It’s awards season here in the voiceover industry and, for the first time, I’m delighted to have received nominations for two awards from our industry’s biggest voiceover conference, the One Voice Awards.
I’ve been nominated in two categories; Best Performance in Radio Commercials (for a commercial for Welsh Beef created and directed by Tim Orr from Sticky Ideas & Advertising, we also created a Welsh version) and also Best Performance for TV/Web Commercials (for this wonderfully dramatic commercial for Ribble Cycles https://youtu.be/E8H_3ik9F-0?si=iE8W-jzwpIKp7sNV ).
The nominations came as a really nice surprise to me, it certainly wasn’t expected and it was a VO friend that alerted me to the nominations.
Just to be nominated is such a wonderful confidence booster. So much of what we do as VO’s just disappears into the ether without any real contact with the end client. The nominations are a sign that I’m doing something right; that other professionals in the business can appreciate my work.
As I’ve written before, when I started my voice over journey I had a real crisis of confidence around my natural accent, and I spent a long time trying to soften and hide it. You can imagine how good it feels that both of the nominated performances were entirely voiced in my natural accent. There are times when it seems that, no matter how many people tell you that it’s the case, it’s difficult to let go of hang ups that we carry into things. It’s also a great comfort that when coaches etc. are telling us to learn to be ourselves, they really are showing us the best way forward.
As a Welsh voice over, it’s easy to come to the belief that our market only relates to Wales and Welsh products and services. This is clearly not the case – at least not any more.
I do a lot of Welsh language work these days, particularly Welsh language versions of e-learning and training videos. It’s a shame that these are often ‘after the fact’ versions, where I’m to replace the existing English language version, being read by another voice actor. Ideally the Welsh VO would be done first (as it usually takes a little more time to say things in Welsh than in English) and then the video or presentation could be cut to fit the English version far easier than adding time to the English version to fit the Welsh. If you’re about to embark on creating a bilingual video or presentation then feel free to drop me a line for advice, I’m always happy to help.
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