Finding a great coach to help you with your voice acting is critical. It’s equally important to take time in between coaching sessions to practice. A great VO coach will make sure you have plenty of homework to keep you busy. Homework is also useful in sessions as a tool for review and growth.
Today I'm gonna talk about why it's so important for your voiceover coach to give you homework in between your sessions.
As a voiceover coach, I make sure to assign my students homework. I think it's super important that they get to practice the principles and the techniques that we've gone through during the session. I think it really helps them to understand and embrace the self-direction mode, because we all have to do self-direction at some point.
It's a luxury actually these days to be directed and I actually love it when I am directed. If you think about your coaching sessions as directed sessions, that's awesome. But in between those sessions, you get that practice to be able to read scripts self-directed, develop your ear, you know to stop if it's not sounding the way that you intended it to sound, per the direction, and then go back and make a correction. I feel it really helps you to advance in a much quicker way during your journey as a voiceover artist because otherwise, you're just going to be meeting with your coach every session you'll progress one session at a time.
It's only one hour at a time and that could be versus an hour of a session and then maybe you practice every day an hour a day, and so that just gives you an additional seven hours of practice. We know that Malcolm Gladwell said we need about 10 thousand hours to really hone in and develop that skill.
Homework will reinforce what's been taught in a coaching session because it makes you go back and think about what we cover during the session. All of my students have an opportunity to record the session, so it's kind of nice I can go back and listen to the points that we covered, go back and review it so we can reinforce it even more in their minds
A lot of times when I'm going over homework with my students that'll be the time when they will get that lightbulb moment. Because let's say I'm going to be listening to a script that they recorded and I'll stop, "Ok so we want to do this in this particular area of the script, it will tell the story better". We can go back and then practice that live. We can go back and listen to the rest of the homework and then go back and keep listening and collecting and then practicing it live.
So it really helps you cement in those foundational techniques that you're learning from session to session.
If your coach isn't giving you homework, ask for it! If they don't have homework to give you, you can certainly go and search for it. There are a lot of places that you can find examples of different genres of voiceover. You can go to YouTube you can go to iSpot channels and you can just listen to those and transcribe them and practice them on your own.
Much love and Keep on rockin' your biz!
XOXO,
Anne
About the Author: Anne Ganguzza is a full-time voice talent and award-winning director and producer who works with students to develop their voice over and business skills - including VO demo training and production. She specializes in Conversational Commercial and Narration styles, including Corporate, E-Learning, Technology, Healthcare - Medical, Telephony, and On-Hold. Located in Orange County, CA, Anne offers private coaching and mentoring services to students in person and via Skype, ipDTL or Zoom.