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When he began his
work in the early 1980s, voice talent either had to work in local
markets or live in a major media market like New York, Los Angeles or
Chicago. According to Dave Williams, publisher of the Los Angeles-based
Voice Over Resource Guide, there
may still be as many as 20,000 people working primarily as voice talent
in Southern California alone.
But the industry has
changed radically—as a result of both technology and
financial considerations—allowing more high-profile talent to
work from smaller cities on a national scale. Today, Park
City’s Eric Gordon can work six hours a day from his home,
providing promo spots for as many as 60 radio and television stations
coast to coast, including KSL locally. Sandy resident Ken Sansom can
continue his nearly 20 years voicing the character of Rabbit in Walt
Disney’s Winnie the Pooh films and
television projects from his agent’s Salt Lake City studio.
And Scott Shurian can record narrations and commercials in between the
classes he teaches regularly on the craft and business of voice acting,
helping develop the next generation in learning how to talk for fun and
profit.
On the radio, in
video games and electronic toys, on businesses’ automated
phone menus, on nature documentaries and in animated
entertainment—you’re hearing voices all the time.
Some of them just may belong to your neighbors.
When Dave Williams
began his career in voiceover in the 1970s, the casting model was the
same pavement-pounding paradigm familiar to aspiring actors everywhere.
An advertising agency or production company would send out a casting
call and audition prospective talent; eventually, casting companies got
involved to centralize the process. But the actor’s physical
presence was a necessary part of the equation.
That was before the
Internet and digital-media technology—and as they have done
with so many aspects of modern life, they changed the voice industry
completely. The introduction of ISDN lines in the early 1990s allowed
for the high-quality long-distance transmission of recorded voices; MP3
allowed digital voice files to be transmitted instantaneously. Agents
created studios in their offices so their talent wouldn’t
have to go to cattle calls, and some higher-level talent built their
own home studios. It was only a short step to realizing that the
“home” didn’t have to be in suburban Los
Angeles. It could be literally anywhere in the world.
That was when,
according to Williams, “People started saying, ‘I
don’t have to be in your town to get the job done.’
A couple of the big voice-over guys packed it in and left.
“We’ve
lost some of our great actors here in Los Angeles who used to beat the
streets and have moved back home,” Williams continues.
“And people thought, ‘If they can do it,
I’m gonna give it a try.’”
There was still a
certain skepticism and stigma attached to voice talent not living on
the coasts, until financial considerations helped open more doors.
According to Linda Bearman—a 20-year veteran talent agent who
relocated to Salt Lake City from Los Angeles in 1993 to found Talent
Management Group, and represents Shurian, Gordon and
Sansom—ad agencies began looking more seriously at smaller
markets in 2000. The occasion was a strike by the Screen Actors Guild
(SAG) and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA)
against commercial producers.
“Very large
advertising agencies discovered that instead of hiring union
talent,” recalls Bearman, “there was quality talent
in regional markets who were nonunion. And that’s how we in
the middle of little old Salt Lake City get auditions from big
companies—because now they know there’s good talent
here and in other regional markets.”
That’s not
to suggest that all Salt Lake City talent is nonunion; Ken Sansom in
particular is adamant about only doing work through the unions. But
once the eyes of agencies and producers were opened to the wider range
of options available to them, as Bearman puts it, voice-over
“instantly became a global industry.”
And some of the
talent began heading to Utah’s hills.
If you’ve
listened to KSL radio and heard a commanding baritone announce,
“News, traffic and weather,” you’ve heard
Eric Gordon. Hundreds of thousands of people from Bakersfield to
Boston—and viewers of CNN International around the
world—have heard him, too.
Gordon has become one
of America’s A-list station “imaging”
voices—the man who lets you know about upcoming programs and
breaking news. That’s pretty heady stuff for a Toronto native
who started out as a disc jockey in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.
Eager to break into
the world of voice-overs while working at a radio station in Boston,
Gordon put together a demo reel—a CD of promos—to
send to the big networks, including CNN. “I figured, why not
start at the top,” Gordon says. “In retrospect, I
was highly delusional.”
But CNN called about
an opening with its Headline News network in 1991, because, as Gordon
recalls, “the demo literally hit someone’s desk the
day someone else got fired.” Two years later, with the advent
of ISDN, the opportunity came to do promos for radio and television
stations elsewhere—and to consider relocating.
Park City appealed to
him from previous ski vacations, and he thought he had enough
affiliates in his stable to afford it. “I went to the bank,
and we only qualified for a small condo,” Gordon says.
“I thought, ‘Maybe I should have gone to Dubuque
instead.’ Then after we’d been here only six
months, CNN called again, and said, ‘We have International
open.’”
Ten years later,
Gordon’s typical day in Park City finds him working from his
home studio, doing promos and
“pops”—self-congratulatory, “we
broke this story” spots for news radio and television
stations—as needed by his cadre of employers. He tends to
keep his occupation a bit on the down-low, since respect
doesn’t always follow his line of work. At one Park City
party, he recalls telling other guests what he did for a living:
“They said, ‘Really? Is that kind of like being a
hand model?’ People think, ‘If it wasn’t
for his voice, would he be a plumber?’
“It’s
very repetitive and very redundant,” Gordon says of his work,
“not for everybody. … On days when it becomes like
Groundhog Day, you have to go,
‘Well, look what this profession has allowed me to
do.’”
For Ken Sansom, his
profession has allowed him to become an icon for children around the
world—even if they’d never recognize his face. The
Utah native spent 25 years as an actor in Los
Angeles—including credits ranging from The Brady
Bunch to Days of Our Lives—but
for the last 18 years has worked almost exclusively in voice
characterization. “When I reached about 60 [years old], there
were not that many roles to get that were on camera,” Sansom
noted by phone from his Sandy home. “The last year or two I
was [in Los Angeles], there was little call for my age.”
Fortunately, Disney
had already come calling about the voice of Rabbit in 1988, and Sansom
offered the persnickety take on the character that has become its
trademark. Still, only five years later, Sansom was ready to move back
to Utah for a business opportunity that never panned out. Disney was
willing to fly him back and forth to record Rabbit material, but within
a few years the ISDN technology allowed him to record his lines in
Bearman’s studio.
Sansom works at least
once a week, recording Rabbit and auditioning for commercials when
Bearman gets an audition invitation that seems appropriate.
He’d probably work more, except that he won’t do
commercial work that conflicts with his LDS faith, and—unlike
many Utah voice actors—he will work only union jobs. He seems
content with a semiretirement that’s still fairly lucrative:
“The guy who makes $10 an hour can’t understand
anybody making $250 for two minutes.”
When Sansom first
moved back to Utah in 1993, he briefly taught his own voice-over
classes. Scott Shurian continues to do so—and he has plenty
to teach.
His own career began
in radio announcing with Armed Forces Radio and a broadcasting
correspondence course from the University of Maryland. Shurian
eventually found his way to radio news and remained in that field for
20 years in California with the ABC News Radio Network and Golden West
Broadcasting. After retiring to Montana, he began doing freelance
voice-over work before moving back to Southern California in the early
1980s. Some of his one-time radio colleagues had already migrated into
the voice-over field, and Shurian was ready to follow their lead.
What he discovered
was that his decades of radio training wasn’t enough.
“The agents would say, ‘You have a great voice, but
you sound too much like a newsman,’” Shurian
recalls. “And that made sense to me, because that’s
all I had been doing for years.”
Shurian’s
revelation led him to Los Angeles-area voice-over workshops to
“create this new vocal persona.” And while he
admits to some Eric Gordon-esque good fortune with landing his first
jobs just when someone else was departing, he began doing corporate
narrations for aerospace companies like Lockheed, TRW and Hughes. Even
as he expanded his résumé to include film and
commercial work, he became well respected enough for his work in the
narrating specialty that he was invited to some of the workshops as a
guest speaker.
When he moved to Salt
Lake City in 1997 to be closer to family, he discovered a wide-open
market for teaching voice acting, even as he continued doing his own
voice work. Applying his experiences in other voice workshops and in
his work, Shurian began first with all-day workshops, then eventually
10-hour sessions broken into five two-hour evening classes.
Shurian hosts these
classes in his own home, where students are greeted at the front door
by his black Lab and class “mascot” Shadow.
Anywhere from five to eight people scrunch together on couches,
alternately listening to Shurian’s lessons on working in the
field of voice-over and practicing at a microphone with actual
advertising and narration copy.
“You’ll
find that the first time a person stands in front of a
microphone,” Shurian says, “they think
they’re supposed to sound a certain way. …
We’re not interested in what your voice sounds like, because
to me there’s no such thing as a bad voice. It’s
what you do with what you’ve got.”
Shurian excels at
helping his students work with what they’ve got. He plays a
variety of “demo” CDs from other voice actors,
identifying the difference between radio personalities who think they
can do commercials because they have a “radio
voice” and those who show a variety of textures in their
work. He guides students through understanding the difference between
just reading the words off the page and actually speaking them. He
directs them always to know of any piece of copy they’re
reading, “Who am I, who am I talking to and what am I talking
about?” He plays the role of both professor and encouraging
colleague, mixing in a hearty, “There you go,” when
a student nails the right breathing pattern or intonation.
Some of the
participants may never intend to pursue a career as voice actors. Lori
Farrell, a clinical social worker, is one of many individuals who come
to Shurian’s class simply looking to improve the way they
present themselves in their speaking. But near the end of the fourth
session, working a commercial dialogue in which she plays a girlfriend
agreeing to change banks for her sweetheart, Farrell takes
Shurian’s direction and reads a line with a smile
that’s absolutely audible. That’s when a reader
becomes a voice actor.
Others, however, are
serious about trying to break into voice work. Trace Eddington, the
public address announcer for BYU men’s basketball games,
already has a few commercials for the university’s athletic
department under his belt; Kyle Fatheringham reports back to the group
on an audition he has just landed in Provo for a “robot
voice.”
There are success
stories from Shurian’s classes like Sandy Tiemann, who runs a
Sugar House flag store with her husband and took her first class from
Shurian four or five years ago. A self-professed “late
bloomer” as an aspiring actor, she attends acting classes of
all kinds regularly and is also represented by Linda Bearman. Thus far,
however, her only paying work has come from making use of her
unconventional, high-pitched squeak of a voice in local commercials for
clients including Subway and the Utah Arts Festival—a total
of “maybe $600 all of last year,” according to
Tiemann.
Yet that’s
still better than a lot of people will do in an industry that everyone
describes as fiercely competitive, even as the market expands to
include more electronic games, automated call menus and books on tape.
As in any performing art, there are far more rejections than jobs. But
Bearman says it may even be a harder field than most, as national
Websites like Voices123 pit voice performers around the world against
one another for the same spot, while simultaneously driving down
payment rates. “You might decide, ‘I’m
going to be a voice-over talent and get a home studio put together, and
I’m going to start working,’” Bearman
says. “Well, good luck. Because
you’re no longer competing with just, say, 600 people in Salt
Lake City.”
It is also in some
ways an even more pitiless business than other kinds of performing,
because of its depersonalized nature. Eric Gordon says he takes
meticulous care of himself not to get sick because “since
we’re not in the building [of an employer], we get treated
like a machine. And if for any reason that machine breaks,
there’s not a lot of humanity involved.”
Still, there will be
many who will plunk down the cash for studio time, production fees and
art to create “demo” CDs that can be sent to
prospective employers or placed on Websites. They’ll be vying
for work with the likes of Gordon, who continues to work with a
$175-an-hour voice coach in an effort to keep ahead of the industry
curve. “If you choose to live outside of New York or Los
Angeles,” he says, “you have to make a concerted
effort to study the craft, be able to modify your sound. If
you’re just cut and dried, you won’t make
it.”
Sandy
Tiemann’s real goal in voice work is to break into animated
characterizations—one of the sides of the industry where,
most professionals agree, you probably would need to relocate to Los
Angeles unless you’re already an established name like Ken
Sansom. Shurian doesn’t focus on character animation voice
work in his class—he’ll only teach what he knows,
and that’s not an area in which he has worked—and
Tiemann says some day, when her children are older, she might just make
that pilgrimage to Hollywood and see what develops.
Plenty of other voice
talents won’t make that trip, because they won’t
ever need to. They may never make much more at it than Scott Shurian
makes from his measured-in-pennies residual checks, but
they’ll stay right where they are to work in a field that
Linda Bearman describes as almost a purer form of acting.
“The beauty of voice-over,” she says, “is
that it’s a craft. It doesn’t matter what you look
like. It doesn’t matter what size you are. It’s
nondiscriminatory. It’s ageless.”
And it’s
not just for New York City and Los Angeles any more.
by Scott
Renshaw
 Salt
Lake Tribune
Giving a Voice to Tricks of The Trade
"Scott Shurian's name
might not be familiar to you, but there's a chance his voice is. With a
career that spans over four decades, the Holladay-area voice actor has
2,500 commercials and over 5,000 professional narrations to his credit
since his early days." Read More...
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