You want to know where to find voiceover auditions, yes? From whatever small town you are in? In Portland, OR, and other smaller cities, my voice over students don’t have the benefit of a live casting community. My newest voiceover students don’t even know what that means. If you are brand new to the voiceover audition business and you’re wondering how you will fit in to the industry, assuming you have completed your training, read on. This is beginner level stuff only.
Let’s start with the basics. If you’re in a small city where there is no such thing as a casting director or a talent agent, you’re not as hard up as you think. You can still get voiceover auditions right from your own home. Recording your auditions is a separate beast altogether, and I will write about that another time with the help of an engineer or two. Basically though, minimal recording software, an affordable mic, some thick curtains or a small closet will be a modest start to setting up your audition-from-home space. Let’s assume you have that set up for now. Now what? These days there are a few pay-to-play sites that make it very easy for the tinytown voice actor like yourself to find opportunities. Hey, I said tiny town, not tiny voice. You have a big, wonderful, unique voice, like no other, and it should be heard! These sites have a reputation, well multiple reputations, for being…..i don’t even know actually. People just have a lot to complain about don’t they? But don’t criticize the medium, just the method. Some of you need this medium, you don’t really have many alternatives. So check them out. Perhaps the people complaining about them just don’t book any auditions. Eh? The first of these sites is Voices.com and the other is voice123.com. These sites will be invaluable to you if you want to wake up to an inbox of emails listing auditions every morning. You should check them both out and see which personality suits you best. There are subtle differences to each and you will only discover which is best by playing around on them for a bit. For those of you who have decided to dedicate 10 hour days to searching for auditions from your new home studio, go ahead and maximize your chances and register for both. There are some strategies you might want to discover and develop to maximize your opportunities for booking voiceover auditions here, such as knowing when and how fast to submit your auditions before the casting roll becomes so full of takes that there’s no way they’re going to hear your excellent take# 147. The other important thing to remember is that this is a SUBJECTIVE business. I know a top notch voice actor from NYC that didn’t book anything for a whole year. His first job when he did book? A National Network voiceover campaign that ran for two years. Voiceover Gold. Have faith in yourself.
I promised “more” in my title. Uh. Okay, you already know about the pay-to-play sites? Get creative then. Go to your local Craigslist page and search under gigs/creative/tv production/etc. Call all the production companies and studios in your area and ask if they accept demos. Call the big companies in your area and ask who might be responsible for their in-house training videos and other such corporate narration info. Go to Voicebank.net and contact every agency listed to see if they accept demos and are accepting new talent for representation at that time. Well, maybe not EVERY agency. You might want to skip all the NY/LA ones until you build your resume. You may be fabulous already, but these huge cities are full of fabulous voice actors that are there in the flesh. You can’t compete with that. Unless you have one of those Star Trek transporter things. Oh wait, if you have one of those, I hope you’re doing something way more interesting with it than hopping from one audition to the next.