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When you book a live directed session, what should you do? What should you NOT do? In this video, Anne gives some great tips for having a great experience for you and the client.
Important tips to remember during a live directed session.
So today I want to talk to you about best practices for live directed sessions.
I love live-directed sessions, mostly because it's considered a luxury to be directed. And it's wonderful to get feedback immediately instead of being in your studio and doing a self-directed session where I'm constantly guessing if this is the way that my client wants me to do the read. When you're in the studio and being live-directed, you should keep a couple of things in mind.
Number one first and foremost is that this is your client who is paying you, any comments that you might have about the copy quality, or maybe the direction that you think the copy should go are best kept to yourself. Do that job and smile and be polite and professional so that you can give the client exactly what they're paying for.
If the client does ask you for your opinion or maybe asked you for a second read, then you can feel free to have, some creative license with maybe the direction of the copy or even suggest different copy that might work better, but be very, very careful about that.
The next thing makes sure that your technology is working. This is so important during one of my live-directed sessions, I had multiple pieces of copy and the client wanted to have different files. So I had to keep remembering that I was pressing record on every one of those files. Well, one of them, I didn't, after we got through the whole read, of course, it was a perfect read. The client was like, that's fantastic. Thank you so much. I realized that I did not press the record button and I had to be completely honest and say, you know what? I am so sorry. I apologize. For whatever reason, I did not hit the record button. And thankfully they were great sports about it. So we were able to read the copy again, I, you know, was pretty much mortified, but again, you have to be honest with your client, you know, make the best of a situation if things go wrong.
So that wasn't necessarily a technical glitch. That was a glitch on my end. However, if you have a technical glitch, make sure that you have a backup handy, lots of things can go wrong during a live directed session. Maybe you didn't record or that could be because maybe you didn't hit the record button or maybe there's some sort of a failure in your hardware.
If that happens, hopefully, you have a backup right in place that you can exchange quickly, whether it be an audio interface, a microphone, your computer, whatever happens. Also, you might have an internet glitch. So make sure you have a backup internet connection as well so that you can recover quickly so that you're not wasting time.
The other thing I want you to remember is to be polite and considerate to everyone on the call. You might have an engineer. If they're going to be recording you, or you might need the engineer, you might have a client, you might have multiple people from the client's office or company there. So make sure that you're polite to everyone. So that they'll want to ask you back to do your next read or to do another job. So these are just a few of my best practices.
I'll see you next week.
Thanks for reading!
Keep on rocking your business like a #VOBOSS
About Anne:
Anne Ganguzza is a professional voice actor and award-winning director and producer who works with students to develop their voiceover and business skills - including voice over Coaching and Genre-based Demo Production. She specializes in conversational Commercial & Narration styles, including Corporate, eLearning, Technology, and On-Hold Messaging. Located in Orange County, California, Anne offers private coaching and mentoring services to students via ipDTL and Zoom.