Over on fellow v.o. Jeff Kafer’s blog, he poses an interesting idea, which is to do a post-mortem on v.o. projects. He brings this ideas from his time spent working in the video game business, and it’s a really good idea there. Think about it…you’ve got dozens or maybe even hundreds of people working on a project for 12-36 months. Doing a post-mortem on the project to analyze what went wrong and what went right is a good idea.

Jeff goes on to give an example of a post-mortem of a recent v.o. project he did (and seems to be very honest with himself in it, which is an important thing to remember!) but the thing that struck me the most was how I wouldn’t really be able to do with with any kind of effectiveness on most of the projects I’ve done.

My v.o. work is primarily commercial and sometimes I’m literally in the booth for the session for a total of 10-15 minutes. I should also point out that the vast majority of my sessions have been at client locations, whether their offices or a recording studio. Very few of the projects I’ve voiced have been done from my own booth here at my office. I bring this up because generally speaking, when a client is paying for booth time at a studio, they have very little incentive to keep the session going long for obvious reasons.

I’m not saying that I never make mistakes…I do, like anybody else. I try to minimize them as much as possible, but even the best v.o. in the world can’t get around the simple fact that the director has something in his / her head, and there’s no way to guess what that is, especially if you haven’t worked together before.

But what was the most eye-opening thing about Jeff’s article is that there are so many other types of v.o. projects out there that I haven’t pursued. Audio books (books on CD), long-form narration, etc. These projects are large-scale and often require many hours in the booth. I’ve done only a few of these types of things…I could probably count them on one hand.

The last one I did, for which I’m still under NDA, was for a web-based project with a fair amount of interactivity. It was a few dozen pages worth of script and I was fortunate in that the client’s only pickup requests were for places where they’d gone back and modified the script a bit.

For me, though, the thing that Jeff’s article has inspired me to do the most is to pursue some of these other types of v.o. projects, not only to increase the amount of work I’m doing, but because they sound like they’d be both fun and challenging. And then, of course, I can take Jeff’s advice and do a post-mortem after each one.

Jeffrey Kafer’s Blog