Wednesday, July 1, 2009

A New Demo and a Valuable Lesson!

I've always been a big 'do it yourself' kind of girl. I like to make things, paint things, fix things, etc. Several years ago I tried to create my own website. It wasn't such a smart idea, which is why I ultimately had a website done professionally. (by Village Green Studios)

In the past 13 years that I've been a voice actor, I have never had a demo professionally produced. I've always done them myself, using real material and adding little bits on my own here and there. They've always served me quite well, but I've always wanted to have a demo created by a pro.

And now, a quick story if you don't mind. When we moved into our new house late last year, I knew I wanted the entire interior repainted. Florida homes are famous for their high ceilings (it helps with the heat) which are extremely difficult to paint. Still, I wanted us to do it ourselves. After putting 12 different samples on the walls in the past several weeks, I finally settled on a beautiful shade of beige. And so we painted, and painted. Proud of our accomplishments, we went off to bed. The next morning we awoke to a house that quite clearly had turned pink overnight. And not a very pretty pink at that.

Thankfully, one of our neighbors is a color expert. He runs a company that matches car paint after body work has been done. As he puts it, he knows color like I know voices. He came over, knew immediately where we had gone wrong, and accompanied us to the paint store to find the color we had intended all along.

The moral of this story? It's always better to go with a pro if you want the job done right.

Which brings me back to my new demo. I recently worked with the great folks at Voice Hunter to create a fresh new TV promo demo. I'm very happy with how it turned out! The process was a blast and there were ultimately so many cuts to choose from, it was difficult to get the demo down to a minute (a good problem to have!).

If you have a minute, please check out my new demo here! You can also hear it on my website at http://www.karaedwardsvo.com/. Then, if you have another minute- please let me know what you think!

Kara Edwards, Voice Actor

7 comments:

Dee Stephens said...

I like the variety!

Voice Pro said...

As I said on Twitter...what's not to like! It's SO YOU and that's exactly what a demo should be. This is the kind of stuff you do all day and there is nothing on there that you can't do at the drop of a producers hat!

Saaahhhweeeeeeeeet

Kara Edwards said...

Dee- thank you!

Brian- I really appreciate your thoughts! I would love to be the new voice of the Disney Channel or Nick- fingers crossed! :)

Kara

Unknown said...

Kara...as soon as I started to play this demo...my kids ears popped up. I told them I knew you and they got this strange smile on thier face. Really nice.

craig said...

I thought it was a very good demo. I like the folks at VH, very easy to work with and very helpful. You sure you don't have a teenage daughter that does the voicing for you? Oh and my grand daughter (5) thought it was really neat!

Kara Edwards said...

Chris- thank you so much for your kind words!

Craig- thank you! It's funny, I've actually had clients apologize to me (after learning my real age) for treating me like I'm a kid during the session. Hey- it may be hard to order anything over the phone (sales people always think I'm under 18) but this voice has served me well :)!

Thanks again!
Kara

Unknown said...

Great demo and site Kara!

You are exactly right on all points. I'm having Village Green do my site as I type this. I can hack a site together myself in iWeb (jonescast.com), but if you want to present yourself as a professional, you need a pro to do your site. Can't wait for my site to be up!

Same for VO. After training for a long time with Nancy Wolfson (brainstracksaudio.com), I just had Nancy and Santisound (http://www.santisound.com) produce my first demo ever. They did a fantastic job. I've been an editor for 10 years, so I could have thrown together a demo - but paying someone good who specializes in demo production is WELL worth it.

All the best,

Trevor Jones
http://www.trevorjonesvo.com
(for now, it points to my blog.. but soon...)