Drop the mic!

Being a serious voice-over professional can have two meanings: serious in the sense of being a rigorous professional committed to the needs of clients, or serious as a stern and strict person, someone who doesn’t seek friendships at work. Friends are friends, business is business.

I see myself as a nice and helpful person, and that’s how I usually deal with customers, without being too serious and, at the opposite side, too comfortable treating them as if they have been my best friends forever.

Even more so, over many years recording voice-overs in Portuguese for countless clients around the world, I have noticed that the way of dealing with other people varies from culture to culture: there are countries where people are more strict in the way they deal with strangers, and others countries where people are more outgoing.

I point to the middle. Professional above all, but also polite and friendly. But never over the top.

I wasn’t always like this. I used to think it was great to show myself as a fun person, even in a professional context with people I didn’t know yet. In remote recording sessions, for example, it happened to tell jokes, showing the client and the sound engineer that I was a great fun person! Yeah, a cool guy!  So I thought… Several times, I had deathly silence from the other side of the line after kidding around unimportant matters to the actual voice-over.

“Did they get the joke? Or do they simply want me to do the job they are paying for?”

I came to the conclusion that, unless I know a client and the sound engineer very well, the best thing to do is to simply be cordial and professional: say hello at the beginning of the remote recording session, thank them for choosing me for that Portuguese voice-over, do the job, give my opinion on the audio and script only if they ask me to, and thank them again and say goodbye at the end.

American voice actress Tracy Lindley has already been through something similar, and learned that someone shouldn’t assume anything about the people on the other end of the remote session.

“I was recording with a client in the UK and everything on my side was audio only, but the engineer was on Zoom with the client so it was a video call from his side.

I heard what I swear sounded like dog noises, so I made a little joke about how the client’s dog must want to join our session.

We had a great recording session, and when the engineer ended the Zoom call with the client, he came back on the line to inform me that what I thought was a dog, was actually the client’s baby!

He said he was laughing so hard at my expense that he had to turn off his mic and camera!

Lesson learned: Never assume ANYTHING!”

Tracy Lindley is an excellent voice-over artist – and an extremelly polite one 😊 -, and I recommend checking out her work at https://tracylindley.com/