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Y'all, I got covid and it has been absolutely miserable for about a week.
Today is the first day I've felt ok enough to give a little update and I'm hoping in the next couple of days I'll be back in the studio recording my next YouTube video! This video has been a long time in the making and is all about my thoughts on AI in regards to voice acting.
Members can now get a sneak peek of the script below and will get to access the first and final video drafts before they're posted live.
Also - special shoutout to my assistant Andrea for posting my short form content on socials that had already been recorded and for managing everything else while I was hiding in bed, she's seriously the best.
I'll talk to you soon!
-Tawny
Every single day I get a comment like this one.
Some nameless faceless account tells me that my job is going to be obsolete soon because of AI and I should enjoy it while it lasts.
But this one is extra icky because this man took something that is literally a part of me without my consent and not only does he not see a problem with it, you could argue that he’s quite jovial about it.
Now I’ve been a voice actor since I was 6 years old. That’s when I got my first job at a radio station here in San Diego and I worked locally and consistently on and off until I was in my mid twenties when I went full-time in late 2016
That means I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years.
So what I’m trying to say is… I’m not new here.
I’ve been working in this industry for a long time and I’ve seen a lot of massive changes.
Back in the 90s when I was doing this part-time and still in elementary school, you pretty much had to be living in LA, New York, or Atlanta if you wanted any kind of steady career as a voice actor. I was lucky enough to be living in San Diego so there was a steady entertainment scene between theater, on camera commercials, and independent films. I also wasn’t too far away from LA in the event that I booked a job that required me to be in Burbank on weekends. I worked locally but steadily on a part-time basis until I went full-time in the 2010s and part of the reason I was able to go full-time was because technology had recently evolved so that voice actors were able to work from home.
I’ve been working from home since late 2016, literally my entire job is online, including the jobs I’m doing that require Non Disclosure Agreements so when I’m sending those audio files, I need to know they’re going to be safe. One of the ways I’m able to do that is by using a VPN with Surfshark. A Surfshark VPN allows me to keep my location and download history private by encrypting all internet traffic so I can safely send or receive sensitive information, like the voice over in yet to be released animated shows or commercials. I also run my entire business online so Surfshark’s other features that protect my devices against viruses and keep my emails and other sensitive data safe gives me a huge amount of peace of mind. And right now you can get 4 months of SurfShark free by entering coupon code TAWNY
So working from home was amazing. Suddenly I was able to record my auditions from a little remodeled closet in my house and connect with the client remotely for a directed session once I booked the job. I didn’t have to make the 2+ hour drive to LA or be on location to record, I could do everything without needing to leave my home, which as an introvert, felt like I had just won the lottery.
But what that also meant was now there was more competition than ever before. Anyone in the world could build an in-home studio and call themselves a voice actor. And a lot of these people had a ton of money to spend on the best gear and the top coaches with the best classes.
It was also during this time that pay to play sites came onto the scene. If you’re unfamiliar with the phrase, a play to pay site is just what it sounds like - you pay to get access to auditions.
Voice seekers will upload their scripts onto these platforms and thousands upon thousands of hopeful voice actors will pay a monthly subscription fee in order to audition and hopefully land a job.
The issue with a lot of these sites is that you’re not just competing against an enormous amount of other talents, you’re also not getting paid very well when you do get hired.
It was actually a huge controversy for one particular website in 2015 when voice seekers and talents began to put two and two together and realized that the company had been funneling the client’s budgets into their own bank accounts.
This particular site’s ethics aside, there’s this common practice with many pay to play sites where they have various subscription levels and some of the most expensive options have talent paying thousands of dollars a year so they get the auditions first - which means the voice actors paying lower subscription fees are auditioning much later after highly experienced and skilled individuals have already turned in their own submissions days if not weeks earlier.
In other words, unless you’re paying upwards of $4,000 a year for the privilege to audition, you’re probably going to book only a few if any jobs on these sites.
Besides this change in technology, there have also been two major tone shifts that I’ve personally seen in voice acting that have shaken up the industry.
The first one was when we went from something we call an “announcer-y read” to a “conversational read” in about 2009-ish when John Krasinski started doing voice over for ads for Carnival Cruise and Esurance.
That changed everything.
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