Sarah Kennedy

** If you’d like to listen to the audio version of this blog post, please scroll down the page a little!**

The year was 2013. I had been booked for a voiceover session in a studio here in Brisbane through my agent. A commercial campaign for a very well-known brand. I’d been slugging away at VO for quite some time by now. I didn’t have my home studio yet, so all the jobs I had were at other studios in Brisbane and attended by clients and other people. Sometimes that audience was only one other person and the sound engineer, or sometimes it was seven other people and the sound engineer. From a voice talent’s perspective, it’s super important to remain open to feedback and be able to incorporate it into the performance. This scene is typical for a commercial voiceover session.

I’m in the booth, and there are several people in the control room with the sound engineer. There’s a full three seater couch, someone in an armchair and another in a swivel chair closer to the engineer. So six people were observing me while I was working. There’s a glass window between them and me, so we can see each other, which allows for smoother communication.

Say “Ham” in Australian

At this point, if you’re able to do this without feeling awkward, can I please ask you to say the word ‘ham’ out loud. I’m going to assume you’re Australian and that you are familiar with the word ‘ham’ and how it’s pronounced. I should also reassure you that the recording session I’m talking about was most definitely an Australian campaign destined to air only in Australia. Okay, back to the story.

I no longer have the scripts, and I can no longer remember the names of most of the people involved in the session, except for the sound engineer and one of the people sitting on the couch. But I’m not going to use her real name; I’m going to call her Jane. Now I could see Jane, and Jane could see me, and we could all see each other.

Right. So. We were about halfway through the session, and things went well. Until Jane’s ears got snagged on a word I was saying that appeared throughout the scripts. Not a big word or one that was difficult to pronounce. The word only had one syllable, and until this particular moment in my life, I was under the impression that there was only one possible pronunciation of said word here in Australia. The word was ‘ham,’ and Jane felt very strongly that I wasn’t saying it the right way. According to Jane’s ears, I was saying ‘harm’ instead of ‘ham.’

The Commercial Voiceover Session Direction

Now here’s the bit that got me and why I feel justified in turning this into a blog post. It wasn’t a remote, live-directed session, and we were all in the same building. Usually, when the booth and the control room share a glass window, the people offering direction spoke and looked directly TO ME.

Not Jane. Jane had offered very little in the way of feedback or direction the whole way through. This arrangement didn’t stick out because many VO sessions had many people who would attend only to spend the majority of their time sitting on a couch in the control room. They either looked at their phones or typed on their laptops occasionally nodding to what someone else had said. It was pretty standard with an audience of this size that only one or two would interact with the sound engineer or me.

You Can’t Please Everyone

So we were about halfway through the session when Jane suddenly looked up from her phone and asked the sound engineer to playback my previous read. That’s when it started. Whenever I said ‘ham,’ all Jane could hear was ‘harm.’ No one else in the control room was hearing this, just Jane. No matter how hard I tried to change the way I was saying the word ‘ham’ (and let’s be honest – there aren’t many options with a one-syllable word that has one vowel in it), I couldn’t seem to make her 100% happy. She was just not chuffed with my work. I could feel it, and so could everyone else. It was a little awkward, to be honest.

Not the fact that I couldn’t please Jane, that part I’m okay with. Not everyone in the world is going to love my work. I’m sorry, Jane. I wanted to make you happy, and I’m sorry that your ears got snagged on my pronunciation of the word ‘ham’ like a fishing hook on a piece of coral. But please, can we talk about you not looking at me that day for the entire session?

Beyond Awkward Voiceover Session

Even though everything that Jane was saying or offering in terms of feedback had to do with me, she wouldn’t look at me. She would look only at the sound engineer and speak about my performance. She was using ‘she’ and ‘her’ pronouns like I wasn’t right there in front of her. It was WEIRD. I was looking right at her. She was looking right at the sound engineer, who had to relay what she had said about me to make sure I understood. This went on, and throughout the whole ordeal, she didn’t look at me, say my name, or acknowledge my presence even once.

Now I’ve checked my records, and that particular session went for 2.5 hours. Granted, it was an extensive campaign, and there were several scripts. But a good portion of that time was taken up by Jane and her obsession with my pronunciation of the word ham. It was honestly the weirdest professional experience of my career. It was a long time ago, but I still remember how it felt for this person to be locked on to this one thing that was an element of my performance and not speaking to me directly. Everyone else was assuring her that they didn’t think there was anything strange about my pronunciation. Eventually, the session came to an end, and I left.

Hearing the Voiceover Session is Believing

Maybe I do say ‘ham’ weird. I don’t know. I’m open to trying new things. And I tried that day to say ham in a way that would make Jane happy. I really did. I’ve recorded this blog as a piece of audio, so you can hear how I say the word ham and be your own judge on that matter. However, that is not the point. The point is that Jane couldn’t or wouldn’t acknowledge me, even though her notes were all about me.

I remember telling my agent what had happened, and she immediately responded with, “Was her name Jane by any chance?”. It turns out Jane had a bit of reputation that made me feel MUCH better about our no-eye contact, not acknowledging my presence, and no actual interaction. In my agent’s words, Jane was known as someone who was really difficult to please. Now Jane may or may not have been a difficult person, and I may or may not have been saying ‘ham’ weirdly, but what happened that day is still, to this day, the weirdest commercial VO session I’ve ever had.

Shout out to Jane. I hope you’re happy wherever you are and have become more comfortable working with voice artists. We’re totally fine with getting a bit of feedback right to our faces. No ham done 😉

Many voiceover artists don’t want to talk about the moments in their careers when they were less than perfect, but often we learn more from our failures than our successes. The posts that seem to get the most engagement for me on my Instagram aren’t the ones where I’m sharing my work or talking about all the jobs I’ve booked. The ones that people seem to appreciate most are the ones where I challenge long-held beliefs about our industry or the ones where I fell short of voiceover success. Voiceover can be a lonely business, and it’s easy to forget that all the positive stuff we see on everyone’s social media is NOT the whole story. Sometimes, I like to shake things up by sharing the stuff that other voice artists would probably keep to themselves.

This is the story of the first time my voice was replaced. A long time ago, when I had just started dipping my toes into voiceover work, I recorded a 30-second commercial spot at a radio station. As was my custom at the time, I followed up a week later with the sound engineer to ask for a copy of the produced spot (because back in those days, that’s how you created a demo – from jobs you’d recorded that had been produced and gone to air.) The sound engineer very kindly obliged and emailed the spot to me.

My Story to Voiceover Success

For those who don’t know me and my story (and apologies to those who know this already and are sick of me talking about it), I am originally a theatre-trained actor. I studied theatre acting full time for three years at university before beginning my professional theatre career. But voiceovers? I am about 98% self-taught. Most of the workshops & classes I’ve attended have occurred in the last three years. So the transition from theatre actor to voiceover actor was a slow one for me. Back when I started 20 years ago, home studios were not a thing. Voiceover classes were not a thing. So my development as an artist consisted of a lot of listening.

Listening to commercials on the radio and the tv, and then (if I was alone) trying to emulate what I was hearing. Those first few years, I spent a lot of time listening to the demos of other voiceover artists whose work I rated highly. Listening and parroting. Then waiting for my next voiceover job so I could get behind a mic and give what I thought I might’ve learned a go. Of course, there are much better ways to develop voiceover skills these days, but that’s how it was for me.

So I opened the email containing the mp3 copy of the ad I voiced. I played it eagerly, hoping it would be fabulous enough to add to my little collection of produced spots to create a commercial voiceover demo. At that stage, I didn’t have one. But the voice in the spot wasn’t mine. Another female voice had replaced me. #awkward

Voiceover Success

As I listened to the spot, there was no denying my significantly deflated ego. At the same time, I understood why I was replaced. The voice I was listening to was that of a true professional voiceover artist. I could hear a smile that conjured up all the right images for the spot she was voicing. She had the perfect mix of energy to grab and hold her audience and intimacy with the microphone not to scare the audience away. I could see the context of the commercial in my head. Not just because of the sound effects and atmosphere added to the spot by the sound engineer. She had outstanding skills, ones I knew I did not yet possess and would need to achieve that level of voiceover success. And it all sounded so effortless. She was the reason the ad worked. I would have ruined it with my inexperience and bad microphone technique coupled with my incredibly crisp articulation and inability to say anything quietly.

I’d never experienced a side-by-side comparison of my voiceover work with someone else’s. People often say what a humbling experience is when accepting awards and accolades, which always makes me scratch my head. This project was my first genuinely humbling voiceover experience, and I knew my work didn’t measure up.

At that moment, a penny dropped for me, and I knew the technical areas I needed to work on to improve. So, I kept working at it the only way I knew how – on my own!

I listened to voiceovers and repeated what I heard. I listened to radio commercials in the car and TV commercials in the lounge room. I downloaded voiceover demos on my computer. I listened, observed, and practiced with my hand cupping my ear. Each time I booked a voiceover job, I was slightly better than the last.

Learning is Key to Success

Talk about a drawn-out timeline. I do not recommend this method of slow-mo DIY voiceover skill development. There are faster ways to move forward than just listening to more experienced voiceover artists. Classes and training and workshops in voiceover are now so accessible that no one needs to struggle through on their own anymore. If you mean business about booking more voiceover work, you have multiple options to help collapse that timeline.

Sometimes experiences that initially deflate us can be the ones that drive us forward the most. This one gave me a benchmark to strive for and the realization that I had a long way to go in voiceover. I’m glad to have had it, and I’ll never stop learning and striving to be a better voiceover artist than yesterday.