Creative Teams’ Top 8 VO Pet Peeves
Edge Studio
Feb 21 2023
Casting directors and project managers who hire voice actors listen to countless submissions for jobs every day.
Needless to say, when reviewing such a wide scope of potential talent, they tend to notice trends and inevitably develop pet peeves.
Avoiding these pet peeves should increase your chance of being their star.
So we polled many of the top creative teams and asked what pet peeves they had with voice actors, and we compiled their responses into 8 of the most common.
We thought you’d like to see them.
1) The most common pet peeve was voice actors who try to do jobs other than their own. For example, they tell the producer how the script should be read, they tell the scriptwriter that the script has grammatical errors, etc.
2) Many creative teams were bothered by voice actors who did not invoice their services correctly. For example, they took too long to send an invoice, didn’t include necessary payment information such as social security or business ID, the price they charges was different than expected, add-ons were added on without notice, etc
3) Another common pet peeve was voice actors who did not see the ‘big picture’ of the script, and therefore did not read accordingly. For example, if the script is a documentary, the voice actor did not read as if their voice would be synced to visuals and therefore should have read slower.
4) Often producers complained about voice actors not giving it their all, and losing energy and concentration throughout the recording process.
5) Many creative teams also noted having problems with voice actors not following direction or just taking too long to ‘get it’.
6) Producers often noted disliking when they needed to tell voice actors how to do their job. For instance, voice actors should recognize when their mouth is clicky…and they should know how to remedy it. They should know how to emphasize a word correctly. And so on.
7) A large complaint was about voice actors who think they know everything and show off (mentioning big clients, microphone types,…). Your ego has no place in a professional setting.
8) Finally, when voice actors give multiple takes that each sound the same. If you are going for a different take from one to the next, you should be able to clearly hear and define what has changed.
Self-awareness and self-direction are not only valuable skills, they are arguably the most crucial skills you can develop in your career (and your life!).
