The people responsible for sound tracks in films do not always give this small owl proper voice-over credit.  A serious blooper of this kind occurred in My Cousin Vinny.  Vinny had been sleep deprived ever since his arrival down South, where the noises of the small Alabama town would not let him get a good night’s rest.  Finally a stay in a woodland cabin offered the potential for a peaceful 8 hours, until the piercing voice of a screech owl made Vinny jump awake in wide-eyed consternation.

 Except the voice we hear in the film is not that of a screech owl.  It’s a barn owl!  The owl in the film was induced to open its mouth with bits of beef, and the voice was dubbed in later.  Apparently the sound editors just went to their collection of owl noises, found one that sounded screechy and threw it in.  

You can see the film clip in question here, listen to a screech owl here and a barn owl here.

Kevin Delaney writes that he will be hosting a free, live video chat with Bill Farmer, the voice of Disney’s Goofy, this Sunday 28 August 2010.  It’s at 7 pm Pacific time (10 pm Eastern).

For details and to RSVP, go to voninja.com.

Thanks Kevin!

I’m not terribly social media-savvy and find all the talk about it exhausting.  I do try to keep up on at least the basics, along with the related gadgetry, but I feel like I’m drowning when I ignore Mashable for a couple of days and all of a sudden I have nearly 200 articles piled up in my feed reader.  Is it that I don’t have a staff whose job it is to be experts?  Can I use that as an excuse, please? But even if I’m ignorant, I can still have thoughts about it, and I might as well unload them on the internet, so here goes.

 I like Facebook, and the more I use it the more I like it.  It’s remarkable that it can serve so many different needs, both personal and business.  I’ve had an account for several years but just recently added a couple of business pages – one for my voiceover business and one for the karate school where I’m both a student and an instructor.  There are a few features Facebook lacks that I hope we’ll see in the near future.  One is that there is currently no way to post to other business pages using the name of one’s own business page, unless one opens a different Facebook account using that name.  Another is that when somebody posts something on your business page, there is no notification of that activity.  You just have to keep checking to make sure you’re staying on top of things and fulfilling your obligations which, in my mind, include responding when somebody comments.

 Most of the shortcomings of Facebook and other social media platforms, however, at least for business purposes, are actually those of the users and not the platform. I’ve “liked” the pages of many businesses related to my field, and when I see an update that interests me and I have something of substance to say about it, I leave a comment.  Ideally, the page administrator would respond and there would be a conversation of sorts – an interaction – which can help to start or enhance a business relationship.  Some of the page administrators get that, and it’s pleasant and satisfying.  It can be as simple as “liking” my comment.  Just a little acknowledgement that, yes, you matter to me.  Many other administrators don’t get it, and their pages are a one-way street, potentially kinetic but in fact, essentially static.   Maybe, after all, it’s a question of just not being able to keep up.  There is so much information coming at all of us – everybody is trying to stay up to date, AND get noticed, but they have so many Friends or Fans or whatever and nobody really has time to pay attention to anybody else.

 So, let me know if I’m missing the point.  I promise I’ll respond to you :)  By the way Daniel Koontz has a swell post about blogging and commenting over at Casual Kitchen.  Check it out.

Earlier in the Holocene Epoch, when I made my living as a biologist, I didn’t get many opportunities to give back to the community using my vocational skills.  I can’t remember a single time I was asked to do a free bird dissection or donate a phylogenetic analysis to charity.  As a voice talent it’s a much more common occurrence to get requests for pro bono work.

The last time I was asked, I was happy to agree.  A local alum of my alma mater asked if I could narrate a promotional video for Junior Achievement of Western Massachusetts. I certainly didn’t expect anything in return, except maybe lunch (and when you talk to yourself in a padded cell for a living, getting out to have lunch with a friend is a pretty great incentive). As it turns out, the producer on the JAWM project, who was also working pro bono, kept my contact information and called me for a well-paying job just a couple of months later.  It looks like we will have more opportunities to work together as well. Nice.

I was so taken with Pamela Vanderway’s concept of using a dialect donor when you need a model for a certain dialect that now that’s the term I think of when I hear somebody who speaks with an accent.

If you need a great model for a 2nd generation Italian-American accent from northern New Jersey, you’re not likely to get to work with Buddy Valastro directly.  He’s way too busy turning out beautiful works of cake art.  But please feast your ears and listen to the Cake Boss narrating his “Meeting Buddy” video.  Then feast your eyes at the Carlo’s Bakery website and see some of his extraordinary creations.

Buddy, I love you.  Is it okay to tell you that?

Of course, it isn’t really a fan page anymore because we no longer become Fans – rather, we Like.  I haven’t read anything about why the change from fanning to liking occurred, but I rather Like it.  It puts everybody involved on more or less equal footing rather than suggesting that the page owner is elevated to celebrity status!

My friend Peter O’Connell recently wrote on his blog of his ambivalence about creating a Facebook page for his voiceover business because it seemed egotistical – you’re basically asking people to like you, be your fan, whatever you want to call it.  He ultimately decided to create one despite his misgivings, because it could help people who are interested in his business to connect with him in a way that’s comfortable for them.

Ever since I started to overhaul my marketing plan a few months ago, I knew I would eventually create a Facebook page for my voiceover business.  The only reason I waited this long is that I’ve been pruning my contact database and in the course of doing so, have sought out the Facebook pages of the companies I work with or would like to be working with.  I wanted to get a better sense of what other people do with their pages, which would help me decide what I want my own page to do.  At this point fewer than 20% of my contacts have a business page on Facebook.  I feel that if a business does not have a Facebook page they’re missing out on a great way to connect with their customers.

I love it when the businesses I like have a Facebook page.  It’s wonderful to have a little community with which one is connected even when one is not physically at the place of business.  One of my favorite such Facebook pages is that of Bread Euphoria, a local cafe/restaurant.   Their website does a great job of telling me what’s on their regular menu.  Their Facebook page goes further and tells me what their specials are this weekend, makes note of a fun, free family event at the local library and suggests grabbing a pizza at Bread Euphoria afterwards and proceeding to a nearby park where there’s a free concert.  Perfect!  They often ask questions of their community, and their friends post comments about the delicious breads and pastries they buy from the bakery store.  The page administrator responds, so it’s a nice conversation. 

My voiceover business page is now up at Facebook as well.  As Peter suggests, it’s a bit nerve-wracking, actually taking the plunge.  I’m not going to heckle people to join me there, but I’ll be very happy if they want to.  This is the first place I’ve mentioned it to anyone, but it was fun to go there the morning after creating it expecting to see it “wandering lonely as a cloud” only to find that a few people had found it on their own in the night.  A warm welcome to them!  I wish I had some nice bread or pastries to offer like Bread Euphoria… I’ll work on that!

Yesterday’s post was inspired by a video at Pamela Vanderway’s blog, and this morning I took a bit of time to look at some of Pamela’s other posts.  What a delightful experience!  She’s a dialect consultant and has such an interesting perspective.  If you’re an actor, whether on-camera or in voice-over, I think you’ll enjoy her blog.  I was especially taken with Finding a Dialect Donor.  What a concept!

For other dialect resources, you can search my blog by entering dialect in the ”Search this blog” box at the upper left.

Today I met a friend for lunch at one of my new favorite places.  Because I’ve had an unusually high number of lunch dates recently I’ve been cycling through my three favorite places, so even though I ate at this place last week it was already their turn again.  But whereas last week I was able to order a cheddar panini with apple, this week I tried to order the same thing and was told, “we don’t have prices for extras – you can get one of these other sandwiches though”. 

 I don’t have a lot of patience with this sort of approach in a customer-oriented business.  I can’t imagine what would make somebody deny a customer what they want when it would be so easy to give it to them.  But instead of pursuing it, I just asked for a plain cheddar panini.  This is because I noticed that whereas it was nice and cool and pleasant in the seating area, it was terribly hot and uncomfortable at the counter and it must have been much worse behind the counter, preparing hot food, and what business did I have ordering a hot sandwich on a 100+ degree day?  I didn’t want to make it even hotter by insisting on getting what I wanted.  Save that for a cooler day.  It wasn’t until later, when my family were sitting at dinner telling each other about our day, that I realised that I had accepted a lunch that wasn’t what I wanted out of deference to somebody else’s comfort.  It was kind of a light bulb moment for me, even though the incident was minor, to realise I had let a conflict go out of empathy for somebody else, and that that had pretty much been my first reaction to it.  

 My friend Hélène Janover posted a video on Facebook this evening that brought this back to me again – a video of voice coach Patsy Rodenburg who relates a story about a man she encountered while on a book tour in Australia.  This man’s body language suggested that he didn’t like her – that was her first reaction.  But when he came up to talk to her afterwards she decided just to let him talk.  If you watch this entire wonderful video you’ll see why it was so incredibly important that she let this incident not be about her.  It makes my own little story seem exceptionally trivial, but the point is, no matter how much you might want to be treated or responded to in a certain way, consider the possibility that the other person might very much need you just to be present – connected.  Which is what actors are supposed to do.

 The video comes to you by way of the blog of dialect consultant Pamela Vanderway.

In December 2006, I was contemplating sending out an electronic newsletter as an alternative to keeping in touch with clients and potential clients via individual emails.  The problem I was having was that I had to send 27 emails a day in order to achieve my goal of writing to each contact just 4 times a year.  And of course, my list of contacts was growing every day.  Although there were a lot of reasons why I preferred sending individual emails, this had become quite a time burden and in January 2007 I took the plunge and signed up with a newsletter service. 

Last month I finally canceled the subscription.  Why? Because in the last few years it seems that the number of impersonal emails we all receive has grown so huge that each one is just another decibel in the noise.  The noise is deafening, and  I don’t want to contribute to it any more.

When I first got into the voiceover business, I thought that the more companies I contacted, the more business I would get.  In theory that makes sense, but if one isn’t careful, the list of contacts itself becomes “noisy”. It gets to be full of companies that aren’t a good fit for one reason or another.  One of the many reasons is that it includes people who don’t like to be contacted by voice actors they don’t know.  Considering that the best way to get business is via referral, there are probably lots of people in that category.

Since cancelling the subscription, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do instead.  Business people are supposed to market.  The odd thing is that I have more business now than ever, but still, I need to have a plan, right? So my plan is this, and it’s an evolving one: go through that database yet again. It has grown to over 3700 companies, still with only around 1200 that were on my email newsletter list, but I’m looking at each of those companies and deciding if I really want to do business with them.  I’m trying to make the list much smaller, much more reflective of the kinds of people I like to work with. If they have a business page on Facebook or a Twitter account, I join, or Follow, or Like (so far there are relatively few that have links from their website to Twitter or Facebook, even if they actually do have an account) but I hope more will catch on).  I do like the idea of having a “conversation” with the business and with its fans, friends, & followers.  After this current decluttering and Liking/Following project is done (as in, I’ve gone through my entire database), I’ll have to make further decisions about how to keep in touch – whether by personal emails, postcards or even hand-written notes.  I just want to make the contact more personal than it has been the last few years.

Marketing is an ever-evolving process, as we try different things and assess their effectiveness and how they feel to us.  The business landscape is constantly changing as well, as new trends emerge and people tire of the “old” ways of doing business.  But my concerns over the use of electronic newsletters are the same now as they were when I first started wondering whether to use them – they’re impersonal, and the more such tools are available, the more people seem to want “old-fashioned”, real life relationships.

For those of you working on your Scottish accent, you can’t do better than this.