you played an evil character. Right? Pilar: Oh, and she was so much fun to play. Anne: And, you know, what's interesting is I watched the little clip that you had, and I don't remember what particular scene it was, but you were having a conversation with someone else. Your hair was short. And again, I don't understand Spanish, which again, it's one of those things I kicked myself for not learning. And I'm going to, I really should just start learning it -- but just your facial expressions alone, you embodied that character. Like you didn't have to understand Spanish to understand that you were an evil character in that. And it was literally like, what, 20 seconds, 30-second clip. Pilar: Yeah. She was so mean. So nasty. Anne: Yeah. Yeah. Pilar: And people would stop me on the street all the time in Colombia. And they would say -- because the name of the show was "Eternamente Manuela," Eternally Manuela," and Manuela was my first cousin. Anne: Would they hate you? Pilar: So they was like, oh my God, they would do two things. They would say, why are you -- they would stop me on the streets. Why so mean to Manuela? Or they would meet me and they'd go, oh, wow. You're really nice. What happened? It was just like, well, I'm playing a character. She was really, really evil. However, when you're playing a character, I never saw her as being evil when I was playing her. I just saw her as being misunderstood. Anne: Okay. Pilar: And so I did an outline for her. I did a backstory for her, where she came from, how she grew up, what were some things that might have brought her to that present moment of when she first steps into the character, into the script that first day. And that really informed what I would do for the rest of the show. Anne: So you weren't thinking like, you're actually playing mean, but -- Pilar: No. Anne: -- because you had such a backstory built up already, it became a reaction. Is that correct? Pilar: Exactly. So this, this came with time because I had time to rehearse before I started the show. So when I'm in the booth, and I've got a script and I'm handed sides at, let's say 5:00 in the afternoon, which is when agents send them generally. And then they're due the next morning. Exactly. And I'm looking at a piece of paper, I'm looking at a piece of paper with words, and that's all there is. There might be a description thrown in and there might be some specs. Anne: There might be a picture if it's a character, right? Pilar: There might be a picture. But generally you're just, it's a piece of paper, and it's not even a piece of paper. It's a bunch of words on a screen. Anne: Right, right. Pilar: So it's my job as an actor to imagine this character. And if I'm talking about anything, I'm talking about commercial, promo, whatever it is that you're given. If you're talking about Folger's Coffee, it's delicious. You have to see and smell that coffee. So let's say you're not Anne Ganguzza, and you hate coffee. Okay? So you have to imagine, okay, so I hate coffee, let's say, and I don't, but let's say I do. And I'm, and I have an audition to do the next day. Well, I have to find something in my memory bank of what I love that resembles coffee. Because if I don't like coffee, I hate the taste of it. Well, maybe I like hot chocolate or I like hot apple cider, so I have to substitute. And I have to imagine, and I have to feel, feel it. I have to taste it. I have to see it. I have to hear it. So I can hear the drip, drip, drip. So using all the senses, that's where the imagination, that's how you can get that character. And you can do that. You know, at the beginning, people will go, oh yeah, well it's acting. And you know, I just sit there and I read the copy, and I get into it. And I read it a few times. Well, absolutely. You read it a few times, but you start sort of clicking on your memory bank to see what you can bring into it. Because when you bring in your memories, I mean, we can, we can do this exercise right now. So what's your favorite food? Anne: Oh, all of it. Probably bread. Pilar: Okay. What's your favorite type of bread? Anne: Italian. Pilar: Be more specific? A Tuscan loaf. Okay. So I want you, okay. Perfect. Artisan Tuscan, loaf from La Brea Bakery. I want you to put yourself in the bakery right now. I want you to close your eyes, and I want you to feel, and I'm in the Tuscan bakery too, even though I've never been there -- Anne: It's warm from the ovens. Pilar: Okay. And so it's warm -- Anne: Because they're baking bread. Pilar: They're baking bread. And it's like, your mouth is starting to salivate. Anne: 'Cause I can smell the bread baking. Pilar: You can smell the bread. And so maybe you ask for the loaf, you get the bread, you get it sliced, right? Anne: And I can see it because it's golden. Pilar: And you can see it. And then you take it home. Anne: It's got a little bit of a crust. Pilar: And you cannot wait. You've decided you need to taste the bread before you leave the store. So what I want you to do is I want you to just talk about the bread that you're eating right now. Anne: Okay. So first of all, I'm going to tell you that I like a dense bread, so -- that has a crispy crust, right? So it's crispy on the outside and it's a little heavy in my hands. Pilar: Stop right there. I want you to say it as you're tasting it. It's crispy the outside. Anne: It's crispy on the outside and it's heavy in my hand. So it's, it's dense. It's got a lot of flavor. Pilar: What does it taste like? Anne: Heaven. It tastes like -- well, I need to have butter on it. So I put butter on it. It's just, it's got, it's got, oh, it's got, it's salty. It's it's even, even sweet to me. Pilar: Okay. And see what you just did there? You just gave that little paragraph a whole bunch of different flavors and colors because you were experiencing it as you were saying it. Anne: Yeah, absolutely. Pilar: So that's what we have to do with every piece of copy. Anne: And now I'm hungry. Pilar: I am too. I'm like I'm in that Tuscan bakery. Anne: But wait, I just want to say this is for everything. I want to reiterate that we're talking about acting for every genre. You know, people think that e-learning and corporate narration and telephony, you don't have a character. Oh my gosh. Yes. You absolutely have to have a character as well. It may not be as dynamic maybe or as emotional because it depends on the experience that you're in. Right? I think if you're going to be taught a lesson from a teacher, the teacher's not necessarily going to be sad and crying or emotional in that sense, or if you're doing a corporate narration, right? You're in a professional environment. So you may or may not have a wide range of emotions, but you'll absolutely have nuanced emotions and those emotions, right, and the acting, you absolutely have to have those nuances because you're not just reading the words that puts you in the scene and it makes you believable. Pilar: Absolutely, Anne. I will go one step further because it is actually to a person who works for State Farm, it is that important. Anne: Absolutely. Pilar: You approach every piece of copy as it is appropriate to the genre that you're talking about. So let's say through the commercial, when he EF Hutton talks, people listen. And it was so effective because people were sitting there, they were talking and, and then the scene was that everybody was talking and then that person stopped. The voiceover would say it and then it stopped. And so you knew that that was the EF Hutton commercial. So that can register in your voice. Anne: Absolutely. Pilar: If you are thinking -- 'cause it doesn't matter whether it's bread or it's a video game character or it's Charles Schwab. Anne: Right. Pilar: It's really all about what you put into it. So if you're doing a commercial about Charles Schwab, you're dressed in a business suit. You're sitting in your, and there's a whole bunch of investment bankers. If you don't know what it is, you look it up. That's what YouTube is for. Anne: Oh my gosh. Yes. Pilar: YouTube is such a great resource. Anne: You to take that minute, take that minute and Google, for goodness' sake. Pilar: Go look up the product, go to ispot TV, go listen, go, go get your feet immersed in it, go see the competition, see what they're doing. Anne: Absolutely. Pilar: It doesn't take more than five, ten minutes. Anne: It really doesn't. You know what? It amazes me Pilar that there are so many people that just, they rush to get so many auditions done in a day. And yet they don't take a minute to really research the product, the brand, the company, whatever it is, right? For the most part, doing that little extra work really, really helps you in just upping your game and taking it to a whole new. Pilar: Absolutely. Because here's the thing. Whether or not you get selected, because obviously the odds, you know, there's so many people auditioning at once for one role. To me, it's more important to have a well-crafted audition, that I stopped and thought about it. I don't have to spend hours on it. No. But when I play it back and I go away for a minute and I, let's say, go get a cup of water, and then I come back and I listen to it again. Is it something that I can be proud of? Or am I just sending it in? Because I waited until the last minute, and I did it and I just have to get it in before the deadline? So you want it to be as real as possible so that the person listening on the other end will go, oh, okay. I can't use her, but she's got a great voice, because that has happened to me. You know, over the past -- Anne: Or you can tell, well, she can act. I think there's a lot of that when they're listening to the audition, we may not get that gig, but you will absolutely prove yourself that you are an actor. Pilar: Well, and here's something that's really important to know is that the casting director gets a whole bunch of voices together from the agents and then sends it off to the client. And then it's the client, the copywriter who makes the decision. But really and truly, when the casting director, since they listen to every audition, they're going to be hearing your voice over and over and over again. So if you're presenting good auditions, there is a situation, even though there are certain people who make the decisions, the casting director is also lobbying for people that he or she is saying, oh, that's really good. I really liked that. So that's why it's also so important that care is taken when you present something because an audition is not just an audition. And audition is like, is a little one act play. It's a 30-second or it's a 15-second one act play with the beginning, middle, and end. And to treat it any less than that is doing yourself a disservice. Anne: So let me ask you a question. So when you get casting specs, are you following the casting specs? Because I've heard both sides of the coin here, follow the casting specs, or really just bring yourself to the party and bring your own uniqueness. So what's your plan?What is your strategy when you get an audition? Pilar: That's such a loaded question, and I've heard it answered in so many different ways. I do look at the specs. I know people who say, don't look at the specs until the end. Don't pay attention. Other people say, follow the specs. You have to read whatever the casting director is sending you via the agent because they're sending it specifically so you take stock. And I know one specific casting director who's like people, read the spec, I'm tailor making it so guys don't miss any little detail of what the client wants. This person said it. They were like, I'm giving you all these breadcrumbs, go ahead and use them. That said, it's not like you're chained to do it exactly. Anne: Right. Pilar: Because they're looking for your interpretation of it. Anne: Yeah, your unique spin. Pilar: I mean, at the beginning, and I know so many people listening on this podcast have I'm sure gotten Sigourney Weaver, sound like Emma Stone. Anne: Yup. Yup. Pilar: Scarlett Johansson. I mean every, you know, all day long, you get all these sound like, and what they're looking for is not an -- I used to, I used to fall into the trap, as I'm sure many people have when I first started seeing those names, as I would run and look at her and try to almost copy their voices. Anne: Right. Pilar: And that's not what they're looking for. They're looking for an attitude. Anne: Yeah, or an emotion. Pilar: What's your point of view? Yeah. But what's your point of view? Who are you talking to? Because if I'm looking at somebody, and we're back in the bakery on La Brea, and I'm looking at the sales person and I'm saying, can I get some bread? And 'cause I'm just having a good day and or maybe I haven't had anything and I'm like, can I get some bread, because I have to go take a pill with my -- and I have to get bread. So, and so it's like -- Anne: Or the pill's stuck in your throat and you need the bread to push it down. Pilar: Can I get some bread? Anne: That happens to me all the -- I need, I need a cracker or I need a bread -- need a piece of bread. Pilar: Right, exactly. So it's all in how you, what is your attitude? Who are you speaking to?What's your point of view while you're saying this piece of copy? Anne: It's so, so important. And it's funny because you and I may experience completely different genres during our days. Right? I do a lot of corporate. I do a lot of e-learning. I do a lot of telephony, but yet I also am always thinking about who I am, who I'm talking to, and putting myself in a scene because that emotion or that nuanced emotion is everything. It is everything. It is what takes a voice actor from simply reading the words to being immersed and making a believable and authentic. And I can't express enough people just say, they just read it and they read it in a melody that they think it should sound like, right? Oh, I've heard it on television like this, or, oh, I've, I've heard it in a video like this, but I'm like, no, you are not the person that's going to mimic any of that. And as a matter of fact, if you get the job, like I'm trying to train you what it takes to get the job. Right? And then when you get the job, then you can be directed as to however the client wants it. But I think you have to prove your acting first. And that I think it comes down to really, I think, the emotion and the point of view that you're talking about, which is everything. Pilar: Yeah. Yeah. I would hazard that to say that long-form, something like e-learning, it's almost more important. Anne: Oh my God. Yes. Absolutely. Pilar: Because you have to think about, who's listening to this on the other end. So if I'm going to be doing this, you know, straight kind of a thing, then, you know, once upon a time there was a little... and then, and my range doesn't change or [singsong] my range is changing like this, and it's always like this, you're going to drive the person on the other end crazy. Anne: Exactly. Pilar: So you are telling a story, no matter what genre -- Anne: No matter what you're doing. Pilar: Yeah. And you have to always tell a the story. Anne: You have to pull attention. Pilar: Absolutely. Anne: The longer it is, I think the harder it is. Pilar: I agree. Anne: And I think the more dry the material, the harder you have to be in that scene, you have to be that character so that you can hold their attention. I mean, there's so many other things vying for our attention. And that is absolutely. I think so, so important for us to understand that acting is, is everything. It really is, acting as everything in terms of, I believe being successful in your voiceover career. So let me ask you a question. What are the differences that you've experienced in, let's say, stage acting or on-camera acting and voice acting. What are the major differences that you have to account for? Pilar: Okay. Stage acting. Well, first of all, you're projecting because you have to reach the last person, the last seat in the theater. Anne: Yeah, and we don't have to do that in our studios. Pilar: No, you don't have to do that. Film acting is very close. It's very concentrated. Anne: Well, plus you have somebody to kind of, if you're in a scene with somebody, right, you have somebody else to play off of. Pilar: Yeah, absolutely. Anne: And that's a big -- Pilar: Not always, not always -- Anne: No? Okay. Pilar: -- but at least you -- yeah, well, because a lot of the times, if you're, if you're doing, if they're doing a closeup of you, sometimes the other actor will, will be there, but sometimes they won't be. And it'll just be a stand-in. So a lot of the times you have to use your imagination. Voiceover though, you generally never have anybody to bounce off of. Anne: Right. That's where your imagination takes, right? Pilar: That's why you have to use imagination. Anne: Yeah, you have to have a lot of it because you have no, you have no audience. Pilar: And also I think something that's so important that people don't realize that I discovered actually many, many years ago when I was working, when I first started working in television, I remember a cameraman, because you know, they work long, long hours. And he once said to me, he said, everything that comes through there, we can see what you're doing because the camera never lies. Anne: Oh yeah. Pilar: He said it in such a way. And I was -- Anne: That makes so much sense. Pilar: And it was just so interesting to me because I thought, wow, they've always got, you know, their eyes trained on you when the cameras aren't rolling, 'cause they're setting up the shot. So there is a truth that you have to present. Otherwise, if you are quote, unquote acting, it's going to show because the camera picks up everything, and the microphone is the same thing. Anne: You know, it's funny because if you do the parallel thinking and whenever I watch television or a movie right away, I immediately say, oh my God, I don't believe that. I don't believe that character. And it's rare that I see it because most of the time, if it's released for television or movies, you've got a credible actor behind it. But if you ever have that experience where you're not believing the character, it is so obvious. And yet I don't think people think about that when they're doing voiceover, right? They think it just has to sound a particular way, and that will make it believable. But in reality, if somebody is listening on the other end, right, and they have a keen sense of believability, I think people always know. They may not be able to put their finger on it as to why it's not believable, but they will be able to tell that it's not believable. And it sounds just like, hey, it's an announcer. You know, that kind of thing. But I think in reality, we all have to strive for that believability factor first because when you can get there, regardless of the copy -- I mean not every piece of copy is Pulitzer prize, winning material, right? I mean, that's where our jobs come in to make it a story, make it our story and to bring that story to the table and make it believable. And if we can't, it's, it's obvious to the ear. Maybe not our own ears, but it's obvious to the person listening that has a vested interest. And if you cannot engage with that listener, then they don't have to engage with you. Right? They don't have to listen to you. Pilar: Exactly. Or if it's a casting director or -- Anne: Exactly. Pilar: -- they're listening to your there'll be just, okay, next. Anne: Exactly. Next. Pilar: We're done. You know, what I've heard over the past two years now, every single casting director says, we listen to every audition. What they don't say is how long they listened to it. So I've been told that literally six seconds in, sometimes it's less. If they don't hear the truth, they just go onto the next audition. They do not listen to the whole thing. Anne: And you know what, that makes me even more resolute in the fact that your very first words out of your mouth for that audition or for whatever it is, you have to already have been in the scene. And it has to have been a reaction to something. Pilar: You're responding. Anne: Yeah. You're responding. And that melody, if you want to break it down into melodies, if you're musical, is completely different than simply starting a word, like welcome, you know, I mean, that's like, oh, that was just, I read the word welcome, but it would sound completely different if I was actually welcoming you at the door. And it would sound completely different. Pilar: Or you could be welcoming into an airplane. Anne: Exactly, exactly. Pilar: Or welcoming into a car or welcoming into a school. It's going to be completely different because we are -- Anne: Wherever you are. Pilar: Yeah, exactly. Anne: I think that's every time for my genre is, you know, when it's welcome or introducing or any of those words, right, it's hard to make them sound authentic, believable. Right? We don't always, we're not always saying welcome, you know, in our everyday life, but you've got to make it sound like it's a greeting, and that you are genuinely happy to see that person. So that becomes a challenge for people. So you've got to step into that scene and figure out what is that scene before you even start talking? I think that's, that's so important. Pilar: And I think it's also important, probably one of the most important things is to have a lead-in which you're not going to put on the audition necessarily, unless they're asking for improv, but that you're having a conversation. Anne: Yes, absolutely. Pilar: You're having a conversation before you start speaking. Anne: Yep. That helps for sure. Pilar: It's like, when you're going, when you're rolling into the scene, it's not like you just kind of get up and start. You're already in there. You're already talking about it. And then you can just flow right into the words. Anne: Absolutely. Pilar: It's so much harder when you're like, oh, okay, you see the line going. And it's like, okay, now we have to start talking. That's not real. Anne: This is the beginning. Pilar: Right? Exactly. Anne: It's like, no. Pilar: So if you say, if you say, oh, I'm here, I'm in front of a whole bunch of people and they're really, really excited. And this is going to be a really great day. And the sun is shining -- Anne: Welcome. This is just the beginning. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I love that. Yeah. Welcome. Wow. Good stuff, Pilar. I could talk acting all day. We can talk acting all day. I think that was -- thanks so much for those nuggets of wisdom. I absolutely think our BOSSes are going to appreciate those. You guys, I am going to give a great, big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL that allows us to connect like BOSSes. You guys can find out more at ipdtl.com. Pilar, It's been amazing as usual. And I thank you for being with us. Pilar: Glad to be here again. Anne: Yeah. You guys, have a great weekend. We'll see you next week. Bye. Pilar: Bye-bye. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

There is nothing more human than storytelling. In this bonus Voice & Ai episode, Anne is joined by award-winning voice actor Emily Lawrence, Co-Founder of The Professional Audiobook Narrators’ Association. They discuss the financial vs. social implications of Ai voices, creating a community for audiobook narrators, and why human-ness is an essential part of storytelling… Transcript >> It’s time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry’s top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let’s welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast for another episode of the AI and voice series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and today I'm excited to bring special guest Emily Lawrence to the show. Emily is an award-winning actor and writer that's narrated more than 425 audiobooks for publishers such as McMillan, Harper Collins, Penguin, Random House, Simon and Schuster, and many more. She's incredibly proud to be the co-founder and chair of the newly formed Professional Audiobook Narrators Association, or PANA, as everybody has come to know it. Her greatest loves are storytelling and reading of course. So narrating audiobooks is a dream come true for her. And her other passions include traveling, LARPing, aerial surf, fostering kittens, and chocolate. So I have a lot to talk to you about because I love cats. We know that. I have three of them. And so I just love the fact that you foster kittens. Emily: I do. Anne: And thank you so much for joining me today. It's a pleasure to have you here. Emily: Well, thank you for having me. Anne: Yes. Emily: Happy to be here. Anne: So in addition to the kitties, um, I need to ask you for a more complete description. I have never heard of this, but that might not be a surprise. LARPing. Emily: A-ha. Anne: For those BOSSes in the audience that may not be familiar with that, what is that? Emily: Uh, so LARPing stands for live action role play, and it's the nerdiest thing you've never heard of. Anne: I kinda love that. Emily: Um, so basically it's like -- people tend to be more familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, so it's basically like that, which is a kind of like you're role-playing out a video game kind of, only in Dungeons and Dragons, you sit around a table, and you talk about everything you're doing and you like roll dice to simulate fighting and whatever. And in LARPing, you actually role-play everything. So it's like a bunch of nerds in a park with like foam weapons. Anne: I love it. Emily: Fighting each other. Anne: I love it. That's great. Well, look, hey, the nerdier, the better as far as I'm concerned. Emily: Yeah, no, I love it. Anne: That's fantastic. So again, it's great to get to know the you behind the association that has been newly formed. How old is PANA now? Emily: Uh, well we opened to members, I think it was October 21st or -- Anne: Wow. Emily: -- thereabouts. Anne: Fantastic. So tell me, you know, I'm very excited to hear about this because I think it's probably about time, right, in the audiobook world, that there is an association that is vested in the interests of the community. Talk to me about that. Emily: Yeah. Well, I mean, there have been other organizations such as the Audio Publishers Association, which really represents publishers. Anne: Right. Emily: But narrators and other people in the industry can be members. And then obviously there's SAG-AFTRA which represents narrators as a labor union, but SAG-AFTRA also represents everybody else. Anne: Sure. Emily: So there was no organization that really was dedicated to narrators specifically. And I think you're right. It was about time and long overdue. Anne: So, I know that there's a lot involved in creating an organization. Tell me a little bit about that story and how did that begin? I mean, what was -- were there issues that were coming up in the audiobook world that you were saying, you know what, we need an organization to really take care of our community? Emily: Yeah. There have been talks for many years of -- among narrators of feeling unrepresented in various places and in various ways. And then obviously with the rising danger, I guess, or whatever of AI, I certainly felt like, okay, somebody has to do something. And so earlier this year, there were a lot of conversations in Narrator, Facebook, and other groups just kind of like that made me feel like, okay, we need to organize. We need to come together. And so I did that. Anne: And have a voice. I love that. Well, hey, it's one thing to talk, right, to sit around in groups and talk. I have so much respect for the fact that you pulled something together. I mean, there's a lot of work involved in that. Emily: Yeah. It was definitely a lot of work. I am very grateful to have my co-founder Emily Ellet with me through the whole process. And so we kind of started talking like about what this would be and how the community needs it. And then we just kind of did it. Anne: Well, I -- Emily: Here we are. Anne: You know, I love it. I was looking at your website, which for those BOSSes out there that want to check them out, it is pronarrators.org. I love your statement on who we are. I just think that your mission statement is providing opportunities for raising awareness of the narrator within public consciousness. And you have so many wonderful things that represent that this organization is going to be doing for narrators. Tell me a little bit about the initiatives for those things. Emily: Sure. Well, we're certainly very ambitious. We have a lot of really big plans, mostly around three things really. One is education, education both of narrators in order to raise narration standards throughout the industry, but also education of the public, and education in the industry about narrator needs and the fact that we exist because -- Anne: Sure. Emily: -- a lot of people listen to audiobooks and don't give a second thought to the performer who's bringing that story to life for them. And that's obviously important to us that, especially when you're talking about having humans versus robot narrators, you know, for people to recognize that we're human to begin with is probably really important there. So education in general is a big focus for us. Uh, we also have a focus on advocacy, which is kind of our umbrella term for all of the things that we want to do to help our industry thrive with human narrators as part of the mix, and the changes that we would like to see in order to help make that happen. And then the last one would be just community, fostering a community. As I kind of pointed out before, there was no organization that really represented narrators specifically, and only -- and we have a really wonderful, giving community. I mean, honestly, the narrator community is some of the most wonderful, friendly, open, supportive people I've ever met. You know, for a bunch of people who are essentially competitors, we're all so supportive of each other. We all help each other out all the time. And it felt like it would be really wonderful to have an organization that sort of formally recognizes, celebrates, expands, and strengthens that. Anne: So what sort of -- do you have events planned for things that you've -- meetings coming up, events, community outreach, what sorts of things do you have planned for the future? Emily: So we've got lots of plans. Um, everything's just in the beginning stages. We're a member-driven organization. So we operate entirely on volunteer labor. And so our committees have only just started. I mean, they all had their first meeting last month. And so everything is in its infancy. We're just getting started, but we've got big plans for example, community events to get together both in person and online and sort of, you know, build friendships, but also network and things like that. We have plans for an award ceremony that is going to be community-driven and peer-reviewed. So kind of like the Audies, which is our current Oscars essentially meets like the SAG Award. So it will be like a peer-reviewed award show, but that has different sort of categories than typical award shows that really focus in on celebrating our community in a different way, which I think I'm really excited about. Anne: Plans on collaborating or is it a possibility to do any type of collaborative work with the union? Emily: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. We've reached out to both the APA and SAG-AFTRA announcing our existence -- Anne: Right. Emily: -- and saying that we would really like to work with them to further our mutual goals, and both of them have responded very positively -- Anne: Excellent. Emily: -- and very supportive. And so we really do look forward to working with existing organizations to move everyone forward. Anne: So in terms of membership, so if I wanted to be a member, are there requirements, are there -- do you vet your members? What's involved if I wanted to become a member? Emily: Sure. Anne: Because I personally don't do audiobooks and don't hold that against me. I -- just not in my genre, but I know so many people that are just so passionate about the craft of audiobooks and narrating. So if I wanted to be a member, could I, or what is the process? Emily: So members are -- you're eligible for membership if you have recorded at least one audiobook -- Anne: Okay. Emily: -- that is available on some sort of commercial platform. Anne: Okay. Emily: So it's a very low, you know, if you've narrated one book, you can join. There's dues that have to pay, but then you're a voting member. Anne: Okay, great. Emily: If you do not qualify for a membership, we also are creating sponsorship tiers. So we'll have sponsorship tiers -- Anne: Okay. Emily: -- for -- Anne: Nice. Emily: -- other people in the industry like directors, proofers, editors, et cetera. And those are not ready yet, but once they are, there'll be sort of different ways to support the industry and get benefits and like access to events and things like that for doing stuff. Anne: Got it. Are you an official nonprofit organization? Emily: Okay. So we are operating as a nonprofit. We cannot apply for our nonprofit status until we file our first tax return. Anne: Got it. Emily: So -- Anne: Got -- well, I know that it's an involved thing, which is one of the reasons why -- I've, I've served on the boards of many nonprofits. So I know how involved it can be, which is again, why I have a lot of respect for you taking the initiative to put this together for the community. There's so much work involved in nonprofit, and I know how important volunteers and volunteer efforts go. It's so hard when everybody is busy to take the time and be able to help out in an organization like this. And I really look forward to the success of PANA because I know a lot of organizations that start off with the best of hopes. And then it turns into something where it is an awful lot of work and maybe more work than people anticipate. And so I know how it can be hard to progress. Emily: Well, it's definitely more work than I anticipated. Anne: Yup. Emily: I'm committed. So I'm there. And I know my co-founder Emily Ellet is also very committed, and we have a wonderful board. We've put together a board of some of the most respected -- Anne: Oh yes. Emily: -- people in our industry, and they are all very committed also. Everyone has expressed a sort of surprised at how much work it really is. Anne: Right, yeah. Emily: But, um, you know, everybody has affirmed to me multiple times, as recently as yesterday, that like, you know, we're in this and we're going to make this work. Anne: Well, I think having a voice for the audiobook industry is so important, especially with things that develop within our own industry. I mean, not just in audiobooks, but in the voiceover industry as a whole, we are facing changes, and I've known this because I've done my AI and voice series for at least 30 episodes now. So there are things that are, you know, impending and coming into this industry that we as professionals need to understand, and I don't know, evolve or work with or not, or form an educated strategy in order to co-exist, let's say, with them. So I will talk about the AI elephant in the room, which is AI. And what are your thoughts? I know that it's, it's scary for a lot of us that this technology is coming. And so what is your position on behalf of PANA in regards to let's say the evolution of AI and AI narrators? Emily: Well, we are a pro-narrator organization, pro-human narrator. Anne: Sure. Emily: And so we are dedicated to supporting human narrators however we can. We have a lot of ideas about how to address this, but I think the board has expressed our first priority to be education, because I think that a lot of narrators don't really understand all of the possible risks right now. I think it's wonderful that you're doing this, you know, you're, series to educate people. Um, but I think that we have a task ahead of us just to make sure that people fully understand -- Anne: yeah. Emily: -- what everything is. Like -- Anne: Sure. Emily: -- for example, a lot of people don't understand the difference between creating an artificial voice, like a clone of someone, and machine learning, which I don't know if you've covered in your series, but that's a really big thing that people need to be aware of. Anne: Yeah. Emily: So we have a lot of ideas about how to address that first and foremost, but also I think, you know, a lot of people -- just today I was seeing on Facebook, people posting like, oh, I listened to this, and it's actually not that terrible and blah, blah, blah. And so I think that it's important that we stay ahead of the game. You know, we can't let the robots catch up to us. We have to stay better. But also I think that, I mean, for me personally, this is not like PANA's official position or anything, but me personally, I think that a lot of the conversation is revolving around like dollars and cents. You know, publishers and whoever are going to do what makes the most economic sense to them. And if it's cheaper, consumers will follow suit. And there's just, it's kind of all about money and jobs and the things that general AI conversations are about. Anne: Yeah. Emily: But I think that with our field, it's not only about our jobs, it's also about the art of storytelling. Anne: Sure. Emily: Something that -- Anne: Agreed. Emily: -- I mean verbal storytelling is as old as language. It's like, we've been doing it as humans for forever. And that's, I mean, to me, that's what's at stake here. Like, yes, I would like to have a job. I would like to be able to do what I love to do for the rest of my life. But I'm equally as worried about, you know, the power of literature and stories and what it means to have, you know, just from like a moral, ethical standpoint to have robots sharing the human experience that they literally can't understand because they're an algorithm. And so I think that that is something that needs to be more part of the conversation for everyone, because what we do is an art. Anne: Sure, absolutely. Emily: And even if a robot is possible, it can never actually express anything human. And I think that that's important to me. Anne: Right. I agree with you. And I think that the consuming public has a lot to say, obviously, right? We are a market-driven kind of industry. What the consumer wants, right, or is it marketable to consumers or is it not? I mean, do consumers want to be able to listen to an audiobook and have a human? Like, is it meaningful to have a human or maybe for certain types of audiobooks, does it matter if it's a human or not? There's so many questions about that. Is there any type of book that you feel might be okay with something that's not human? Emily: Um, no, personally I don't because -- Anne: Well, and that makes complete sense. Emily: I mean, sure. I mean, obviously I have a certain point of view, but I think, you know, a lot of people are saying, oh, well, it's more suited for non-fiction. I think that that's kind of insulting, like -- Anne: Yeah, yeah. Emily: -- yes non-fiction does not involve character voices and things like that. Anne: Right. Emily: So from that perspective, it's easier for a robot to do, but I don't know, I've narrated nonfiction too. It's every bit as human. I think that authors would generally be insulted to hear that like, nonfiction is less human than fiction. I mean, I think it's all part of the human experience. Anne: Sure. Emily: It's all part of something that human beings have spent hours or months or years putting together. And they deserve a human voice to express that. Anne: Well, and you're talking to, you know, my specialty corporate narration and e-learning, so I understand that completely. I mean, to me, I mean, I want there to be a human teacher behind the mic. Emily: Sure. Anne: I want there to be, you know, I'm a company, I want there to be a human that's expressing my mission statement or my objective. And again, it comes to people responding and saying, well, you know, it's what the market wants. Or I guess for me, if I'm just one little person, me, I'm not going to necessarily stop the progression of technology. And so in terms of how I need to, I guess, evolve or work with technology that's, that may be encroaching on, let's say genres that I, you know, specialize in, I have to try to think of it in terms of, okay. So are there certain types that might be okay? A lot of times, you know, it's like, why do consumers go to outlets like the -- Fiverr, right, to get their voiceover? Because they don't have a value necessarily, or they don't -- Emily: Sure. Anne: -- or they have a certain value associated with that job. So could this not be the future lower end of -- Emily: Yeah. Lower budget production -- Anne: -- consumer -- yeah, lower budget. Emily: I mean, look, there are already people who are driven by money, you know -- Anne: Yup, yup. Emily: -- want the cheapest product, and they're hiring brand new narrators on indie platforms -- Anne: Yup. Emily: -- for like a quarter of the standard rate -- Anne: Right. Emily: -- or less, you know? Like those people already exist. Will those people start doing robots instead? Anne: Yeah. Emily: Maybe. Anne: Yeah. Emily: You know, who can stop that? Anne: Yeah, exactly. Emily: But I think yes, that is a concern because the more artificially narrated audiobooks that are put in the market, the more consumers get used to it, the harder it is -- Anne: Yeah. Emily: -- to argue our position. Anne: Exactly. Yeah. Emily: It's all concerning. I do agree that there's a certain element that I don't know how much control we have, but I also think that there will always be an element of high budget productions -- Anne: Yes. Emily: -- that will always have a human narrator. Anne: Oh, I completely agree with you. I mean, I don't think that there's ever going to be -- and I'm a tech girl. I worked in technology for 20 years. I do believe that there's always, there's always going to be a place for the human still in voiceover. And I think that narrators that have been for years, you know, telling stories and audiobooks, I mean, that is a level of acting that cannot be reached right now by any type of AI voice. Emily: Oh no. Anne: And I don't know that the public wants -- Emily: No. Anne: -- to be, necessarily feel like they've been duped either. Emily: Sure. Anne: So if they're listening to an audiobook, and they think it might be a human, so I think it's all speculation right now trying to figure out how -- like how long will it take? How far will it go and how human will it sound? And I guess my argument has always been well, humans are developing it. So I think you will always have those people that want to take it to the point where, oh my gosh, is this a deepfake? They'll always try to get there. But I like to think that technology is good inherently, and that because humans are developing technology, it will develop to a point that will help humans and not necessarily take them down or, you know, erase an industry. So I do believe that there will always be a space for a human actor in voiceover. I just don't know how far the AI will go in five to ten years, let's say,. Emily: Sure. But I will say that -- okay. So the way that these algorithms work, right, is that they find the middle ground, right? So they'll always be passible. They'll never be award worthy. Right? They're never going to take acting risks. They're never going to be able to, I mean, unless they have an engineer sit there and like tweak them for every moment, at which case, like just have a voice actor do it. Anne: Well, yeah. Sometimes there is a lot of tweaking involved, that's for sure. Emily: Yeah. So it's like, they'll just, they'll never be able to cry. You know, they'll never really be able to make a listener cry or feel that connected because they're not connected. You know, they're an algorithm. So they'll make the baseline choice, the easy, safe choice, because that's, you know, when you're talking about machine learning or it's studying thousands and thousands and thousands of performances, no two narrators are the same. We wouldn't make the same choices on the same book. So they're going to pick the baseline, which I think means that it will never be as good, no matter what, inherently it'll never be as good as the best narrators. So that's why we need to make all narrators, or at least narrators who want to make a living doing this, the best that they can be, because I don't think machines can ever really, truly catch up with anything that is off the cusp and beautiful and you know, like human, and they'll never be that. Anne: What if -- now here's my what if, because I do know of technology called speech-to speech where it can mimic. So what about an actor who, you know, has great acting skills, and they can act a baseline model, right? And then other voices can be applied on top of that. I mean, it's scary. I've heard it. Emily: Basically have a human narrate the book, but then put someone else's voice on their performance? Anne: Yeah, that is a mimic. So that would make it sound pretty much human, but with somebody else's voice or maybe with a different language. Emily: Well, I mean, if you're doing that, at least that actor is getting paid to do it -- Anne: Right. Emily: -- because they'd have to custom record that book. Anne: Exactly. Emily: Um, so that's, uh, a less scary proposition to me. Anne: Yeah, yeah. Emily: But um, yeah, I mean, I guess that's a possibility. I think the -- what we're more concerned about or most concerned about anyway, is machine learning, which will completely replace humans entirely. So like right now, most of the AI voices are licensed, where it's basically like they have somebody sit in a studio for a few days, and then from there they extrapolate whatever texts they want to be able to put on that person's habits. But machine learning would be like, they can listen to the thousand most popular in audiobooks and narrators of all time and sort of create an algorithm based out of that. Anne: Yes. Emily: And they'll never have to license. They'll never have to pay a single human for that. I think that's the biggest fear is completely taking us out of the equation. I think when it comes to licensing your voice or what you just mentioned, where it's like you record the book and then they put some celebrity's voice on it or something, I mean, personally, I am against those things. But I can see why some people might feel like there's more wiggle room in those. Again, that is not my personal opinion. I want to stop all of this, nip this on the bud. But if we're at a point where it's like, that's all that's left to us, at least there are still humans involved. Anne: Yeah. Well, and I think, again, if we're thinking about how we can evolve with it, if, if that becomes part of it, and I do know that that technology exists. I don't know at this point -- you've got people, you've got other companies that are not voiceover that are creating this technology. So how can we work with those companies or do we choose not to work with those companies right, in order to -- Emily: Sure. Anne: -- stay ahead, right? Is that a possibility? Emily: Um, okay. My personal feeling is I don't support anyone doing that because, and I have more to say, but like, because I feel like that's just kind of giving in. It's, you know, you get a sum of money, which is enough for a few years, and you're basically giving up your whole career in trade, and the careers of all of your colleagues, because how many of those, how many people's voices are they really going to need to license? So ultimately, and I understand that everyone's situation is different and, you know, I shouldn't judge, but ultimately it's a very self-serving decision to do that. And so I personally, and this is my personal opinion, don't feel like I can support those things. However, if someone's going to do it, I think there's a lot of important ways to protect yourself and to protect others in the industry. So I know that our union is working on licensing agreements that would be union. As far as I know, every one of these that I've heard of or seen advertisements for or whatever is non-union. And there's a reason for that. It's because they're taking advantage of people who are vulnerable. Anne: Sure. Emily: And they're taking advantage of people who need the money and who think, oh my gosh, a year's salary for a few days in the booth? Of course, I'm going to do that. Not realizing or not thinking through the consequences. You know, there's a reason that they don't want these contracts to be union because the union would want to, for example, limit how many times that person's voice can be used. Can they make a hundred audiobooks from that person's voice versus a thousand or a million from the same person's voice? You know, they're going to try to put limits on it to make it more equitable and spread it out. And these companies don't want to do that. There was no advantage to them for doing that. And then there's other things like, well, I've talked a bunch about machine learning, which if people don't know, I really highly recommend looking into it. But if you license your voice, and there's no provision in your contract which says that they can't use that for machine learning, they can take that voice and not only use it for clone or whatever, but they can use it to create a totally synthetic voice that they'll never have to pay anyone a dime for. You know, there's a lot of risks, and that's part of why we want to do an educational series is if you're going to do this, which I personally strongly recommend and hope that you won't, but if you will, please at least be smart about it. You know, there are companies involved like, you know, Google and whatever that have really deep pockets, and they can offer the kind of money that a lot of people would have a really hard time turning down. But you also have to remember that there's a lot more at stake here than your wallet or even your career. Um, so we just, if you're going to do it, you have to be smart about it and you have to read those contracts with a fine tooth comb. Anne: So I totally, totally understand all of that. Absolutely. What about the possibility of, as an organization, having a voice and going to these companies and saying -- I want to say it's like in the video gaming industry, when musicians would create music for video games, fighting for their creative licensing rights. What about that sort of thing? Like, and I understand, I mean, Google and you know that a lot of the big companies have a lot of voices already, not even voice actors, right? Just voices -- Emily: Right, yeah. Anne: -- that they're using to learn, right. They're using to put into machine learning and learn and test and create other voices. If as an organization, you could be a strong voice in saying, hey, you know what, anybody's voice that's used really you should be asking permission. There should be compensation. There should be -- Emily: Right. Anne: -- you know -- Emily: We should be getting royalties. Anne: Right, exactly. Emily: You know, like with any contract, you should have a limited period of time -- Anne: Exactly. Emily: -- where you can -- Anne: Exactly. Emily: You can't license in perpetuity, you should get six months or whatever, you know, like, I totally agree. That's part of why, if these contracts are going to happen, they should be union. Anne: Yeah. Emily: And that's why they don't -- they don't want to give us that, they don't. Um, they just want to give us a sum of money that is like an absolute fraction of what we would deserve for doing that kind of work. Anne: I have spoken with some companies who say that they are not those companies. You know, they say that they are for -- Emily: Well, of course they say -- Anne: Well, okay. But that's the thing though, is that, do you assume that all companies are not ethical? You know what I mean, in this game? Emily: I think honestly, I think any company doing this nonunion and not offering the protections and the compensation that any actor doing this deserves it, I don't think that's ethical. This is my personal opinion. I'm not speaking for PANA. Anne: Oh, no, no. Emily: I don't think it's ethical to offer a desperate actor a year salary and have their voice in perpetuity to use -- Anne: I agree. Emily: -- for whatever you want. You know? Anne: I agree with that. And I totally agree with that. And I think that that is absolutely where voice actors need to, you know, they need to be aware of these things that, you know, these companies that are for TTS. For me, that's a big red flag. And if you have a contract or you have a company that wants to pay you for, you know, 3000 lines of whatever, I absolutely believe that you should have a lawyer on that. Um, I say I would not take the job. However, if you go to these AI companies, I'm going to say independently and, you know, and try to work with them, or if there's an organization that can be on a board -- there is an organization right now that is working towards policies and legal contracts that will be in protection of the voice acting community. So I feel like there could be power in that as well. Emily: Sure. Anne: And especially from the audiobook narrators industry as well, because you guys are a -- you're a large community, and you have strong voices, and you work closely with the union. And I think that that is a wonderful thing. And I think that if you can get in on the ground floor of those usage policies, which everybody should have, right? And then, you know, ultimately, you know, fight the good fight hopefully so that the companies now understand, because I think in my research, I'm just going to say, there's a lot of AI companies out there that don't understand the voice acting industry. They don't understand like I actually had to say, no, there's usage. There's -- Emily: Right. Anne: -- you know, there's usage here for how long. And we have contracts that, you know, we can't use our voice for this company, because we're already committed to this company. Emily: Sure. Anne: And there's a lot of education, not just for us, but -- Emily: But for them. Anne: -- on their side as well. And I think that if you have a strong community of voices, that might be something to consider. Like you said, education, maybe education for AI companies as well. Emily: Sure. I -- Anne: Yeah. Emily: -- I would certainly be open to that. Anne: Yeah. Emily: And another one that we haven't mentioned, but that is definitely a concern, at least for me, would be having some sort of limitations on the content that they -- Anne: Yes, absolutely. Emily: -- could use voices for. Anne: Yup, yup. Emily: Like for example, you know, I'm, I'm Jewish. Anne: Yup. Emily: I would be horrified if my voice was used to narrate Nazi propaganda. Anne: Yup. Emily: You know, like that's just -- so I think any, any contract that is like in perpetuity with no limitations is unethical to me -- Anne: Yup. Emily: -- because that's just not how it should work. Anne: Oh yeah. Emily: Am I -- Anne: I agree. Emily: Am I open to working with AI companies to create a more equitable compensation system? Personally I think that that's SAG-AFTRA's job. If I ever hear of an AI company actually having union agreements with SAG-AFTRA, I would feel more kindly towards that AI company. I have yet to hear of that. I would potentially be open to that kind of effort, but honestly, I feel like that's putting the cart before the horse. I don't think we should give up the fight yet. I think we have enough good arguments and resources on our side to not necessarily have to get to that point yet. Anne: Okay. Well, I think that you've definitely got some strong arguments there, and I, I have also been in the forums and I hear what people say, and I understand. I myself have done so much research, probably a little bit more with the companies maybe than others, which is the only reason I bring up the point that there are companies who say that they are ethical and say that they will, you know, your license or your voice belongs to you. It's licensed to you. We will not use it in our machine learning, right? Only with your permission and only if you are compensated fairly, so. Emily: I mean, that's good. Good on those companies. Anne: Yeah. Well, I'm hoping that more companies will, with things, you know, with the unfortunate, but actually now fortunate episode that happened to -- maybe not fortunate. I don't know if I would call it that, but that happened with Bev Standing, right, with her suit against TikTok and the fact that it got settled, it does set a precedent. And so it's unfortunate sometimes that bad things have to happen in order for, right, resulting policies and standards and laws to come into play. You know, the whole thing with the Anthony Bourdain movie, right? Why resurrecting a voice without the permission? I think that there are bad things that happen. However, good things can come out of it afterwards in order to build laws. And I think that that's kind of where we might be in this crazy world of AI. And it seems like AI has just sprung up in the last couple of years like crazy. Emily: Sure. Anne: So I do believe after my research, for me, I think it comes to educating the companies, the AI companies about us and about what we need and about what our rights should be as actors. And I, I'm hoping that my involvement in this podcast is going to also have a voice that can help affect that. And so that they will see that we do need to license our voice. We do need to be fairly compensated. And, you know, I can only hope that my little part in it has something to do with maybe getting things the way that would be fair and equitable to us. Emily: Sure. I mean, I hope that, I hope that your efforts are successful. I do think that, I would like to think that these companies are just unaware or something. Anne: Yeah, yeah. Emily: And I'm sure some of them are, but I also think that some of them are very clever. Anne: Yeah, of course. Emily: And I know there are, for example, I can think of certain companies in the audiobook world who say, well, we won't -- they are clever in the way that they deceive people. You know, they'll say, well, we're not using our data to clone your voice, but they won't say that they're not using the data for machine learning or other things, you know? Like, and I think that, because I think that if we could get companies to do union contracts, that would certainly order it, you know, equivalent. That would certainly be a step forward. But I also think that educating voice actors to understand all of this stuff -- because it is complicated -- Anne: Sure. Emily: - and it's not necessarily natural to a lot of people. I think that's important too, because like right now there are companies where we're -- actors and publishers are literally giving data to and not really recognizing how it could be used. Anne: Agreed, agreed. Emily: And so that's a problem. Anne: I think we always have though, you know what I mean? I'm going to say long before this AI craziness, I think also, you know, there have been devices that have been listening to us and capturing our voices for a long time now. Emily: Sure. Anne: And so it's, I think it's good that we all are educated on it. And I just wanna give a shout-out to the organization, which I'm a part of, and anybody, if you're interested in joining them, it's called the Open Voice Network, which is based on creating standards for anything voice. And there are some companies who create AI voices that are in this organization, but it's all for the good of the voiceover world as well, to make sure that we are fairly compensated and hopefully, you know, we have a set of standards that can work for everyone. So that's openvoicenetwork.org. Maybe that's something that, you know, uh, BOSSes out there, you want to take a look at. I love, love, love what you're doing with PANA. I mean, thank you really. It's, I know how hard it is to bring an organization up and get these things going and moving and being productive. So congratulations to you guys. I think it's an amazing thing you're doing for the audiobook community, and I think it's wonderful what you're doing. Emily: Thank you. Anne: Yeah, yeah. Emily: Appreciate that. Anne: So tell us how people can find out more about your organization and you? Emily: Sure. Uh, pronarrators.org is our website. We are @pronarrators on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, and I'm Emily Lawrence. And you can find me at emilylawrence.com. Anne: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Emily, for spending time with us today. BOSSes, go check out pronarrators.org. Thanks again so much for joining us. I'm going to give a great big shout-out to our sponsor ipDTL. You too can connect and network like a BOSS. Find out more ipdtl.com, and we'll see you guys next week. Thanks so much. Bye! Emily: Bye. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

Bienvenidos al podcast con Anne Ganguzza y Pilar Uribe! In this episode, your hosts cover how creating a great demo can get you booked without auditioning, the versatility of having multiple demos, and how being kind to everyone you meet is really the most underrated marketing technique…   Transcript >> It’s time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry’s top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let’s welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza.   Pilar: Hola, BOSS Voces. Bienvenidos al podcast con Anne Ganguzza y Pilar Uribe.   Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I'm happy to welcome back with me as special guest cohost Pilar Uribe. Pilar, how are you today?   Pilar: I'm doing great, Anne. ¿Tú cómo estás?   Anne: I don't know. Sí.   Pilar. Just say bien, just say bien.   Anne: Bien, bien.   Pilar: Bien covers it all.   Anne: Everybody will follow my own journey as I learn Spanish. Thank you. And I learned to be as -- the best bilingual voice artist I can be, but let me talk about another language, another language of love which it comes from my VO studio kitty Sebrina today. I noticed, Pilar, you know how animals, they have that sense. When you're a cat lover and a cat lover walks into my home, my cats know it. And I have to tell you that my little Sebrina, who is the most sociable of the three VO studio cats that I have, she's usually the first one that will come down and greet people, if she feels that they are sufficient --   Pilar: Worthy.   Anne: -- cat lovers. Yes.   Pilar: If they're worthy of her attention.   Anne: So I have to tell you that the last two times we've been recording, she has been scratching at my studio door, and she just doesn't do that. And I know, I know that she hears you because I have inside and outside headphones. And so what I hear here in my headphones in the booth are also kind of projecting outside my booth through my headphones. So I know she hears you. There's no other reason to explain why she's scratching at the door.   Pilar: Oh, I love that.   Anne: Like she must hear your voice.   Pilar: That's so cute.   Anne: She must hear your voice. And she must know that there's yet another cat lover with me, and she's scratching to get into the studio.   Pilar: And she knows there's a possible suitor right outside.   Anne: That's right. Exactly.   Pilar: Paco. Oh yeah.   Anne: Paco. Yes, she probably feels it. I'm telling you.   Pilar: They know, they know these things. They know.   Anne: They do. They know everything. Wow.   Pilar: We're just their, their custodians. They're the ones who rule.   Anne: Exactly. So I had to tell you that story, you know, because we share, we share a love for studio cats, for sure.   Pilar: So I can say, I can give a little shout out. Hola Sebrina, ¿cómo estás?   Anne: Oo. She's going to hear the scratching soon. I'm telling you. So we had a great conversation on our last podcast about being a bilingual voice talent and what it takes to, I guess, be successful in the industry. And I want to continue that to go a little bit more in detail. So if there are beginners out there or people just entering into the industry that want to market themselves as a bilingual voice talent, what are the steps that it would take for them to do so successfully? First of all, I think you must have some sort of a demo, right, that showcases that you have this talent. What are your thoughts about a demo and how you can successfully market yourself as bilingual through your demo or not, or what works for you?   Pilar: Okay. So since I started out in the world of voiceover without any like really any information -- I mean in the world of dubbing, that's what I meant -- they knew I spoke English, they knew I spoke Spanish, so I could do both. And I just kind of jumped in. I did not have a voiceover agent until I got to Los Angeles. So I had to get my own work. And that meant a lot of knocking on doors, talking to other actors and saying, okay, where are you, where are you working? What studios are you working in? And there aren't that many in Miami.   Anne: And you're talking physical knock. I'm just going to clarify this --   Pilar: Oh yeah.   Anne: -- you mean like physically networking with other people, which today really translates into online, right? Maybe --   Pilar: Yes.   Anne: -- groups and online, online networking groups. But yeah, you had to physically become a good networker.   Pilar: Yes. Thank you for telling me that, because, because I don't even realize. I think it's interesting because you know, you get to a place -- you know, I'm talking to you here. I earned my living doing this and it's, it's really, when you go back, and I'm looking at my, my past, everyone thinks, oh, oh, she's doing this. She has it all. Oh, it's oh, it's like really easy. Look at her. And every single step that you make is, it's like, you're climbing up the mountain, and then you slide back down and then you climb up the mountain, and you slide back down a little bit.   Anne: Yeah.   Pilar: And it's a lot of walking --   Anne: You claw your way up the mountain.   Pilar: -- you, you literally crawl your way up the mountain. My, um, my ex mother-in-law, God bless her, told me one time when I was learning something many, many years ago, she said as much as you may learn and then fall back, and, and if you're, if it's another language or if it's a new profession, you're never going to be at the point where you don't know anything. Once you start learning, you can't say you don't know anything because you actually know something now about that subject. And I, that's just something that I've always taken with me.   Anne: Yeah, that's a cool perspective. Yup.   Pilar: Because the more I learn -- yeah, right? Because the more I learn, the more I realize, oh, okay. I don't know about so much more.   Anne: Exactly.   Pilar: But there's other stuff that I do know now. So I just, I kind of bring it all. You know, my, my little lump of knowledge gets bigger and bigger. And so when I first started dubbing, as I said in a couple, couple episodes before, I just, it was luck that I got the job, but it was because I had been auditioning so many times before for these different studios -- no, excuse me, for this one studio.   Anne: But was it really luck, Pilar? If I ask you to think that back, was it really luck? Because you had really been working, uh, networking with people and getting to know people, and I'll tell you, the first rule of marketing is people buy from people they know, like, and trust. And so I think you might've been establishing that relationship in working in those studios when they said, you know what? We need somebody to do this dubbing job. And boom, guess who's top of mind? There you are. Just a thought.   Pilar: Okay, for those VO voces, those BOSS Voces who are listening to Anne for the first time, you got to go take classes with this woman, because she's completely turning my story around. And I'm sitting there, like my brains are like going, whaat?   Anne: I love it. You're a marketer. It's so funny, the parallels, right?   Pilar: I don't even know how I did it, but you're basically showing me all this stuff that I did without me even realizing it. So thank you for that.   Anne: Well, it's cool because we, we get to work it backwards now because now --   Pilar: Yes.   Anne: -- people just entering in the business, are they networking online? How are they networking? And maybe they should consider all versions of networking because it all helps you, you know, to get where you need to go.   Pilar: We're doing it, we're doing reverse engineering.   Anne: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.   Pilar: So reverse engineering a lot of the times means, and again, I'm not saying I do this, but when I have an interaction with somebody, I always keep them in my mind, and I send them an email, and I let them know what I'm doing. Because a lot of the time -- it's, it's basically being and not stalking them and not being obnoxious about it, but so they know that you're around. You know, for so many months before I actually got my first dubbing gig, I didn't get any response. And the same thing happened when I, when, when I started working for NPR. I didn't hear anything for months and months and months. And what I realized is that marketing is always the long game.   Anne: Isn't it? Ugh, yes.   Pilar: It's, it's the long game --   Anne: That's it, we can go home now Pilar, because that was, that was the wisdom, that nugget of wisdom. It is, it's a long game. So many people want that instant result.   Pilar: Yeah, because we have, we're exposed to instant gratifications through our cell phones, through our laptops.   Anne: Yup.   Pilar: And what it is is that it's basically putting a tiny grain of sand into the atmosphere and letting it go there. It might come back. It might not, but every single time you do it, you're sending the energy out of, I'm a voiceover artist. I can do this for you.   Anne: Yeah, absolutely.   Pilar: And eventually that does come back.   Anne: Yes.   Pilar: So I get my first gig and then I'm thinking, okay, I want more. So then I start asking questions. I started asking my actor friends and like, oh, you're with this studio. How do you get into this studio? And it turns out that the person who recommended me to work in the first studio is also now working part-time in the second studio. So I call him up and I say, hey, you know, what's going on? And they're like, oh, okay, well, I don't really have anything for you now, but maybe. So I was like, okay, great. And then, boom. Maybe I make a call or maybe he calls me again. And then the chain starts happening. So that's really what it became.   So at one point I was working for four different studios and, you know, making these connections and then slowly but surely. So then you reach a point, right? I want more. So then I go into the audiobook world, and I start doing that. And then a big part of my, my voiceover journey was Fafcon because --   Anne: Yup.   Pilar: -- I went and that's --   Anne: Networking.   Pilar: -- when I experienced. Yeah. That's when I experienced, I was like, oh, these people actually make a living at it full-time, because I'm sitting here running around, you know, with four different studios.   Anne: Sure.   Pilar: And I'm sure trying to deal with the whole audiobook thing. And, and they're like, oh no, we have our clients. We have our IVR. We have our people who call us up every so often. And we, and I'm like, oh, that's a new concept. And I had no idea about this part of the business.   Anne: You were learning about now these are all different genres. You were just doing dubbing --   Pilar: Yes.   Anne: -- and then you started with the audiobooks. Interesting about the audiobooks. And I'm going to say that might've been a few years back, right? There was no ACX back then, right? So --   Pilar: No, actually I started with ACX.   Anne: Oh, you did? Okay.   Pilar: So, so it was more recent.   Anne: Oh, okay, so it was recent then.   Pilar: 2012.   Anne: Oh, okay.   Pilar: They had just started 2013. They had --   Anne: Still that's a --   Pilar: -- they hadn't been around that long.   Anne: -- that's a while. Yeah. That's a while. That was when they just started, I believe. So, okay. And right there for audiobooks, that was kind of a, a cool thing because it was online, and you didn't have to necessarily have a demo to present. They were basically just offering you work and you could audition and not necessarily have to present a demo to get work there.   Pilar: Exactly. So I, again, not knowing anything that was back in the day when audiobooks were done in studios.   Anne: Yes, yes.   Pilar: So the publishing companies had their own studios, and you know, the big guys on campus went and they recorded there.   Anne: Exactly, exactly. Now, were you doing, were you doing Spanish or were you doing both English and Spanish?   Pilar: I was doing both. Actually I started out doing English, doing these like really funny romance things. And then I went the other way with Spanish and started doing religious things because somebody asked me to do religious stuff, and this was, and so here's where networking comes in. You never know. You just never know who is going to be somebody who's a valued contact. That's why, and I'll, I'll tell this story really quickly, and so I don't lose my place about this.   When I was working as an extra on "One Life to Live," there was this guy, and I, and I may have mentioned it. And I remember him saying so clearly that he said, you have to be nice to everybody on set. You know, we were just all looking at him like with stars in our eyes because he was so good-looking, and he was just like, you know, he was a series regular. And he said, be nice to everybody. And I never forgot that. So when I went to Colombia, I was very aware that I needed to treat the producer and the director exactly the same as the coffee lady, because the coffee lady, the person who brought me coffee, and that was her only job, she was just as important --   Anne: Oh yeah.   Pilar: -- as the producer.   Anne: Absolutely.   Pilar: You know, it's a courtesy thing. It's a human interaction thing. And I've always been very, very aware of that. But that experience --   Anne: Yeah.   Pilar: -- that I had on the set from somebody who was, you know, making, you know, a good amount of money to talk to us who we were just like these little star struck extras was really important.   Anne: See, it's not just a life lesson, right, but a business lesson to be nice to everyone. It's like be nice to the person that picks up the phone. You may think you want to talk --   Pilar: Exactly.   Anne: -- to the boss, but in reality, it all starts with the person who answers the phone or gets you the coffee. You never know.   Pilar: You never know where that person's going to be. So --   Anne: Exactly.   Pilar: -- fast forward to when I would do voiceover dubbing at this one studio, one of the engineers was, he was just such a sweet guy, and we got along really well. And he was so pleasant and jovial. And, you know, whenever he would ask me to do another take, I always did. And you know, if I thought that I could do it better, he would let me do it. You know, if it was just like a little kind of an alteration in, in the way I inflected in my voice. And he said, hey, would you be interested in doing audio books in Spanish? And I was like, sure. And you know, afterwards we spoke, and I did quite a few for him. And, you know, he said, I don't ask everyone this because obviously people can, you know, he, he gets different responses.   Anne: Sure.   Pilar: And so that's why I, I want to emphasize the importance of being really pleasant and nice and courteous to everyone. 'Cause you just, you just never know. And I, I did like four books with him, and that was just something on the side that I did. And I wouldn't have done that otherwise, if I had been like, you know, a bitch on wheels going to the studio.   Anne: And you know what's so interesting though -- let me just try to relate this to today in an online community, when you're communicating with people online and especially in these groups where you think it might be a closed group where you're only talking to voice actors, be nice to everyone, because there are people sitting there watching you, and reading those comments, and making judgements about your comment, if it's not nice, or maybe it's not becoming of a professional. They're watching and you never know who might be looking or listening behind the scenes. So be nice to everyone. I think it's just a wonderful thing to live by. Right? Just be nice to everyone. Be nice.   Pilar: I totally agree with that, Anne, and, and I would go even further because I was listening to somebody about this. When you're on Zoom, you know, it doesn't cost anything to smile.   Anne: True, so true.   Pilar: It really doesn't.   Anne: Yeah.   Pilar: You can just, you can just be pleasant, and you can have a nice sort of energy to you. I mean, I know we're always in sweats, and it just it's become a way of life. And we're probably going to be doing this for a long time, but there's a certain energy you bring when you come into a Zoom meeting. You know, you can either slouch and you can just be like, uh, you know, and we've all heard them. Everybody on --   Anne: Yeah.   Pilar: -- listening to this podcast has heard people who are just like these Nagging Nellies I guess, or the complainers.   Anne: Debbie Downers,   Pilar: Debbie Downers. Debbie Downers. It's like, oh yeah, I'm I'm in voiceover, but I --   Anne: But I can't.   Pilar: -- but I don't have a demo yet. And I haven't --   Anne: I can't do this.   Pilar: -- gotten any work in six months. It's like really, really? Are you kidding? Then why are you even here?   Anne: Yeah.   Pilar: You know, it's like, hey, I want to learn. I don't know anything about, oh, I don't know. Let's say you're doing, um, let's say a demo. You want to learn how to do a demo --   Anne: Video games or something.   Pilar: No, I'm thinking of, you know, those slot machine things?   Anne: Oh, casinos.   Pilar: Casinos. They're, they're actually, now that's a new genre that I heard about.   Anne: Yeah, exactly.   Pilar: I was like, oh my gosh.   Anne: Casinos and gaming. Yes. That kind of gaming.   Pilar: Casinos and -- yeah.   Anne: Yup.   Pilar: So it's like, let's say you go in, and you don't know anything about it. Well, hey, you're here to learn. I'm here to learn about casino and gaming. Yay. This is something new. So it's like, I feel like you can always put your best foot forward because it doesn't cost you anything.   Anne: Yeah. You can always learn, and you can always learn.   Pilar: Yeah. Exactly. You can always learn. So --   Anne: You can always learn something.   Pilar: Yeah.   Anne: Even if you're like, oh, I don't know. Like I didn't like this class or -- that's the teacher in me that says, you know, if you're a good student, you can learn anywhere, anywhere.   Pilar: Yup.   Anne: There's always an opportunity to learn.   Pilar: I totally agree. So back to the guy. So I did these four books with him, and somewhere along the way -- so I, I didn't have an audiobook demo. I had a bunch of audio book samples 'cause that's what you do.   Anne: Yup.   Pilar: And the experience at Fafcon, which was just so enriching. And I met some amazing people that I'm still friends with today, I realized everybody was like, oh yeah, the demo this, the demo that. I was like, why in the world do you need a demo? And then after I'd gotten all this information, and then I went home ,and I looked at all, everybody's website that I had met. And I was like, oh, this is our industry's equivalent of a resume.   Anne: Yeah, absolutely.   Pilar: That's basically very simple and quick and dirty explanation. You have to have a demo. So anybody going online, anybody who's considering you -- I just did a session yesterday, and I had a certain kind of demo for this 'cause -- I can't talk about it because obviously it -- now every -- you sign NDAs, wherever you go.   Anne: Absolutely.   Pilar: Um, so I auditioned for this company, and then they said, oh yeah -- he said, so he started talking about the style that he wanted for what we were doing. And he said, yes. And I, from your audition, but especially from your demos.   Anne: That's excellent.   Pilar: I was like, oh, okay. This guy did his homework.   Anne: Yeah.   Pilar: This guy really looked at my stuff before choosing me, which means that's why my demos have to be in order.   Anne: Absolutely. I'm so glad you said that because there are some people who think that you cannot book off of your demo. And I, I am in disagreement with that because I do believe that people that are doing their homework that are out -- they're searching online. If your demos are sitting there on your website, people listen to them. And I get requests all the time, you know, hey, I love -- can you do the voice in that spot, on your demo, in this particular spot that you're referencing? So I will get people. I know they've listened to the demo and I've booked.   Pilar: In 2020, I booked a year long campaign. I basically paid my rent and then some.   Anne: From a demo.   Pilar: From a demo. I did not audition. I didn't audition for. And I was like, wait a minute. Don't you need? And they were like, no, no. The agent, 'cause I'm so -- I was such a newbie, he was like, no, no, you don't need to audition. I mean, he literally said that to me. No, you idiot. They're booking you off the demo. And, and actually yeah, through my agent, I book off my demo all the time. So it's, I get people will request it because they've listened to the demos. So --   Pilar: Right.   Anne: -- I mean, of course I audition too, like everybody else, but I do book a considerable amount off of my demos.   Pilar: In terms of specifically a bilingual demo, what I did, what I noticed, first I, and I did what everybody does. The, the very first demo I did, I basically just did my spots. That's what I did, you know? 'Cause I, I didn't know any better, so I, okay. I've got a bunch of spots and let me, you know, hook it all together. And I actually got somebody who did it for, you know --   Anne: So for your bilingual demo, right? You --   Pilar: No, for my first demo.   Anne: Okay. First demo, you strung together spots that you had created. Okay.   Pilar: Yeah, exactly, because, you know, that's what you do when you're starting out, and there's nothing wrong with that. But then when I went to Fafcon and I realized, oh, these people actually had this professionally done, you know, the skeptic in me said, oh, come on, really? Why in the world would you need that? And I realized, because that's how it happens in this particular business. It may not happen any in any other business, but I've seen the reason why I've booked work, and why I need that because that's the way, that's the way it is. I mean --   Anne: Well, I think it also shows -- of course, you can put together a demo of spots that you've done already and lots of people do that. But also I think it can show a range. Maybe you get booked for a lot of -- a particular style of spot or a particular read. And I think a demo can showcase a broader range of acting that you can do.   Pilar: Yes.   Anne: And that's where I think that it's really advantageous as well as hooking up with someone who is familiar with what's out there and what's -- a good producer or a demo producer that knows what trends are out there, what companies are looking for and can implement that on the demo as well.   Pilar: Exactly. You just hit the nail on the head. You need somebody, you need a director. That's what a demo producer is.   Anne: Yeah, yeah.   Pilar: They know better than you do. So, you know, it's like you go in stages. So at first I thought, oh, I'll do my own demo. And then I realized, no, I need somebody who can direct me because they're going to showcase my voice to the best --   Anne: Yes.   Pilar: -- of my ability rather than me trying to figure it out because --   Anne: You're too close to it.   Pilar: -- the dirty little secret is that we don't know how we sound --   Anne: That's right.   Pilar: -- really and truly.   Anne: We're very close.   Pilar: We need somebody else. We need somebody else to sit there and tell us, no, no, no, you want the cosmetic read. This is, you know, you want the automotive read. You want the, you know, the Olive Garden read; they're all different. So after that I was like, okay, I'm going to bite the bullet. And I actually did, I had, uh, I did a kind of a double thing because, um, Bob Bergen was teaching a weekend class, and this just kind of came about up in San Francisco. And I had already booked time with Chuck Duran to do my demos because I wanted to go there. This was obviously before, 'cause now you can do it. You don't even, you don't need to --   Anne: You can do it online.   Pilar: Yeah. You can do it totally online. But I was like, no, I want it -- and I wanted to go to LA because there was something about it --   Anne: Sure. Well, there's something about the experience of being in a studio too in LA recording a demo that all you have to do is perform. And this is a really wonderful experience.   Pilar: Totally.   Anne: Yeah.   Pilar: So the demo that we did -- so I asked Chuck, I said, you know, I'd really like to do two. I'd like to do one in Spanish and one in English, because I was told don't ever, ever mix them. That was the first thing I was told. So I was like, okay, I'm not going to mix them. So we did it in English and in Spanish. So he did the English copy, and he actually speaks some Spanish. And so then I translated some of them and then we came up with some other things. And so then I had two demos. It was great.   Anne: Two identical demos?   Pilar: No.   Anne: Okay.   Pilar: Not identical.   Anne: You had different spots in Spanish then?   Pilar: Yeah. Some overlapped, but some did not. And you know, he was very strategic about it. So that was, that was, that was fine. Then I realized that I wanted to have a bilingual demo. I was just stubborn. I was like, I want a bilingual demo.   Anne: So wait --   Pilar: This is what I want.   Anne: So what do you consider a bilingual demo? Do you mean one that is both English and Spanish --   Pilar: Yes.   Anne: -- in the same demo? Oh, okay.   Pilar: And --   Anne: All right. So you are a bilingual talent that has a separate English demo and a separate Spanish demo. Now a bilingual demo means you're going to have both English and Spanish.   Pilar: Yes.   Anne: Okay.   Pilar: And I have -- if you listen to my bilingual demo, there's a little bit of a, of a little bit of an accent because that's something else that I get all the time. I don't really have an accent in either language.   Anne: Speak English with a Spanish accent.   Pilar: Yes. All the time.   Anne: Okay.   Pilar: That's what I get all the time.   Anne: Okay.   Pilar: So then that became almost a third category, and I did that actually online.   Anne: So that's a separate demo or just a separate --   Pilar: That's a separate demo.   Anne: Okay.   Pilar: That's a separate demo.   Anne: All by itself, the English with the Spanish accent --   Pilar: All by itself. The bilingual, yep.   Anne: Okay, but let's --   Pilar: But not all of them.   Anne: Okay, but --   Pilar: They're not -- so there's English with a Spanish accent. There's English, normal English. And then there's Spanish. They're all mixed in, in that specific bilingual demo.   Anne: Okay.   Pilar: And so I was told by my -- and so then whatever the agent happened, and they said, no, no, no, we don't want that. We don't want that on. You know, we just want the English and the Spanish. We want it separated. But I tell you, I have booked from that bilingual demo.   Anne: Right, which is sitting on your website.   Pilar: So -- exactly. And so it's kind of like when you go in, when you walk into a store, not everybody's going to buy the same thing.   Anne: Right.   Pilar: But you want to have pants, and you want to have a dress --   Anne: Well, people consume --   Pilar: -- and you want to have a jumper.   Anne: Yes. People consume your audio differently --   Pilar: Yup.   Anne: -- right?   Pilar: Right.   Anne: Agents will consume or deliver your audio separately, right? Or people that go to an agent website may shop differently than people that get to your website, in which case I like to have everything available on your website because you never know who's shopping. It could be an owner of a small company --   Pilar: Exactly.   Anne: -- or it could be a casting director or an agent. And so they're very different buyers because casting agents and talented -- that's what they do for a living eight hours a day, all day long. The owner of the small pizza place, you know, down the road, he doesn't cast voices all day long. He just knows what he hears and he knows what he likes. And so he does a Google search, comes up with your website, right, is bilingual voice talent. Boom. Here's your demo that is sitting there that maybe your agents didn't want to present both ways. And he says, that's it. That's exactly what I need.   Pilar: And here's the funny part. And I can't 100% confirm, but I suspect that -- 'cause of course, you know, when I, when I signed, I gave them all the demos. I'm pretty sure that the demo that they heard that booked me that job in 2020 -- it was just like an ongoing thing -- they booked me on the strength of the bilingual demo, where they heard me speak in English and in Spanish at the same time and with an accent.   Anne: Yeah, yeah.   Pilar: So don't be afraid of the having the accent. So, you know, I run into people all the time. So they, they're Spanish speakers, and they speak with a little bit of an accent. And then there are English speakers who have a little bit of an accent in Spanish, but specifically to the Spanish speakers who speak English, don't be afraid to put different ranges --   Anne: Yeah, yeah.   Pilar: -- of your speaking in English, because like Sofía Vergara, she's Colombian. Very nice. She really puts it on thick in, in that, in the, in the whatever it was --   Anne: "Modern Family."   Pilar: "Modern Family." She doesn't speak like that all the time. If you listen to her, she puts it on thick in some movies and pulls back, 'cause she knows how to do that. You don't have to have a perfect accent in English or a perfect accent in Spanish either.   Anne: Well, you know what's so interesting, and I can see where your agent might say, no, we don't want it mixed. Right? We want one, that's English, one that's Spanish, because traditionally we've moved away from, if you remember in, in narration -- I'm going, I'll make the comparison with narration demos. It used to be a narration demos, you put every genre in there. You had like a documentary style. You had an e-learning, you had a corporate, you had, you know, all different styles of narration.   So it became all mixed up into one. And then we became very target specific. And so then it became, okay, you need a separate demo for an explainer, separate demo for corporate narration, separate demo for e-learning. But when you're talking bilingual, you have a client, a customer that may need multiple versions of Spanish speaking language. And so I think when you mix it together in English, English with a Spanish accent, Spanish, you're giving them all of the range that you have in that language.   Pilar: Exactly. I --   Anne: And that makes sense to me that that would work for you.   Pilar: Yeah. Yeah. And I've, I've had -- I've been in sessions where I speak English with no accent, and they want a run of the copy that way. Then they want a run of the copy with a little bit of an accent, and then they want to run of the copy with a lot of an accent. So I'm giving them three choices because --   Anne: Exactly.   Pilar: -- they don't know at the time how they're going to place it for those markets.   Anne: Right. And the markets may change. Right?   Pilar: Yeah.   Anne: The markets may --   Pilar: Exactly.   Anne: -- be more localized or, or regionalized, or I think it really just goes with the territory. Now, I guess my question is if they use it multiple times, are they paying you multiple?   Pilar: Yeah.   Anne: You know, that's what you want to make sure, which is why your agent helps.   Pilar: Yes.   Anne: And, and --   Pilar: That's where --   Anne: Yeah.   Pilar: -- that's where it gets tricky because I've really only been doing the bilingual work this way, to the extent that I've been doing it since I came out to Los Angeles.   Anne: Yeah, yeah.   Pilar: Usually it was that you either do the spot in English or you do the spot in Spanish, before I had an agent. You know like for example, on the pay-to-plays.   Anne: Yep.   Pilar: You don't really have, you don't get that oh, let's -- once in a very long while, but mostly it's like, okay, Spanish speaker, Latin American speaker or American speaker.   Anne: But if you think about it too, I would imagine the type of customer that would go through an agency or casting director to find a voice, they know the target market of who they're advertising to more so than, let's say, somebody on a pay-to-play. Right? They're just like, oh, I need Spanish. Maybe, that's just my guess, an educated guess because, and they come to the agent because they're much more target specific. It would seem to me that would make sense.   Pilar: I agree, because I think that a lot of the times the ad agency is looking for specific markets. So if it's Florida, it's going to be different from --   Anne: Exactly.   Pilar: -- Southern California.   Anne: Exactly. You're going to need a different Spanish that's in Florida than is in California, which makes a whole lot of sense to me. Wow.   Pilar: And it's different than Arizona too.   Anne: Yeah.   Pilar: So it's like, you're talking totally different markets.   Anne: This is so enlightening for me because what's cool is that I have questions for you because I have no real experience with how to market as a bilingual voice talent, because I'm not one. But yet you tell me your experiences, and it's, so it makes so much sense really for every one of us in the voiceover business, how we need to be very target specific. We need to be able to serve the -- our clients and our clients have many different needs, many different demographics, and the better that we can serve them and showcase, right, through our demos, through auditioning, how we can serve that community, then obviously the more chance we have to get the gig, and you know, that's what it's about.   Pilar: Yeah. And I, I just to, just to piggyback on that end, let's say you don't speak another language. Well, get your accents ready.   Anne: Yeah.   Pilar: Because a lot of the times I am called to do with a slight Southern accent or with a British accent. There are tons of things, whether it's the video game world or even commercial copy. So having an ear, developing that ear, looking at YouTube videos, there are tons of YouTube videos -- I think is important to listen for, let's say, a specific regionalism --   Anne: Right.   Pilar: -- because you never know what you're going to get in the voiceover. And I think one of the worst things to do is to get an audition and then be scrambling because --   Anne: Absolutely.   Pilar: -- you're like, oh my gosh, I don't know how to do this.   Anne: Right.   Pilar: Let me go look online. How am I going to do this? And then you're just, you're adding all that stuff. It's like --   Anne: Sure.   Pilar: -- why not take some time, take a look at it, listen to it, you know, practice, you know?   Anne: Well, and let me add the caveat here because of, you know, the climate past couple of years that if the casting specs request a native UK Londoner, then perhaps that's not necessarily something you audition for, if it's in the casting specs. But I think it's important that it starts there. Because again, we want, if people are looking for a native speaker or a native ethnicity, then I think that -- that we should respect those casting specs. And also that's a question, do we do a British accent these days? That's an interesting question. Are we taking away work if we do that, if we're not native? That is -- it's, it's a tough question that I think everybody is kind of wrapping their heads around, what is right in this industry these days?   Pilar: So I think that it is very important to distinguish and to be upfront about it because here's the thing. If you present, the person on the other end listening is going to know immediately if you are not a native speaker.   Anne: Yeah.   Pilar: So, I mean, that's just down the line. So I'm very, I'm very clear on the fact that I say anywhere, I, I, you know, on my resume, whatever, wherever I'm a native speaker in Spanish, I speak French fluently.   Anne: Yes.   Pilar: So if you drop me in the middle of Paris, I will not starve. I will be able to get myself anywhere. And I'm not --   Anne: I'm so glad you made that distinction. Yes.   Pilar: Yeah, I'm not a native speaker because native means I was born there or spent most of my life speaking French, and I haven't.   Anne: Right.   Pilar: So I can't, I can't say that with any kind of authority.   Anne: Right.   Pilar: Now in terms of accents, I have run across it. I, it's really more, I run across it much more with video games and especially animation --   Anne: Yes.   Pilar: -- where they're going to ask you --   Anne: Yup. They're going to ask you to have an accent.   Pilar: -- for a Russian accent. And that's really more of a character --   Anne: Yes.   Pilar: -- kind of a situation rather than this is a person of authority --   Anne: Sure, absolutely.   Pilar: -- where commercial copy comes in.   Anne: But again, that might be, and I'm just thinking, right, that could be come more of a discussion as we move on --   Pilar: Yes.   Anne: -- as well.   Pilar: Agreed. Yes.   Anne: So wonderful thoughts on that, and Pilar, of course, it's always a pleasure. I learn so much on every one of these episodes. Thank you so much.   Pilar: Well, you're my marketing guru, so there we go.   Anne: Well, hey BOSSes, I'm going to give a great, big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can connect like a BOSS and find out more at ipdtl.com. Have an amazing week, you guys, and we'll see you next week. Bye.   Pilar: Hasta la vista, baby.   >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

Training your ear takes practice - in any language! Anne and Pilar discuss what it’s like to approach bilingual voice over in today’s VO industry, from understanding culture and dialects to managing translation and delivery styles. Adaptation and observation are key to success as a bilingual talent, and it’s important to keep a finely-tuned ear open to understanding language rather than just speaking it. Tune in to hear tips and information from a veteran performer… More at: https://www.voboss.com/bilingual-vo-101 Transcript >> It’s time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry’s top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let’s welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Pilar: Hola, BOSS Voces. Bienvenidos al podcast con Anne Ganguzza y Pilar Uribe. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I'm honored today to bring back very special guest co-host to Pilar Uribe. Pilar, how are you today? Pilar: Hola, Anne. Cómo estás?   Anne: See, I need to start learning from you. Hola. Hola. So I am so excited to have you on this podcast because first of all, your journey is amazing, and our journeys are always ever evolving, right? And -- Pilar: Yes, oh yes. Oh, absolutely. Constantly. Anne: There's so much that our podcast listeners can learn from you. So I'm, I'm excited to continue that conversation. And I want to talk today about bilingual, what it means to be a bilingual voiceover actor in today's industry. And, you know, back in the day, I grew up in a very small town, and I was never really exposed to anyone that spoke a different language. And my exposure to let's say another language was my high school that said you can take French or Spanish, you know, for as many semesters as you'd like. And so I picked French, which I now think maybe I should have picked Spanish because I feel like that would be really useful to me today. But yeah, I was not exposed -- and it's one thing to be exposed to the language, but I was not really exposed to the culture. And I think it's so important for us to talk about that because as business owners, we serve many different communities. And it's so important for us to understand the community that we are serving and to be able to speak to them in the way that they're accustomed to and be able to serve their needs the best that we can. Pilar: Yes, this is very true, Anne. You know, I was born in New York, and both my parents were from Colombia. So that was all I knew because I spoke Spanish at home until I went to school in New York, and then I spoke English. And then when we, when we got home, we would speak only Spanish. And so every Sunday, my mother would make a traditional meal called ajiaco, which is this wonderful soup with chicken and corn and sour cream and chives, and it's like, it's so delicious. And we would listen to Colombian music. And so I grew up steeped in the culture. So it was like, there was stuff at home -- Anne: Right. Pilar: -- what we did at home. And then there was school. Anne: School. Pilar: And -- Anne: Where did you learn English then. Pilar: I learned English in kindergarten. Anne: Got it. Pilar: Well, I guess it started in nursery school 'cause I went to this playgroup where there were kids from all over. And then in kindergarten, I went to Convent of the Sacred Heart. And I think there was one other person who spoke Spanish. And of course, you know, when you're a kid, you catch on really quickly. So there was like maybe one or two people, one school friend, she spoke German, somebody else spoke Spanish, but that was also the custom of the day, which is that you learned that -- French was what was offered. I don't remember, at least at Sacred Heart, I don't remember Spanish being offered. When I switched schools, when I went to Spence across the street, they did have Spanish, but I mean, I already knew it. Anne: Right. Pilar: And so in New York, at least there was really no Spanish culture per se. You know, every so often of course I would hear Spanish being spoken, but it was in pockets. And so it was my home life, and then there was school life, and it was almost like never the twain shall meet. And so I, I grew up with a very Hispanic background because my parents wanted to give that to us, but I didn't see it reflected outside. That wasn't really until much later that actually it's, you know, you started seeing it, at least, you know, where I grew up. And so of course, my family, we would have -- lots of friends would come over, and they would speak Spanish. And so that was very fluid. But for example, I know friends who, whose parents were, they were not interested in teaching their, their children Spanish. So they have a very Latin sounding name and they don't understand Spanish. Thank God that my mother wouldn't let us speak English when we got home, because my career is basically been bilingual my entire life. Anne: So then, if I can ask, 'cause I've, I've looked this up multiple times, and I'm seeing some kind of different answers in different places. So then should I refer to the community as Hispanic or Latino or what is the difference there, if you wouldn't mind? I've got multiple places that kind of say they're the same, but yet they're different or they're mutually exclusive. Pilar: So it's, it's really strange. And I think us Hispanics, we don't even know. The word Hispanic -- I mean, when I was growing up, you were a Latina. A Latina was just, you were a Latina, which means you were from Latin America. Anne: Right, it referred to a place. Yes. Pilar: Yeah, exactly. So then Hispanic came along. If I go and I look at the term in Wikipedia, it says the term Hispanic refers to people, cultures, or countries related to Spain, the Spanish language, or hispanidad. So it embraces, because obviously we can't forget about Spain. Anne: Right. Pilar: So it embraces Spain obviously -- Anne: Right. Pilar: -- and the Americas where Spanish is spoken. And so Latinx is something that has not been around for that long. And it has to do -- see, for me what I understand it, 'cause I was like, what is this Latinx? 'Cause I was -- I would always hear of it for people who were gender neutral. Anne: That's what I -- Pilar: Who were gender fluid. But that doesn't mean that everybody who is a Latina is a Latinx. Anne: Correct. Pilar: So that's where it gets tricky and where people kind of sit there and they go, well, how do I refer to myself as? And so, you know, I'm an American because I was born in this country. Anne: Right. Pilar: And I speak Spanish. Anne: Right. Pilar: So for me, I would say I'm Hispanic because that's basically just the way that I referred to myself my entire life. The Latinx thing is something that's sort of come about in the last five, six, seven years, I think, which is fine. But for me, ultimately, I'm a Latina. Yo soy latina -- Anne: Right. Pilar: -- and that's kind of -- you know, for Americans, I'm Hispanic, but I'm a Latina because that's how I grew up, una latina. Anne: And it's Latina, because you're female, is that correct? Pilar: Yeah. Anne: And then Latino, is that -- Pilar: Yes. But then sometimes -- I know it's so bizarre -- Anne: And Latinx might be inclusive of non-binary or -- Pilar: Exactly. Non-binary. Anne: Got it. Pilar: That's exactly what it is, but because the Latino -- and because we have that differential in Spanish, because a Latino can also be male or female because I've had -- los latinos is like -- Anne: Right. Pilar: -- that's like everybody. Anne: Right, right. Pilar: You know, like, that's like so -- people just go overboard with trying to define the labels, you know? Anne: I guess, I guess it's just safe to assume that it's a personal matter, how you'd like to be referred to, right, for each person -- Pilar: Agreed. Anne: -- then. Okay. Pilar: Agreed. Anne: All right. Pilar: And I think it's kind of like everything goes. Anne: Yeah. Pilar: I mean, it's not -- well, at least for me, you know. I can't speak for everyone. Anne: Well, it's good to know because I, you know, I had questions I'm like, well, I'm not quite sure because again, when I grew up, I really was not exposed to really many people that had different cultures. I remember when I moved from my small town in upstate New York to New Jersey, I met so many people with so many different cultures, and I was like, this could have been good for me back in when I was growing up. But anyway, so now the question is, you speak Spanish, but there's so many different dialects, right? Pilar: Yes. Anne: And there's so -- many people need different dialects depending on again, what group you're speaking to. And I say group meaning buyer. If you're doing a voiceover and somebody hires you for that, they usually request a specific dialect of Spanish. So what are the different dialects and what, what are the differences between them? Pilar: Okay. So if you're talking, if, you know, if we start with Spain, which is [?], the Spaniards have a very, very different way of speaking. And so it's really interesting because Spaniards are some of the most lovely people, but the way they speak, it's almost like they're shouting at you. So [speaking Spanish] and so everything is just all, everything is always screaming. And that, I just said a bad word, by the way. Anne: Oh. Pilar: But you didn't understand, which is good. Anne: See? Pilar: So yeah, but it's, it's very, very guttural and it's, it's hard to explain. It is very, it's very tough sounding. So that's Span -- that's the Spaniards. Anne: Okay. So does that mean if somebody hires you to do some international work, and you needed to speak Spanish that was directed at people in Spain, would you speak in that delivery? Pilar: Probably, because I actually have been called to do that. Anne: Okay. Pilar: And also of course, and this is, again, nobody really knows because this is just conjecture, but the Spaniards, they have, they have a lisp. So supposedly, and some peoples, historians debate on this, but I want to say it was Phillip II or Ferdinand, I can't remember, but one of the kings had a lisp. So to cover, all the courtiers started lisping to cover his lisp. So instead of saying cerca, I'm near, estoy "therca," estoy therca. And then like canción, a Latin American would say, I'm singing a song, estoy cantando una canción, in Spain you would say estoy cantando una "canthión." It's the th instead of ss -- Anne: Right, right. Pilar: -- just for that particular C. It's not all the time. Anne: So there's Spanish from, people from Spain. Pilar: Spanish, Spain, right. Then they call this neutral. So neutral has a variety of connotations because neutral Spanish is actually, and this is something that I heard many years ago, when they say neutral Spanish, they actually want you to sound more Mexican. Because actually in terms of buyers, the largest minority of Latins is the Mexican -- Anne: Mexican. That makes sense. Pilar: So I want to say it's 89 million, but that might be an old figure. And so the Mexicans have a very distinct accent, if you go to different regions of Mexico. The reason why they ask for it is that it's a flatter way of speaking because when you start hearing different regionalisms, there's a lot of lilting. There's a lot of (singsong) and there's a lot more accents. The Mexican is pretty close in terms of being the flat, which is why they ask for it. Anne: They call that the -- Pilar: They call it -- Anne: Neutral? Pilar: Neutral Spanish, yes. Anne: Neutral Spanish. Pilar: But that's kind of code for -- it's, it's kind of more tilting towards the Mexican. Anne: Right. Because of the larger population, I'm assuming. Pilar: Yes. Anne: That's what -- Pilar: Yeah. And it's the consumer, right? Exactly. But here's the funny part. And again, the VO BOSS listeners might disagree, but the accent in Colombia, the way Colombians speak, is probably some of the best Spanish in all of Latin America. It just happens to be that way. I'm not speaking out of line. Anne: Well listen, I will tell you, I have to tell you this because when I worked in education, my boss for a good 18 years, he was from Colombia. So when he would get angry, and he would kind of go off into a different language -- Pilar: Yeah. Anne: -- it was very interesting. It was, I don't know it was lovely actually, but again, I never knew what he was saying. He was probably saying bad words, if he was angry at me or, or whatever. But it's interesting because he had an accent for 18 years, and he was, gosh, he was one of my, one of the best bosses I'd ever had. I mean, it was like half of my life that I worked for him. So I got to know him from his accent in English, but didn't ever really hear him speaking Spanish too much, except for once in a while, when he would talk to maybe his wife that would call or whatever, if I overheard him on the phone. Pilar: Yeah. Anne: Or if he got angry. Pilar: Yeah. But so Colombian Spanish is grammatically, it's probably the closest to Spanish from Spain. Anne: Okay. But then I imagine there's different regions in Colombia. Right? Pilar: Totally. Anne: Okay. And then you'd have like a different dialect for each. Pilar: Right, because you've got like, for example, the coast, um, [speaking Spanish] it's kind of like Southern, it's like the equivalent of Southern, it's and it's very, uh, it's, it's a great like people from Baidupar (?), [speaking Spanish] and then you've got Baices (?), [speaking Spanish]. There's a beautiful accent from Medellín. And then the region from Bogotá. There's all kinds. Anne: Yeah. Pilar: Where my family was from, Ibagué, it's just, it's a very funny kind of accent. They're all very different. And so that is important because a lot of the times when you are auditioning for something, they're going to ask you, because I get asked all the time. So you've got, like, let's say you've got Colombia, you've got Venezuela, and Venezuela, their accent is different, but it's more in line with the, because like for example, Caracas is on the coast. And so there, that accent is a coastal accent, and it's very close to the coastal Colombian accent from like a Baidupar, from the coast of Colombia, which is closer, not the same thing, but it's closer to like central America. So central America, you get into Dominican, which is very different. They speak at like 30,000 miles a minute. I mean, it is so crazy. You can't understand them. Anne: So then, may I ask, when you get an audition, right, are they specifying the dialect or? Pilar: Yes, yes -- Anne: Okay -- Pilar: -- now they are, now they are. Anne: -- all the time now there, because before this, I mean, bilingual has always been a thing, but I think lately it just was assumed that Spanish was maybe one or two different dialects. And, and I know for a fact, when I do a lot of telephony work, they would specifically request certain dialects of Spanish that they would want on the prompts. And so I think probably even now, right? So if you are not familiar with a specific dialect, do you go and study that before you audition? Or how does it, how does that work? Pilar: Yes, yes. Anne: Okay. Pilar: I actually have a coach who is -- Anne: Oh, okay. Pilar: -- she's great. She has, she knows all kinds of, I mean, dialects from all over the world. So and so I'll, um, I have some, some things that I, that I recorded with her. And so I'll just, I'll go to my notes there because even something proximity wise -- Anne: Sure. Pilar: -- Cuba and Puerto Rico, there's a very big difference with the accents. And I've been asked to do a Puerto Rican accent, and I've been asked to a Cuban accent. Those are the two that I get called to, sometimes Mexican. But a lot of the times what they're looking for, what I'll do, for example, when I'm doing an audition, and they're looking, they're asking to do the neutral Spanish, is that I will tone down. I will be very aware when I'm speaking of my Spanish, because I do have some regionalisms in my Spanish, and people who know, who have an ear and speak Spanish, native speakers -- Anne: Absolutely. Pilar: -- they will hear it immediately, so I can disguise it. It's practice. That's basically, it's like, if you want to put on a Southern accent, a Southern accent from Alabama is very different -- Anne: Oh yeah. Pilar: -- from a Southern accent from Virginia. Anne: Exactly. Pilar: So it's just a matter of being aware of what they are, and it starts in the mouth. So it's, it's great to get together with a coach. And for example, when, when they ask you for a British accent, and they're asking for an upper-class British accent, versus they're asking for a Scottish accent, 'cause a lot -- Anne: Sure. Pilar: -- you know, I get, I get those kinds of things for like video games. You just have to be aware, you practice, you get online. I actually did a, um, an ADR for a movie that came out, and I didn't know the language. So I got hired and he said, you speak Spanish. And I had worked with this looping director before and I said, yeah. And he said, okay, this is, this is a little different, you're going to have to practice. And I thought, okay, great, wonderful. So I start practicing, and it's this thing called Nahuatl, which is from a region in Mexico. And it's not really something -- it's a language, but it's not something that is spoken often at all. Anne: Right. Pilar: And this was for a big Marvel movie. So I started going online. There's very few videos, but I get ahold of them. I find somebody who speaks Nahuatl. And I speak to her and I realized this language has nothing to do with Spanish. And I'm like, uh-oh. So I literally phonetically had to learn phrases. And, and we had that all prepared because the looping director gave us time, but it was like, oh wow. This is a completely different language. This is not Spanish at all, but it is spoken in -- Anne: Spanish. Pilar: -- Mexico. Anne: Yeah, exactly. Wow. Pilar: So yeah, it's limitless amounts of variations. And if you're a native speaker of Spanish, you have to be very aware that you're not dealing with just one -- Anne: Right. Pilar: -- the way your voice sounds. Anne: Exactly. Pilar: You have to be able to adapt. Anne: Right. And not only just in the sound of it, right, or the accent of it, but I would say performance wise as well, right? There's styles in which people speak their language. Pilar: Yes. One of the things that I get called to do is to do a spot, and I have to do it in English and Spanish. And so first of all, Spanish is always longer. It always takes double the amount of time because we talk a lot. So double the amount of time what I say in English in Spanish. Anne: Oh, right, because you talk a lot, meaning the words to translate are twice as many. Pilar: Totally. Yeah. Anne: Okay. And you call it the bilingual two-step, I saw on your website or somewhere I saw that. Pilar: Yeah. Because it really, it takes literally double the amount of time to say it in Spanish as it does in English. And so Spanish is a beautiful language, and it's very descriptive. Anne: So I don't mean to interrupt -- Pilar: Go for it. Anne: -- I'm just thinking like, what if somebody that's not familiar, right, says, okay, I've got a 15-second or 30-second spot in English and oh, by the way, can you do it in Spanish? I assume that presents issues because you might have to do it much faster or you might have to maybe make some different changes and because you can't fit all the words in, is that correct, or? Pilar: Yes. So I'm much more -- I didn't use to be vocal, and I'm much more gently -- and obviously you have to do this in a democratic kind of a way, so you don't ruffle people's feathers. Anne: Right. Pilar: And they were aware of that. You know, copywriters are aware of all that today, which they didn't use to be, that they have to shorten it because otherwise you end up sounding like a chipmunk -- Anne: Right, right. Pilar: -- trying to get it out. And also the way a Latina like me expresses herself in Spanish is completely different from the way I'm going to say it in English. And it's the same copy. Anne: Now, how, performance-wise, if I might ask? Like, so you might say it in Spanish differently, would you be, I don't know, more excited or more dynamic or is -- what's typical? Pilar: I think it's in the way, the way the words are said, it's just different, because, because the actual sounds -- Anne: -- they go together differently. Pilar: Yeah. They go together differently. Okay. So here's something -- let me just see if I have it in English and Spanish. Okay. So this is -- I did something like this and it's, it's an Amtrak spot. "Did you think of the first person you're going to go visit?" Okay. That's in English. I'm just making that up. "¿Ya piensas de quien va ser la primera persona que vas a visitar?" So it's like two completely different people. Anne: It is. Pilar: And I don't know how to explain that, but -- Anne: It is. Pilar: -- it is. Anne: But that brings up a question, which I've always wondered about. So let's just say you have, you're doing a live directed session -- Pilar: Yeah. Anne: -- and the person that's directing you doesn't know Spanish. You have to know, right, you have to know the delivery. Pilar: Oh yeah. Anen: You have to know the nuance or does it happen that you don't always have, you know what I mean, a Spanish speaking, if you're doing Spanish and English or -- what's that like? Pilar: No, generally, actually, no, whenever I do live directed sessions, there's always somebody -- they may not speak it fluently, but they completely understand the language. Anne: Oh, okay. That's good to know. Pilar: You always have somebody there who knows. Anne: That's good to know. Pilar: But as a bilingual speaker, I feel like it's my job to make it easier for them. So I try to -- when they ask me and they're like trying to fish for a word, like, I don't like jump in, but I try to help them out, because it's difficult. Like I've done this my whole life. You know, I'm constantly in my head translating from English to Spanish -- Anne: Right. Pilar: -- Spanish to English. Anne: Right. Pilar: And so sometimes people just don't have that facility. I just happen to do it all the time. Anne: Right. Pilar: So if I can help them with a word or something -- Anne: Yeah. Pilar: -- I do. I'll step in, and I'll say it. Anne: Yeah. And that makes so much sense. I have really, honestly, I have such respect. I think everybody learn multiple languages. Really. I think it's such an education, not just culturally, but just, it's so many things you can get by being bilingual in your own personal development, really, so much you can learn. Pilar: You know, when it's a whole world. Anne: Yeah. Pilar: I mean, when I, when I studied French, it really, really opened it up because I was seeing so many parallels between Spanish and French. And I was like, oh, okay. So now I get why this, these are Romance languages. And then, you know, one time my family, my mother and my, my father and I, uh, we were invited to a wedding in Italy. And it's a really good friend of mine who is getting -- married an Italian gentleman. And I thought, well, why don't I just, I'm going to learn Spanish on the sly. And so -- not, not Spanish, Italian. And back in the day, dating myself, we had Walkmans right? Anne: Yup. I had one of those. Pilar: So I got a bunch of cassettes. Exactly. And I listened to it all the time. And my father would look at me like I was crazy. 'Cause he was like, 'cause I didn't say what I was doing. I was just always with the Walkman on. And so when I stepped off the plane, I was speaking Italian, and we could get around because I was speaking Italian. I didn't speak it that well, but I understood it. Now Spanish is very different from Italian, but there are a lot of words -- Anne: They're similar. Pilar: -- that are the same, so -- Anne: -- if I -- yeah. Pilar: So yeah, so it was really cool to be able to kind of navigate in that world because I had help. Anne: And it's important. I say that because the many times that my husband and I've gone to Italy now, I don't speak Italian, but my husband grew up with his grandparents speaking Italian, and his mother and father, not all the time. It wasn't -- he wasn't required to speak Italian. They were born in America, but his grandparents. And so he had enough knowledge, but thankfully he had that knowledge. And when we stepped off the plane into Italy, I mean, you just, you gotta be able to get around. Pilar: Yeah, yeah. Anne: And so I know very few words, few words, enough to like enough to get a gelato. But -- and to say please and thank you. Pilar: Exactly. And mi porte un po de panni? You can get a -- you can get, go very far. Can you bring me a little bit of bread? Anne: Yup. Pilar: Mi porte un po de panni? That'll get you anywhere in Italy, and there'll be grateful and they'll start flirting with you -- Anne: Yup. Pilar: -- and they'll offer you wine. And, you know, whatever. I'm always in such awe of voiceover artists whose Spanish, who, you know, it was not their first language, but they learned it, and they speak it really well. You know, they may not be native speakers -- Anne: Right. Pilar: -- because obviously fluent and native, they're two different things. Anne: Exactly. Pilar: But a lot of the times I will hear a really good Spanish accent, you know, over the, if, you know, if I'm in a train station or whatever, and you can tell the person is not native, but their pronunciation is flawless. So there's obviously a market for that. Anne: Yeah. Pilar: And that comes through practice. Anne: Yeah. Pilar: You have to practice, you know, and how do you practice? You, you read out loud, you -- and, and I do that. I mean, I'm, I'm a native speaker and I do that on a pretty regular basis. I'm reading a book in Spanish on my Kindle. And so I will read it. I will read entire passages out loud because I need to hear myself -- Anne: It's like a muscle. Pilar: -- and go -- yeah, exactly. Anne: Right? It's a muscle. Pilar: You need to practice it. Anne: If you're not going to be speaking -- I remember my husband's father when he used to talk to the family in Sicily. And by the way, Sicilian is different from Italian and different regions -- Pilar: Totally. Anne: -- there as well. I mean, his father knew enough, but also was very, it was very stressful for him to talk to the family because they would just be talking a mile a minute. And he was trying to get that back into his muscle memory and also speak it. He used to come off the phone. I mean, he'd be sweating. You know? So I can imagine, I can imagine what it's like being bilingual like, first of all, hats off and mad respect to anybody, you know, that speaks another language and can do it in fluently and -- because there's, there's work involved in that, that is a muscle memory and practice and all sorts of things. Pilar: Yeah. Anne: And I was thinking that it affords you some other opportunities in your voiceover business, such as -- I imagine you do a lot of dubbing. Pilar: Yes, yes. Anne: I imagine people ask you to do translation or proofreading services. So there's some other things that you can add as a service to your business as well by being bilingual. Pilar: Well, and also, yes, I agree with -- Anne: If you choose. Pilar: -- everything you just said. Anne: If you choose to want to do, you know, translation -- Pilar: Yeah. Anne: -- or proofreading or those things. Pilar: But even, even just knowing, maybe not being completely fluent, but even knowing a good amount of words and practicing those words -- because here's what I'm starting to see in a lot of copy is English copy but like a couple of Spanish speaking words -- Anne: Yes. Pilar: -- will sort of sift in there. And so if you can say it -- because a lot of the times I'm called and I can't completely make it in Spanish because people will be like, huh? What is she saying? Anne: Right. Pilar: But I can, I can add -- there's some spots I used to do. So instead of saying "this time on Colores" -- so I would never say Colores in regular. Anne: Right. Pilar: But it's not CoLORes. Anne: Right, right. Right. You have to have the accent. Yeah. Pilar: It's somewhere in between. So it's helpful to have an understanding of the sounds that another language makes, because I'll tell you, it's helped me. I can do German. I can -- I don't speak German. I can do Portuguese because it's basically about developing the ear. You know, a lot of times I'll hear a voice actor or somebody say, oh no, I can't speak. It's like, do you have a pair of ears? Anne: It's all about the -- Pilar: If you have a pair of ears, you just, you, you, you train yourself. Again, it's like what you said before. It's like a muscle. Train and develop that. Anne: And you know what, it's so interesting that you say that. I mean really, training your ear is, a lot of it, even just being conversational and, and understanding what a lot of people don't understand, what a conversational melody sounds like, because they've never really studied it. Right? Because all of a sudden -- Pilar: Yes. Anne: -- now, we're being asked to speak these words that didn't come from us and sound conversational. Well, there actually is a melody to being conversational and there's a melody to all of it. And so the process of training your ear is not something that happens overnight. That's for darn sure. You know, I just know that from the many students that when we go through our, you know, how are we speaking conversational or how do we get there? It takes a long time to develop the ear, but it's definitely something that can be learned, but it does take a lot of practice. A lot of practice. Pilar: It takes a lot of practice, but if you do it just five minutes a day -- Anne: Yeah. Pilar: -- and you, and you take a little piece of a newspaper in Spanish -- so just when I first got to Colombia, I had a little bit of an accent in Spanish. And my director was very strict, and he said, okay, you got to go get rid of that. And it was the slightest thing. It was like in the S's. And, and I, I was aware of it, but I was like, I don't know how to get rid of it. So I worked with somebody, but what I really did was I watched telenovelas all day long. And sometimes I would just, I wouldn't, I wouldn't even look at the television. I would just listen -- Anne: Right, just listen. Pilar: And I would repeat over and over again. That's how I learned Italian by myself. Anne: Yeah. Pilar: And so everything is possible -- Anne: Immersed yourself in the sounds and melody of it. Pilar: Yeah. Exactly. Anne: Yeah. Pilar: It's just having it around you, and you don't need to spend that much time on it, but you can -- Anne: Yeah. Pilar: -- if you do it on a daily basis, you are going to improve. Anne: I think it has to be consistent. Wow. There's so many other things I want to talk to you about being a bilingual voice talent. And I think we're going to be continuing that in our next episode, but this was a great beginning to talking about, I guess, the depth of what it takes to be a bilingual voice actor. So I thank you, Pilar. I'm going to say my last question to you is going to be okay, so now you know what our new series name is, right? Okay, so it's BOSS -- Pilar: You want to unveil it? Anne: Well, it's BOSS, and it's voices in Spanish. So how would I say that? Pilar: You would say BOSS Voces. Anne: BOSS Voces. Pilar: Or if you're from Spain, you would say BOSS Vothes. Anne: Oh. Pilar: La voth. Por qué -- Anne: La voth. Pilar: -- muy linda, Anne. Entonces, yo te puedo hablar todo el día, si quieres. Anne: Oh. Pilar: I just went overboard in Spanish. Anne: Okay. Pilar: I said you had a lovely voice -- Anne: Yes. Pilar: -- but for Latin Americans -- Anne: Yes. Pilar: - it's BOSS, BOSS Voces. Anne: BOSS Voces. Pilar: Voces. Anne: Voces, voces. Pilar: So with Spanish, you pronounce all the vowels. So it's ah, eh, ee, oh, oo, right? It's not A E I O U. Anne: Right. Pilar: So it's BOSS -- So you would say, maybe you would -- Anne: BOSS -- Pilar: -- you could give it a little, kind of a, a little sexy lilt. go BOSS Voces. Anne: BOSS Voces. BOSS Voces. Pilar: There we go. You got it. Anne: There we go. Well, now you guys know our new series' name. Thank you so much from my first, my first lesson from you. As always, it has been amazing to spend this time with you. BOSSes, we want you to have an amazing week. If you want to connect and network with amazing people like Pilar, you can find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Bye. Pilar: Fue un placer, Anne. Nos vemos. Ciao. Anne: Ciao. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voboss.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

Moving from the closet booth to the…car booth? Anne and Pilar finish telling the story of Pilar’s Journey in Part 3 of the Boss Voces premiere. Listen as Pilar finally packs her car (+ her cat!) and moves to LA in hopes of establishing her VO career and signing with a big agency. It's been a wild ride, but things are really coming together now on the West Coast for Pilar... More at: https://www.voboss.com/pilars-journey-part-3 Transcript >> It’s time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry’s top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let’s welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza. Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and I'm so happy to welcome back to the show special guest cohost Pilar Uribe. Pilar, hey, how are you today? Pilar: I'm doing great. How are you? Anne: I'm doing great. Hey, I have been so interested in your story, and we've learned so many things that are parallels to being in the voiceover industry today from your story. So our last couple of episodes, we talked about your telenova star personalities in Colombia and your -- I think it was nine years you were there in Colombia doing all kinds of acting -- Pilar: That's right. Anne: -- and some radio as well. And then you moved on to Miami, and we're talking to us about your radio career in Miami and how you evolved into that and also in voiceover. And now we're on when your next move, which it's so interesting, you moved from Colombia to Florida, to Miami, and I, I think it was all just things seem to take you where you needed to go to evolve in your career. And I think that's such a cool parallel with my experience as well. And hopefully BOSSes that are listening out there kind of have some similarities as well. So I'd love to hear about your, I guess what made you go from Miami to LA, and let's, let's continue the journey with you. Pilar: So I'm in Miami, and my, as I said, in the last episode, my land lady, she actually wrote me an email saying, I'm so sorry, but I'm going to sell the apartment. Anne: And you were there for how long? Pilar: 16 years. Anne: Wow. Pilar: Yeah. So my first thought was total and utter panic because I was like, oh my gosh, I have to get out of this apartment that I've lived in. And I've sort of made a life for myself. And I started looking around. I had been working with somebody. We've had like a 25 now, yeah, more than 25-year conversation with his really good friend of mine in New York and something that he used to say to me. I had started getting a little bit sort of, I want to do something else, but I'm not really sure what it is. You know, I, I've got four jobs and I've got the radio host thing, and it's just, you know, it's, I'm always hustling, and it would be nice to be able to do more voiceover. But you know, Miami is not a lot, a lot of opportunity there, unless it's in my booth. And he said something to me, because I was like, you know, I think I need to. And he would say until you decide to pack your bag, you're not going to move. And he said that to me for years. And I take it now is it's not just a physical thing. It's sort of a, if I want to do something, I have to go ahead and do it. Anne: Yeah. Pilar: Because I can talk about it -- Anne: You have to pack your bag. Pilar: -- until the cows. Yeah. So like, I can talk about it until the cows come home. But if I don't actually do it and decide to make a change, I'm never going to do anything, you know? Anne: Yeah. I love that. I love that. There you go manifestation again. Pilar: Exactly. Anne: Especially for those BOSSes that are early in their careers, and they don't know, and they think about it, and they think this is what they want to do, but yeah. Actually taking the step and the, the physical part of yes, making that decision, putting the things in place, and it helps it come to fruition. Pilar: Exactly. So I didn't tell anybody, and this is something that I'm very conscious of. A lot of the times I would sit there, like I wrote like 17 or 18 songs when I lived in Colombia. And so I said, you know, I'm, I have songs and I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I would tell everybody that I was gonna put out an album eventually. I never put the album out, but I told everybody I was going to do it. And a lot of the times when you say things like that, you leak your energy. So when you have an intention in your mind, it's really important to keep it within yourself, um, and share it with people that you can trust and be aware that it's not something that you need to sit there and gab and gab and gab and gab about, but that you really need to focus on what it is that you're doing. And I think that, that's what I, I mean, I did that for a while, and I would sit there and I would complain, and I'd be like, oh, you know, I want more. And I'm really kind of in love with this thing called voiceover, but I don't really know what it is. And so I decided to just go ahead and kind of be quiet and say, okay, if I'm going to do something -- because I'd been doing it for 10 years and everything that I got was actually I got it. I didn't have an agent. I didn't, I, you know, had the on-camera agents, but I was doing voiceover. So I thought, okay, what, where can I go? And so VO Atlanta was coming up. And so I just thought, well, let me, let me check out Atlanta, because I love Atlanta. I've been there a few times, and I went and I saw these people and it was really wonderful. And then I thought, let me go. There was a, I think it was a WoVo was having a small, like a little mini session in San Francisco. So I thought, let me, let me go there. But once I left to go there, there was something about it. As much as I loved Atlanta, Atlanta was, I mean, at that point, um, this is two years ago now going on three, it's really, it, it definitely has a very strong voiceover, but it was more for on camera. And I realized I really want to focus on my voiceover, you know? And, and I had always thought, I mean, I always knew that in LA, you know, LA for me, it was like the Olympic village. And I was like, do I want to, I've always dreamed of going to LA and this, my friend Dale has been telling me would tell you, pack your bag. Anne: Yeah. LA is weird dreams coming true. Right? People move to LA with their dreams. Pilar: Right, exactly. What was it that they say in -- "what do you wish for? It your dream!" Was it that -- it was this great guy at the very beginning of "Pretty Woman." Anne: Oh! Pilar: He says it at the very beginning. Anne: Oh yeah. Pilar: And he says it at the very end. Anne: Yup. Pilar: "What do you wish for?" It was, it's really cool. So I went to San Francisco and then I went and I spent a few days with a friend in LA. And as soon as I got there, I was like, oh, I'm supposed to be here. And I just knew. Anne: Yup, yup. Pilar: I just, it was like, I arrived. And I just knew that that was the place. Anne: Yup. Pilar: So I went back to Miami and I started setting intentions, just like I had when I moved to Colombia. I was like, okay, I'm just going to start setting my intentions here. And I was like, okay, I'm going to need a place to live. And I had time before I had to leave. So this is like in March, March/April, and I had a lead from a very kind person who wrote a letter to Atlas Talent, and it turned out and of course, it's the universe, because they were looking for bilingual voiceover talent. Anne: There you go. Pilar: So I get this email, and they're like, we'd like to have a meeting. And I was like, oh my gosh, they want to have a meeting? They want to have a meeting with me? Are you kidding? I was like, I, so I didn't want to tell them that I wasn't there yet. So I was like, you know, I'm in the process. So I wrote them back and I said, you know, thank you so much. I'm in the process. I'll let you know when I get there. Anne: Now, can I ask you how long ago this was? Pilar: Two years ago. It's going to be three years. Anne: Okay. And it's so interesting because again, the timing of everything, right? I feel like it's important to me. We're really coming into, you know, inclusivity and diversity and needing bilingual and more and more and more. So that makes sense to me. Pilar: Yes. And, and that will play later -- Anne: Yeah. Pilar: -- into that. So I started packing, I started throwing things away. I started giving things away because I realized I can't move with all my stuff. 'Cause it was just, it was just too expensive. So I had to, you know, sell, give away, donate. And I got July 19th, 2019, I got into the car. I packed all my stuff, and with my kitty, with Paco. Anne: And drove across the country. Pilar: I drove across the country. I picked up a very good friend of mine who actually, we started out almost -- I met him almost as soon as I got to, uh, Miami ,Aaron, Aaron Goldenberg. And he is an actor as well. He was living in Atlanta at the time, but I flew him back from Atlanta to Miami on my frequent flyer miles. And we drove across the country, which I highly recommend. I mean, you know, this is -- Anne: With a cat. Pilar: Of course. Anne: With a cat. Pilar: With a cat, of course. I highly recommend -- Anne: How was your booth kitty in the car for a cross-country trip? That would be interesting. Pilar: I have to tell you, he was really good considering, you know, of course there was meowing going on. Anne: Yeah. Pilar: I never let him out of the car. I mean, I never let him out of his travel bag because, you know, that's just not a good idea with -- Anne: Yeah. Pilar: -- with cats, but he was really good. Anne: What about when you stay -- I can't imagine you did the drive in one fell swoop. Pilar: No, no, no, no, no. Anne: Yeah. Pilar: It took us seven days. Anne: Yeah. Pilar: We would drive, I would park some litter in the bottom of the car. I had some litter there and I had water there. And so what I would do is that I would take him out when we would do rest stops. I would take him out and we would leave him alone. We would close the car. We would leave him the most. So he would check it out. He never went to the bathroom in my car. Anne: Oh my gosh. Pilar: I have to -- yeah, no. So what would happen is when we would get to a place, I would immediately, the first thing I would do was I would set up his kitty litter box with a little portable thing that I had, and I would put it in the closet usually so he would have privacy and he would go immediately. So -- Anne: I can't imagine them holding it for like an eight-hour ride. Like -- Pilar: I know. And the thing is, it was right there. That's what was so obnoxious that he wouldn't go. And I had the kitty litter there for him, but he refused to go. So, you know, whatever. Anne: We digressed, we digressed -- Pilar: We digressed, yes. Sorry. Anne: -- into the studio -- into the studio cat -- Pilar: Yes. Anne: -- conversation. But I'm sorry, I had to, I had to ask. Pilar: But it can be done. I'm just, I'm telling you now, Anne, it can be done if you want to go across with the kitties, it can be done. Anne: See, we manifested it. We manifest -- we manifest our kitties as well. Pilar: Exactly. Anne: Crossing the country. Pilar: Um, yeah. So it was, it was, it was great. I saw the most beautiful parts of this country. I was like, it's, it's really, when you realize, for those of you living in the States -- Anne: Yeah. Pilar: -- you just realize the vastness of this country and how amazing it is. You just, you really don't get that um, you know, when you fly in. Driving, it was, it was just, it was such a great experience driving through all across -- all of the states. Anne: That's what I'm going to do when I retire. Pilar: It's definitely worth doing. Anne: Yup. Pilar: So we, we arrived in Phoenix, and Aaron had to fly back for a gig. So I dropped and we -- that had that already been planned. So I dropped him off in Phoenix, and it was close enough that I could, you know, drive the rest of the way myself. It's like 600 miles. So it was long. But I had, I had done that before. So I drove. And then when I was literally inside LA, when I was literally inside, when I was inside the -- in California, I took a picture. I was like, okay, I've reached California. So I took a little, a little post -- I did, I just did a little Instagram post. And when I got within the confines of LA county, when I knew I was within LA county, I stopped the car. I pulled to the side of the road. I stopped the car, and I sent an email so the agent would know that I was there because I didn't want to lie about that I was there when I wasn't. So I was like, okay, I'm already physically here. So then they know. So then they wrote me back pretty quickly after that. And they said, you know, we're every, and it was, you know, it was the summer. So everybody was on vacation. So I got to LA, I wrote them and I, I saw them like about two weeks after I arrived. I arrived at a friend's house. And then I started doing Airbnb, and then I found a place through a good friend, Randy Thomas. She found me -- a friend of hers had a room. So I rented a room, this dear man. So I just started living basically out of my car. I just, I had all this stuff, obviously. So I took some stuff out, but I would live out out of my car because like, what else am I going to do? Anne: Right. Pilar: I can't bring all that stuff 'cause it wouldn't fit in this room. Anne: And this is before, this is before pandemic. Pilar: This is way before pandemic. Anne: Yeah. Okay. Pilar: Yeah. So, so I'm, I'm -- Anne: Well, not so far, actually. Pilar: No, no, no, no, not that far. No, because this is August. This was August. So -- Anne: Right, pandemic March. Pilar: Yeah. This was the August, 2019. Anne: Okay. Because was it 2020? Pilar: Yeah, yes. Anne: Where have the years gone? Pilar: Yes. I know, exactly. We went through a whole year and a half. Right? It's already -- Anne: Didn't we have two years of pandemic? I'm not sure. Pilar: Yeah, we're about to reach two years of pandemic, yes. Anne: So okay, so you're about a year before the pandemic then. Pilar: Yeah. Six months. Anne: Oh, okay. Pilar: Nine months, nine months. Anne: Okay, nine months. Pilar: Nine months. So -- Anne: Like a pregnancy, like -- Pilar: Exactly, like a pregnancy. Exactly. So I had nine months ,and that's really important. Anne: Yes. Pilar: So I, I, um, I, I go to the agent. I, you know, I get all dolled up and I, I get there super early to the appointment with the agents, and they were like, so incredible. So nice. So normal. I was like, wow, okay, this is just, and they asked me questions. And so I, I, you know, I give them my stuff. I give them my little, you know, my little elevator pitch, which by the way, everybody needs an elevator pitch. That's really important to have an elevator pitch. That's what I'm discovering is like, you know, just basically like a little minute of your life. Anne: Sure. Pilar: You know? Anne: Absolutely. Pilar: And so then they, you know, they asked me, they said, do you want to freelance? Which is what I had been doing for 16 years, because Miami is a right to work state, so with all my on-camera agents. And I didn't, I didn't have any experience with, with VO agents. And they said, do you want to freelance? Do you want to, you know, sign? And I was like, oh, where's the page where I can sign on the dotted line? I was like, I'm not, I'm not freelancing if you're giving me this choice, I'm signing, you know, because obviously California is not a right to work state. It's like, you sign with an agent, you're done. So I was like, yep, I'm on board. And then afternoon, they sent me an audition. And I was like, okay, how do I do this? So I became really good at auditioning inside my car. Anne: Tell me about your setup in the car. Pilar: So the setup is, it's actually, it's a really cool setup. So you sit, you have to sit in the backseat. You pull the seat all the way to -- forward. And I have a Sennheiser 416. Anne: Yup. Pilar: So you pull the seat all the way forward. You sit on -- and, you know, it's, it's, it's a maneuvering situation to get your butt in the bottom of the car, not on the seat, but on the floor of the car. Anne: And we'll share a picture of this setup on our website, on the VO BOSS website. Pilar: Totally. Oh yeah. Anne: I would love to share. Pilar: Oh, I have it. I have it. I have a picture. Yeah, totally. Totally. And then the laptop goes on the back seat, and then I've got my Focusrite 2i2 there as well. And then little, you know, the cables. And then I've got my Sennheiser with a stand in the middle of where the, on the -- Anne: Console, on the console? Pilar: On the console. Anne: Okay. Pilar: No, in the middle of where the front seats are. Anne: Yes, yes. Right. Pilar: So it's that little it's, it's not on top of where the dashboard is, but it's in the middle. So I'm sitting down, and I'm looking -- Anne: I call that the console. Pilar: Oh, you do? Okay. We call that -- Anne: Well, I do, the console in between the seats. Pilar: Yeah. Okay, cool. Cool. Cool. Yeah. Okay, cool. It's like, I'm not familiar with that lingo. Sorry. I'm not that advanced! So I don't know why they used to call -- we used to call them jump seat -- the jump parts. I don't know, whatever. Anyway, so I'll take a little table. I'll call it the table. So I'd put my set, the, the holder, the mic holder and the Sennheiser. Anne: Yup. Pilar: And I would start doing auditions from there. 'Cause I originally, I had a, uh, a dear friend who would also let me use his studio, but sometimes I couldn't get to the studio in time if it was quick. Anne: Right, right. So it's not like you were living out of your car. I mean, you had a place to stay; you just didn't have a booth. Pilar: I didn't have a booth. Yeah. And the thing is I didn't have room. Anne: Yeah. And so your car acted as the booth. Pilar: Exactly. My correct as the booth. Anne: Yeah. Pilar: And so I had the trunk of my car was filled with stuff -- Anne: Sure. Pilar: -- because I couldn't take everything out, 'cause it just wouldn't fit in the room that I was living in. You know? Anne: Yes. Pilar: So like when I wanted to wear something different, I would go and get something out of the car -- Anne: Go in the trunk. Pilar: -- and then -- yeah, exactly it was, it was actually kind of an easy way to live, you know? Anne: Right? Pilar: -- 'cause I, I didn't have that much. Anne: Minimalist. There you go. Pilar: So it was perfect. And then this guy had a garage. So sometimes when I needed real quiet, because it was -- the lawn mower situation -- Anne: Yup, yup. Pilar: -- in California is just a nightmare and a half. There's always lawn blower, leaf blowers everywhere every day. So I would go and I would park the car, and I would, and this was summer. This was still summer. This was August. I was, I was just sweat like a pig. Anne: Sweltering in the back seat there. Pilar: Totally. But it was perfect because I was really, it was like, I was insulated. Anne: But not like Miami. I can't imagine if you were in -- Pilar: No, no. Anne: -- a car in Miami. Pilar: Oh no, that would be horrible. No, I would. I would be, you know, they wouldn't find me. I'd be asphyxiated. It'd be so bad. Anne: So you did your first audition in the car. Pilar: I did my first -- Anne: For Atlas. Pilar: Yeah, I did my first audition -- I think I did my first -- yes, for Atlas. Yeah, absolutely. 'Cause that was, that was like the first I, I needed a place to go. So that's where I did it. And then I did it at this friend's house as well. A lot of the times, you know, I would come in and I would, I would do like three or four, you know, auditions. I did them for five months, five months. Okay? So I would audition. I finally found again, it was, I wanted a quiet place. I asked for a place. I found this wonderful woman who's also a voiceover person. And she had converted her closet, not her closet, but this other house where she had, uh, she had, she used to do it. So it was actually already sort of treated. It was already a treated space where I'm, where I'm talking to you from now. So it was, it was perfect. Anne: Ah, so you're still in the same place? Pilar: Oh yeah. I'm still at the same place. Anne: There you go. Pilar: You know, when I found the place, it was a matter of, I asked around and this person said, oh, I have this friend of mine who's looking for somebody. So it was just, it was so perfect. It was one of these aha moments. I was like, this is it. This is where I'm supposed to live. I saw the place. And I was like, I want, you know, this is where I want to be. And the first day that I moved in, I had not finished moving in when I had it professionally treated and everything set up here where I'm speaking to you from now. So it was perfect. And I just auditioned and I auditioned. And when I say this am, I mean, it, I didn't get one gig. Anne: So for five months, you auditioned and you auditioned. Pilar: I got zero and I, yeah. I took classes of course, 'cause I realized, oh, this is a different scenario. I'm in the Olympic village of voiceover. Anne: Sure. Pilar: This is not, you know, we're not in Kansas anymore. Anne: Right. And when you auditioned, what sorts of opportunities -- were they bilingual? Were they English? Spanish? What were they? Both. What did they send you? Pilar: They were everything. It was like, they were everything. And it was like, oh my gosh, stuff that I would never have been able to do if I was in Miami. Now this was pre-pandemic. Anne: Yup. Pilar: Obviously the situation has changed, but it was also a testament to my agents who were like willing to put me out there because you know, they're always talking and there's always feedback obviously. Anne: Sure. Pilar: So I would get auditions for McDonald's. Well, I would never, I've never been able to do that in Miami. Anne: Hold on a minute. I'm going to back the truck up there for a minute because you say there's always feedback. So with great agents, I think you get great feedback. Pilar: Yes. Anne: And if you are actively requesting feedback, I think that that can very much help. I know there's -- some people never get feedback. I think that that is something that is very different. And when you're shopping around for agents, and agents are shopping around, it really is a partnership. And I think that if you want a great agent, they will, they will be absolutely willing to give you feedback and help to propel your career. Just like you're going to help them get clients. Pilar: Exactly. And you just made a really good point because it's a partnership. Anne: Yup. Pilar: It's not, oh, the agent is up there, and I'm down here or, "oh, you work for me. You got to get me the rules." No, no, no, no, no. Anne: Right, exactly. Pilar: It's not a community. It's like, you've literally created a community. Now, the agents won't say anything until you ask them. Anne: Yes, absolutely. Pilar: If I'm in the driver's seat, I need to drive my career. So I need to ask for that. And I have to be able to, you know, put my ego to the side -- Anne: Yes. Pilar: -- and listen to what they're saying. Anne: Yes. Pilar: And not say, oh, well, they don't know what they're talking. They don't know that. You know, it, it really is. It's a, it's a real give and take. It's about giving it. It's about receiving. Anne: So now in your five months, when you were not booking, were you asking for feedback? Pilar: Not at the beginning, but then I asked for who do you recommend that I study with? Anne: Right, right. Pilar: And they were like, okay, we have this and this and this. And I was like, okay, great. And I also asked other, I asked a lot of other voiceover people. I was like, well, who do you recommend here? Who do you -- so then I started taking classes. Anne: Sure. I think what's nice is that they, first of all, I would feel like because they are a large talent agency and a very well-known one. The fact that they gave you the opportunity, like if it were, I think any normal person going through that, and I'd start to be, oh my gosh, I haven't booked for five -- you know, it would start to psych me out. Oh my gosh, what if they drop me? Or what if, and it could be a nerve-wracking kind of situation. If you feel like, well, there's gotta be something that needs to change here. So you want to book for your agent. Pilar: And you know what the thing is, Anne? To me, it's a testament to my agent, the agency that I have, and I feel really blessed. They were very -- it's not -- they knew that I was there. They knew that I was new, and they were -- Anne: They had faith in you. Pilar: -- it's not that they were hands off. Anne: They had faith in you, right? Pilar: Exactly. And there was somebody that I talked to in the office one time, because I was just like really freaking out at one point. I was like, oh my God, they must think -- Anne: Yeah, I can imagine. Pilar: -- who is this person? Why did we hire her? You know, it's like, she's not doing anything. And she was so nice and to the point, and she's like, you know what? It was almost like she said -- she didn't say it this way, but what she meant from that conversation was we know you're a newbie. That's why we're throwing it all out at you. We're giving you the space to do this. Anne: Nice. Pilar: So, uh, and I can't, I can't remember how she said it, but that's what I walked away from. Anne: Sure. Pilar: And I was like -- walked away with -- Anne: Sure. Pilar: -- and I thought, oh, thank God. You know, I'm not -- Anne: Yeah. Pilar: -- like I'm not going to be fired immediately. You know what I mean? Anne: What a nice, what a nice testament to really a working partnership and that your agent has faith in you, and they're giving you -- Pilar: Yes. Anne: -- that space. And I think obviously they had to have known when they first spoke to you, when they first met you, that you had the wherewithal to be successful from whatever, from your past experience, from your personality, from your drive, whatever it was, they had that faith in you, and they kept that faith in you. So that's a really nice, that's a really nice story. Pilar: Yeah. Anne: I'm hoping that our listeners will take that for what it is, because I think getting an agent and having an agent and having a relationship with an agent is something we could have a whole podcast episode about -- Pilar: Yeah, yeah. Anne: -- in regards to the, how to work together as a partnership. Pilar: Yeah. And, and, and I think for me, what was really great was that I was willing to listen to them, and I was also willing to be transparent with them. Anne: Absolutely. Pilar: So they knew, they knew where I was coming from. I mean, they knew that I had radio experience because I have all this stuff on my website. Anne: Sure. Pilar: But they also knew that I was very new to the business in terms of commercial versus all these other genres in the world that they live in. Anne: Sure. Absolutely. Pilar: And they were willing to give me that latitude. Anne: Great. Pilar: So transparency, I think, is really important in this world. Anne: Oh, I completely agree. Pilar: And to be able to turn it into something of, not that I don't know this -- into, I'm very willing to learn -- Anne: How can I -- Pilar: -- and I'm willing to work hard, yeah. Anne: -- how can I learn? How can I, yeah. I'm eager to learn. There you go back to, back to your roots there. Pilar: Exactly. Anne: I may not know, but I am absolutely eager to learn. And I think there's a lot to be said for that in just an overall mentality about what we do every day in our -- I mean, there's always opportunities to learn, and you're talking to an educator here, one that was in front of the classroom for 20 years. We always, always have an opportunity to learn and to improve. And I think that if you take nothing else away from our episode, absolutely, this is one of them. And there's always ways, if you're transparent, if you want to learn, you're eager to learn, people appreciate that. And agents, especially, I think appreciate that. Pilar: Absolutely. Yep. I totally agree. Anne: So five months, nothing. Then what? Pilar: Then I booked this job and -- Anne: Commercial? Pilar: Commercial. It's a commercial job. And I will never forget when the check came in. I thought they'd made a mistake. I almost called them and said, you've, you've made a mistake because this has gotta be wrong. Luckily I called a friend of mine. I al -- I literally, I had my hand on, on the press send a button. I thought we just call a really good friend of mine back east who's a voiceover. And she started laughing when I told her. She said, no Pilar, that's the right amount. This is what it means when you are a union actor, to get paid in the industry. So I was like, oh, thank God. I'm going to be able to pay my bills. Anne: Yup. Pilar: And then that was the end of January. And then in March, the pandemic hit and I was ready. And so I just, I started booking. I just started booking and booking and booking. Anne: Success begets success. Pilar: Yeah. Yeah. Anne: Fantastic. Wow. What a great story. Pilar: Yeah. Anne: What a great story. And so now during this pandemic, you're still in the same place, right? Except now you have -- Pilar: Yes. Anne: -- you don't have to necessarily record in the back of your car because you have a studio, which is awesome, which is where you are talking to me now from. And you are, I hope just a booking machine. And now is Atlas your only -- I imagine you have more than one agency or is Atlas pretty much your agency you're working with right now? Pilar: Well, I was with Stars before I was with Atlas, and they were, you know, they were okay with it. You know, and they're, they're totally okay with having other regional agents that are not, you know, in their market. I've looked around for others. But you know, when I started looking around the pandemic had hit. So they were really swamped. Anne: Yeah. Pilar: So they're really my go-to people right now. Anne: Sure. Pilar: You know, it's, it's not easy because yes. I had a huge glut in 2020, and then 2021 was a lot quieter. It's been a lot quieter than I expected because I, you know, it was just the, I don't, if it was, I was the new kid on the block or what it was. And so, you know, for me, it's like finding other ways to be creative -- Anne: Sure. Pilar: -- and to be able to support myself in that way. And so it's like, I'm constantly learning, you know? And if there's, if there's one thing that I can, a takeaway for me, from what I've been talking about is that I always have a beginner mindset. So if there's a place where I'm feeling stuck, because this is an area, let's say, where I'm not booking, it's like, okay, what other ways can I find -- Anne: Sure. Pilar: -- to do it creatively? Anne: And to evolve, right, as an artist. Pilar: And to evolve. Exactly. Because it's not just about booking the big, you know, commercial job. Anne: Sure. Pilar: It's about how can I incorporate everything that I've learned, and how can I maybe use that in a different way? Anne: And I'll tell you what I, what I love is first of all, your story is so wonderful because you try, you have faith, you manifest, you move. And while you struggle, you know, and fail sometimes, you ultimately come out where you become successful. And it has happened from the story that has evolved here to you multiple times. So each time when you move, you're growing, you're hitting those stumbling blocks. You're growing, you're finding success. And even now you came to LA, you got the agent, you got the jobs, you did really well. Now you hit a little bit of a lull. And so again, you're going through that cycle of how can I improve? How can I grow? What can I do to, to learn? And I think it's such a wonderful testament to how our industry works and how the artistry works of voiceover, where we just must continuously learn. We must continually take those chances. We must continually learn from our failures, right, and put into practice things that we can do to be successful. And what a great story. I absolutely love it. So I want to take the time now to thank you again for telling the story and helping us in being so inspiring. Because I think in our next episodes, I really want to get more into the nitty gritty of the day to day voiceover career that you are now embracing and, and living so that we can talk about how BOSSes out there can, you know, maybe do the same so that they can be successful. Pilar: Absolutely. And I'm very, very excited to keep going. Anne: Yeah. All right. Well, BOSSes, I'm going to give a great, big shout-out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can network like a BOSS. Find out more at ipdtl.com. Guys, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week. Take care. Bye-bye. Pilar: Bye, fellow BOSSes. >> Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. 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