Here’s what it takes to be a voiceover actor in LA, courtesy of working pros

In a lot of ways, voice acting is no different from managing an on-camera career. You need good agents, it’s best to be a SAG-AFTRA union member, you more or less never know where your next job is coming from.

There are unique aspects, however, to working just with one’s vocal chords for cartoons, commercials, videogames and the like that aren’t analogous to appearing on film and TV shows for a living.

We caught up with some professionals in the field at the fifth annual Voice Arts Awards on the Warner Bros. Burbank lot one warm November Sunday, and found out what it takes to keep talking in a business that ever-changing technology both enables and presents new challenges to keep sounding great at.

Adapt!

In a world where technology and trends are constantly changing, adaptability is key, artists say.

“You have to adapt,” noted Scott Parkin, who makes most of his living talking on commercials but, like many voice actors, also teaches the craft, does other showbiz jobs (he wrote episodes of the TV series “Gary Unmarried”) and occasionally appears onscreen. “I still train. I’m a coach, but I also train with other people who are really good at specific things. You have to keep training, it’s a fluid situation. You work on character development with an animation guy, with a promo guy you work on using your voice in a different way.”

These days, however, voice actors have to learn to use more than just their primary tool. What used to be a traditional process of having your agent get you into auditions has been changed, by the internet, into being able to send your demo reel from anywhere in the world to ad agencies, casting directors, producers and the like. That both makes the job hunt easier and the competition more fierce.

“Because of technology and how it’s expanded, you actually have to not just be a voice-over person today; you have to be an audio engineer,” explained Joan Baker, who with her producer husband Rudy Gaskins runs the Society of Voice Arts & Sciences, which puts on the awards ceremony and the 10-hour “That’s Voiceover!” career expo the day before. “You have to learn technology, learn how your voice sounds through which microphone in your particular space . . . There’s a lot of detective work that you have to do, if you want to be successful.”

Tell, don’t sell

For some voiceover actors, however, unlearning is also required. Glendale resident Dave Fennoy used to be a disc jockey in Northern California before he moved south to establish a steady career voicing videogame and animated series characters.

“Voice training from radio, you learn some good things that can help you in voiceover, but you also learn to be this guy,” Fennoy said, breaking into dulcet but deceptive radio guy speech at the end. “That’s not real, it’s not sincere. The people who do voice acting are actors. You have to lose that thing here because people don’t trust it. Those guys were selling us used cars that didn’t run and other products that didn’t work. Nowadays, you want to hear from somebody that you relate to. You want to feel like you’re being told, not sold.”

Fennoy also explained how caring for one’s throat is as important to voice actors as face maintenance is for onscreen performers.

“You have to take care of your voice,” he noted. “So when you are in a crowd and you see somebody sneeze, run! I was actually doing a job, it was a pod racer game, and it was all in Huttese, the language of Jabba the Hutt. It was a five-hour session, I was doing as a regular Huttese guy, then Huttese with a Jamaican accent and then Huttesse guy with a homeboy accent. The whole thing was shouted, and at the end of the session I couldn’t speak. I was supposed to announce a sports award show later that week and had to cancel. That producer has never hired me again!”

Fennoy got into voiceover acting because he didn’t want to spin lame pop songs for teeny boppers for the rest of his life. For Bob Bergen, it was a calling since childhood. Even before his family moved from the Midwest to Tarzana, young Bergen wanted to be Porky Pig. Once out here, he got in touch with the legendary Mel Blanc, who created the voices for all of Warner Bros.’ classic cartoon characters. After Blanc passed, Bergen auditioned to replace him as the stuttering swine’s voice. He’s been doing Porky for 30 years now.

But Bergen, who now lives in Woodland Hills, said the pig ain’t all, folks. He makes a good living with his voice, but Porky accounts for only about 10 percent of it.

“Porky’s high profile, but I do a lot of animated features,” Bergen explained. “I just did a major sequel to a franchise for Disney. I do a lot of things; I’m Luke Skywalker for the ‘Star Wars’ games, I just did a ‘Robot Chicken.’ To be successful as a voiceover actor, you’ve got to have diversity. So commercials, promos, trailers, games, narration. The only thing I don’t do is audio books, because I just don’t like the idea of sitting there and reading a book aloud that I would not read for pleasure.”

While Bergen makes a decent living at the V.O. game, Cathy Kalmenson – co-owner with her husband Harvey of Kalmenson & Kalmenson, a respected voiceover school and casting directing service based in in Burbank for 25 years – noted that voice acting more often requires keeping a day job.

“It’s very rare that voiceover people make a living from voiceover,” Kalmenson, who’s company has a database of more than 30,000, mostly L.A.-based voice actors, said. “Many of them have what I like to call casserole careers. Voiceover is one part of their revenue stream. Many of them are on-camera talent, some of them do other things beside being actors; they’re also in real estate or substitute teachers, or they’re writers or poets or artists in some other way.”

She also noted, however, that new avenues for voice acting – podcasts, GPS systems, gas pump videos and virtual reality productions among them – keep emerging.

“There are new products and services that will need voices… being invented right now,”  Kalmenson observed.

‘Lean into it’

Gwendoline Yeo has both a thriving voiceover and on-camera career, with appearances in “Desperate Housewives,” “Broken Trail” and last year’s “An American Girl Story” just a few highlights of the latter. But even though she’s sometimes cast as Asian characters in cartoons, such as Shinigami whom she voices for the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” show, Yeo enjoys the wider range of roles she can get as a V.O. artist.

“Look, the truth of it is that I am an Asian American woman,” Yeo, who lives in the Studio City hills, pointed out. “So occasionally I get to play creatures on ‘Clone Wars,’ I did the movie ‘Curious George’ and I happened to play three African-American women. So you have that luxury at times.

“But a lot of times I don’t have that luxury. Sometimes I’m cast by the color of my skin. And that’s OK, you lean into it. I mean, if you speak French, you don’t say ‘I don’t speak French.’ If I can speak Mandarin, which I do, or different Asian accents or whatever, I’m happy to do that. On-camera-wise, obviously you play your age and your race. For voice, I feel the field has changed a little bit.”

Home studio changes the biz

When Yeo talks about change, she doesn’t mean entirely for the better. Yeo, like all the voice actors we talked to, perceives a technology-enabled influx of new players into the business. The veterans don’t complain about the increased competition forcing them to up their games, but they are concerned that ad agencies, especially, are hiring more of the unorganized newbies.

“So much of the work has gone non-union,” Bergen lamented. “Not so much animation, because of celebrities. But so much of the day-to-day voiceover work has gone non-union because of technology and the internet. You have access to copy now on your computer, the home studio is your closet.

“We had a commercial strike in 2000 for five or six months, and that coincided with the launch of online, non-union casting,” he further explained. “And it grew, bigtime. But these actors, they don’t get pensions and they don’t get health benefits or residuals – but they also can’t relate because they don’t live in L.A. If you’re used to making minimum wage at your day job and all of a sudden someone’s paying $250, $300 to talk in your closet for an hour, to you, you hit the lottery. To us, yeah, but that might get your family healthcare for a year, that might get you residuals for the rest of your life.”

Talking in L.A.

All the actors agreed, though, that however atomized the industry has become, it still helps a lot to be living, working and talking in L.A.

“Especially with animation,” affirmed Venice-dweller Parkin, who also mentioned that a great perk of doing local fast food chain In-N-Out Burger’s commercials is receiving a silver coin that’ll get you anything at the restaurants. “And we have every big advertising agency that’s in the world here in Los Angeles. And we have the studios to support; it helps.”

“I still think that this is the Mecca of it,” Yeo said. “I still feel like human-to-human interaction is most important – not just in voiceover, but in the world.”