Reply To: Character
My experience has been so-far that they definitely believe most people have the potential to be great voice over artists, not because they are trying to fatten up their ego to sell more stuff to them, but rather most people (not all) with reasonable direction can become good at VO in some capacity. I feel confident that if they thought a person had no potential, they wouldn’t string them along. That being said the bar is pretty low in that most people with a range of normative speech and moderate amount of directability CAN become succesful VOs. It takes work ofc, and I trust their qualifications for teaching the skills needed to improve, but to answer your sentiment, yeah from what I can tell, there is a short checklist they mark about three things you’re good at (tone, taking direction, cadence, etc) and also mark three things that you can improve upon that also happen to be skills they teach (elimintating glotal stops, fluidity, confidence, etc). In short, I think they use the rubric they do in the evaluation so it’s less subjective; not because they want to sell you something (though I’m sure it’s a more than welcome coincidence for them). I know at one point they claimed to only greenlight 50% (I think) of the people who participated in the evaluations. From the interactions I’ve had with the staff, they do seem to passionately care for the students well being as well as respect the art itself.
I signed up for doing two demos with them and the person I spoke to for managing my courses, when I told her I would like to do an animation demo, she (very politely) made sure I understood that it is a highly competitive genre. It was pretty clear she wanted me to set realistic expectations rather than trying to sell and build up salesman promises and I really respected that (and I’m keen wasn’t reverse psychology, haha). Course I kind of knew that from the start so it wasn’t news to me, but still.
The person who did my evauation, Art Bruder, gave me solid pro-con critisism. I feel they were accurate and I don’t feel like he was trying to fill a form quota, but every candidate might be a little different. Who’s to say?
tldr; Imho, I trust their intentions as honest. If they gave you the ‘green light’ it’s probably because they genuinely believe what they told you.
