New Look for Lance Blair Atlanta Voice Over Talent Website (lanceblair.net)

Necessity is the Mother of Invention (and cliches), and a fit of needing to spruce things up online has brought me to redesign my Atlanta Voiceovers webpage at lanceblair.net . You'll find the same text content but more color and hopefully a touch more of my personality at least in so far as I incorporated my fave color: orange. The old design, while very corporate looking (and I book a lot of corporate work) was too corporate. Clean, but a touch boring...perhaps I should say "sterile".

To many of the male VO sites are black, blue, and red...and I've been stuck in that branding rut for a while as well. The new Lance Blair VOs are going to more fun and 3-D, not flat and announcery. There are enough guys out there with voices that are 99% the same in the "Black Blue and Red" voice over world. Good luck to them.

As of now, the old "boring" narration and commercial demos are not out for display. They will be back very shortly with dynamic, lively, and engaging material. Most of the clips are edited and ready to go, just a few more tweaks are required. This is 2009, so I'll be bringing the 2009!

Recording Levels for Voice Over: 0 db = -18 dbFS

I read about more and more people trying to record at levels as close to 0 dbFS as possible. They are wrong.

O db on a analog preamp is (or should be) calibrated to -18dbFS in your digital domain. On professional video cameras, tone is calibrated to -20 dbFS.

Recording with consistent peaks from -24dbFS to -18dbFS is absolutely fine, and consistent peaks above -15 or -12 are just pushing the converter harder than you need to.

What needs to be addressed is the noise in a signal path, not the levels.

Once the noise is fixed, record at -18dbFS and then you can bring them up to -3dbFS or what have you in post...but that bringing up of the levels ought to be the client's/post production job. NOT the talents.

Talents shouldn't be serving up files at -3dbFS. They should be serving up clean files at -18dbFS to -9dbFS...but everybody has fallen into the trap of the loudness wars where everything needs to be near 0. If you give clients files that are already at -3dbFS there's already less they can do with compression and limiting.

Don't record it hot, but fix your noise floor so that it can be made hot in post!

Real Men of Genius: Mr. Incomprehensible Voice Over Script Writer Guy

I was reading some venting and general gnashing of teeth and fretting over difficult tongue-twisting copy written by those who don't necessarily take into consideration how a sentence will sound once spoken aloud. Kinda like the sentence you just read, actually.

Inspired by such drama, I re-recorded today a piece I wrote last year but has stuck with me (and becomes more certifiably pertinent to my experience each day). It is my salute to you, "Mr. Incomprehensible Voice Over Script Writer Guy". The backing track is performed by the wonderful and talented Mr. Victor Harris.
RMOG2009.mp3

Lance Blair Voice over for "Low End of the Dial" trailer

Hope everyone is enjoying 2009 so far...

My filmaking colleagues in Boston Brian Corbett and John Coyne have after a decade finished their in depth documentary looking at the state of College Radio. It's a great piece of work and I'm proud to have been able to pitch in with my voice over for the film's teaser/trailer.

See the trailer at the film's official website here.

The Latest From the Voice Over Front

So what's new on the Voice Over Front?

I did a spot last week with the wonderful and talented Mary McKitrick which we recorded together via phone patch. I'm in Georgia, she's in Massachusetts, and the spot was for Virginia. What a country! Check out the spot here...Watch it!

I'm working on a large e-learning project for The American Cancer Society on Smoking Cessation. They continue to be a wonderful organization for which to work, and this new initiative for workplace support groups for quitting smoking hopefully will help many people finally break the habit. (I've been there, I know...).

Thanks to the many voiceover colleagues that gave me a heads-up about the new internet voiceover site Bodalgo.com. It's based in Germany, but they have a steady demand for American and English voice overs for global corporate and industrial presentations. I have many international and US global market-driven clients who have used my voice for American, English, and Trans-Atlantic voice overs so I look forward to earning new clients with this great new website with its excellent service.

My TLM 103 and Speck 5.0 and ART MPA Gold are still making me a very happy voice over talent.

A big thank you to Bob Souer for making a connection for me that is looking to turn out quite fruitful, but I'll write more about that when everything is finalized.

Senator John McCain Impersonation Voice-Over by Lance Blair

Impersonating Senator John McCain isn't as easy as it sounds, especially for voice-over. His voice whistles unmistakably and consistently, but how much is too much? His voice has many regional influences, and yet he has a very folksy cadence of his own. I've done many impersonations of John McCain for humorous effect, emphasizing an impulsive and frustrated character, but I wanted to try John McCain as he often speaks: slowly, softly, and confidently. That was an even greater challenge. Attached is a sample of my more serious McCain impersonation using his acceptance speech from the Republican Convention in St. Paul.

Lance_Blair_as_John_McCain.mp3

Enjoying Narration for E-Learning Voiceover

I always wanted to be a teacher, largely because I was fortunate to have great teachers in the public and private schools that I attended as a kid: I knew from experience these teachers had a vital impact. Working with brilliant tutors at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland where I earned my Master's with Honours (2-1) in English Language and Literature reinforced my love of learning and of teaching. A few years before launching my career as a voiceover talent I interviewed at Simmons College in Boston and was considering following a career in teaching.

So I'm not a licensed teacher...but when I record e-learning voiceovers, that is my character. I assume the role of teacher, mentor, colleague, and friend. Sometimes I imagine that I am talking to a lecture hall, although it may seem against the rule of "speaking to one person" in voiceover. Mostly, I am speaking to a colleague who wishes to know more. I imagine my chair pulled up next to theirs, with me leaning over pointing to their laptop screens and papers...drawing out examples on my own notepad as I explain a point in further detail. For e-learning voice overs, the narrator is far more than an announcer. He or she is a mentor and a colleague: a teacher.

When I first recorded e-learning voiceovers years back part of me thought "Ugh. 10,000 words of technobabble." That impression was wrong. As an effective e-learning voice over talent, one ought to learn the content. You can't just become familiar with it, and you can't just read it cold using your bag of voiceover tricks; that would result in a painful e-learning voiceover. I've heard many strong narrators in e-learning voiceover sound perfectly bored and lifeless even though their voice is clear and strong. In e-learning voiceovers, You have to think like a teacher: "This is what I've learned, and this what I'm sharing with you."

For e-learning voice-overs, I'm given the responsibility to connect with the listener through content that really matters: content that trains future engineers or reinforces the knowledge and skills of engineers and other professionals, and content that improves the exchange of ideas and knowledge. When so much in the media is merely distraction and diversion, e-learning voice overs are a welcome opportunity to be a part of contemporary teaching.