2009 August |

Voice-Overload Comics by Jeffrey Kafer

As some of my regular readers might know I am a big fan of a few webcomics… like questionable content and sinfest. So it was a nice surprise when I got a Twitter message from Legendary Voice Over Blogger Bob Souer with a link to a Voice Over related webcomic.

The webcomic is put together by Voice Over Talent Jeffrey Kafer using the stripgenerator.com software and is posting them on his voice over blog.

These comic strips are reduced in size. To take a closer look at the comic strip right click on the panel with your mouse and chose view image.

Good job Jeff… keep up the good work

All these strips are copyright Jeffrey Kafer.

Trip To Jordan Pictures – As Promised

Sabah il Khier,

As you might have gleaned I’m the kind of guy that keeps his promise. Beginning of this month I had promised you folks to post a few pictures of my trip to the Coastal City of Aqaba in Jordan as well as a few other pictures taken during my trip to Jordan.

I will try to run a narrative so you can follow the sequence of events for each image. Please note that the images have been reduced in size so if you would like to view them at a larger size just right click on the image and chose view image:

1. After a bus ride that took 6 hours for a 4 hours trip we finally reached our destination in the coastal city of Aqaba on the Gulf of Aqaba which is connected to the Red Sea. Below is the view from our hotel window. We stayed at a hotel called The Day’s Inn Hotel (can an inn be a hotel?) Surprisingly this hotel probably had the best customer service I have EVER received in my life. And because of that I highly recommend you stay there if you decide to go to Aqaba.

2. We went on this trip with a tour group from Amman (the capital city of Jordan where we usually stay on trips to jordan) the tour group allowed us to check into our hotel and get some lunch then quickly rounded us all up so we can go to a Desert camp a few hours outside of Aqaba called Wadi Rum. Wadi in Arabic means Valley. As you can see from the picture we got there at around sunset. The people up on that dune are the local Bedouins just hanging out.

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Bits & Pieces Part Quatre – Video edition

Morning Folks,

Welcome to my forth installment of Bits and Pieces where I go around the web and bring you information relevant to the voice over industry or just stuff I find kinda cool.

This time I will be posting interesting video posts that I found entertaining or beneficial… Enjoy:

1. The Vendor / Client Relationship (off of Bob Souer’s blog)

2. Setting up an e-commerce website in 5 minutes (off of instinct.co.nz’s website)
This video is relevant to the last series of articles I wrote about setting up a more secure (technically and financially) way of delivering your final audio work

3. Here are a couple of videos from Voice Overist Philip Banks… I grew up in british school (which is to say I attended a british curriculum school) until the age of 15 so its always nice to meet a Briton who can make me laugh (other than Douglas Adams)

4. Interview with Canadian voice over Artist David Kaye

Voice Over Artist, David Kaye – The best video clips are right here

5. Beau Weaver Voice Over Studio Tour

Thats it for now… if you like any of this… drop me a comment, send money or adopt me (if you’re rich and can afford it). You’ll have to duke it out with my parents (who thankfully are very much alive alhamdullilah) and we can sell the tickets and all be rich (or richer in my adoptive parents case).

HA!

taji

Adding A Shopping Cart To Your Site

Hello All!

This article is part 3 in a series. The series so far contains the following articles:

This was not done on purpose as I am just fumbling at this point trying to find a solution to several issues at the same time… and all related to improving my voice over business:

Provide my clients with a professional looking audio file delivery system
It must Look good, function well and be secure
It must (when applicable) allow me to add an audio file as a downloadable digital item which the client will need to pay for before receiving the download link.
It must integrate with Paypal or any other payment system without glitches.
It must if possible be for free

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Half Now, Half On Delivery – a Paypal Solution

image courtesy of getty images

This is just a thought here… but since I’ve been elbow deep in server muck looking for a way to deliver the files to my client in a professional way I got a little epiphany.

Since some of us find it somewhat cumbersome figuring out if a first time client will pay or not we end up with moments of panic and possible seconds long hysteria.

Here is the scenario: You are doing a job for a client… this is the first time you do any work for them and you don’t know if they are trustworthy or not. You’ve heard horror stories of people getting contracted to do work … they deliver the work (quite naively) without watermarks to ensure client payment of the job.

The client downloads the file… and that’s the last they ever hear of them. This can drive a person nuts… the idea of getting swindled or digitally mugged is enraging just to think about let alone to experience.

So what do you do?

Some of us watermark… others request half now … half after delivery… but again … how do you guarentee that you will get paid the second half after delivery? more »

Looking More Professional – The Download Area

It was something my boss mentioned that triggered this whole hair pulling experience.

He wanted to know if we could utilize a professional looking section in our website that looked like yousendit.com which provided our affiliates and clients with a section in our website for them to download their files from. Being a little more tech savvy than the average individual I went and researched the issue and came up with two solutions.

You get a membership with a website like yousendit.com and maybe spend an average of $3,000 per year because we’ll need multiple users on the system
Purchase a php script for around $200 and install it on our servers and have our clients download the files from us directly instead of paying yousendit.com to host our files.

I was definitely pro the second option since that meant that I would save our company money and we don’t often have to use this website based application so it wont be too big a burden on our measly middle eastern internet bandwidth and we don’t have to abide by any company’s storage limit since it will be hosted on our servers.

Then it struck me that it would be a great thing for my voice over business website to have a nice professional looking download area for my clients. I mean I am sure they would appreciate a professional looking site that was:

1. easy to use
2. professional looking
3. secure.

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Ramadan: The Holy Month Approacheth

As you might have noticed if you are a regular reader of my posts. I often try to introduce you to elements of my faith. I do this in the hopes that with repeated exposure you will come to better understand my faith and what I stand for.

In approximately 9 days the Holy Month of Fasting, Ramadan, will start and I wanted to share with you a little bit about it.

I have chosen an article from a travel blog to illustrate the point of view of a non-muslim that she may bring insight where someone as involved as me in the Islamic culture might not:

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Bits And Pieces – Part Trois

Morning Folks,

I don’t have much to say this fine Tuesday morning so I’ve decided to run one of my Bits and Pieces posts. For those who are new to my blog and don’t know what that is… its when I get voice over related posts and news from around the interwebs and collect them all in one area… For your viewing pleasure:

1. I got the following email from Voice Over Actor and Coach Donna S. Highfill telling me of her new studio… here is what she said:

Hey there – thought you might like to see my latest 5 minute video on how salespeople sell in a tough economy. I offer three quick points . . .just click on this link:

http://corplite.com/2009/08/top-sales-and-the-importance-of-the-ps/ That’s it – enjoy!
Donna

2. A few days back I got an email from VO great Bettye Zoller … its a long email and you can probably get the details on Bettye’s blog at voicesvoices.com

Here are some of the highlights:

CARTOONS, CHARACTERS, & OTHER CRAZY PEOPLE! In Dallas on September 5-6.
BUSINESS OF VOICEOVERS WORKSHOP In Dallas on October 10th .
VOICE ACTING TECHNIQUES FOR TODAY in Tulsa, Oklahoma on October 17th at University of Tulsa
NARRATION SEMINAR for LONG-FORM PROJECTS INCLUDING FILM, VIDEO, CABLE and AUDIO BOOKS. in Dallas on October 24-25

3. Voice Over Actor and Radio personality Wendy Edwards has started a new online magazine. She’s very excited about this new project and would love for you to visit her online mag! http://wtfshewants.com/

4. Last week (I guess) the 14th Annual International Radio Creative and Production Summit hosted by Dan O’Day was held. The event was documented by Voice Over great Bob Souer on his blog. It’s got pictures and everything! He seems to have enjoyed himself and done some siteseeing he he was out in LA where the summit was being held.

5. Peter O’Connell wrote an interesting article about my favorite canceled animated TV show Futurama called Futurama as a future apparently fox is bringing back the show which is great for fans like myself who were devastated by its initial cancellation.

6. Here is a funny article by British Voice Overist (as he calls himself) Philip Banks about getting recognition as a voice over artist out of the blue. The article is called Did I tell you about my fan?

7. Kevin Delaney is a Voice over actor and coach who also runs a blog called Voiceover Ninja. He recently had one of his podcasts featured on voiceoverxtra.com. The podcast is called Reaching The Next Level and talks about pushing your career forward and out of a possible plateau that you might have reached.

Thats it for now. I hope this news was both entertaining and useful. Right about now I have my SaVoa.org application filled and ready to email but would like to think about the case a little more and weigh my options.

Be Good To Each other.

Mahmoud Taji
www.mahmoudtaji.com
www.arabicvo.com

Financial Core – More About Unions

Hello Folks,

So after I wrote an article about Union Vs. Non-Union one of my readers ( Lisa Junco ) pointed out to me the fact that there was a third option called Financial Core. I had heard the term before but like I said in my previous article that before I started looking into this matter I had very little knowledge of it. Why would I? There is no need or possibility at present for me to be part of these organizations so why waste my money and time.

But for people that this information is relevant to here is a wikipedia page about financial core .

Here is a most interesting exert from that page:

Most significantly, this financial core definition of the minimum union dues required to get and/or keep employment under a compulsory union contract allows objecting union members to withhold that portion of their compulsory union dues that the union spends on any political activities, campaigns or causes. By resigning full constitutional membership in their labor union and declaring themselves financial core workers citing the Beck ruling, financial core members are termed dues-paying-non-members . They keep their union jobs and all union benefits. However, since they are no longer constitutional members of the labor union, they are free from any union internal rules and regulations governing full constitutional members. They can not hold union elected office nor can they even vote on the union contract they support financially. ruling, financial core members are termed

Now Here is the part Relevant to fellow Voice Actors :

The primary impact of the financial core issue has been in the acting industry. By joining the Screen Actors Guild or American Federation of Television and Radio Artists as a financial core member, an actor can pursue work in states such as California, where union membership is a prerequisite to work in the industry. Full members of these unions are prohibited from working non-union jobs, but financial core members are not restricted by the rules of the unions and so may work either union or non-union jobs. When working a union job, they would receive the same benefits as full constitutional members. Similarly, in the Writers Guild of America , financial core members are able to remain working during labor strikes.

But I decided to keep digging and found this doozy of a negative propaganda presentation on the Screen Actors Guild website called:

Get The Facts about Fi-Core : http://www.sag.org/getthefacts/index.html

… surprisingly SAG calls fi-core paying members :

Fi-Core/FPNM are viewed as scabs or anti-union by SAG members, directors, and writers—most of whom also belong to entertainment unions

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Voices.com Hooks You Up With Some Sweet VO Resources

I just got this post from the voices.com blog and I’ll try and not say something mean like… FINALLY something we can benefit from.

Yeah I wont say that.

anyway here’s the post minus the image of ipod headphones:

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95+ Podcast Resources for Voice Actors

Are you studying the art of voice acting or looking for resources to get started in voice overs online?

If you love learning, you’ll love this list of 93 educational voice over podcasts, sorted by category!

Find voice acting podcasts to help you grow in your business, develop your artistry, hone your technical savvy, spice up your auditioning techniques, demos, and of course a healthy selection of tips to do with “getting started” in voice over here at Voices.com’s VOX Daily blog.