Our guest on this episode is David Gilbert, a professional voice over talent. David and Miranda discuss the importance of choosing the right voice for a project, how he embraces the character he portrays, and the impact of AI on the voice industry. As an experience and successful voice talent, David describes the amount of training and coaching required to create authentic and believable voice overs that connect the audience with the brand. Join us to explore some similarities in the strategy behind voice over and video storytelling.
Connect with David: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidgilbertvo/
Connect with Miranda: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mirandaoconnor-mba/
Learn more about The Art of Storytelling: https://www.theartofstorytelling.com/
Our guest on this episode is David Gilbert, a professional voice over talent. David and Miranda discuss the importance of choosing the right voice for a project, how he embraces the character he portrays, and the impact of AI on the voice industry. As an experience and successful voice talent, David describes the amount of training and coaching required to create authentic and believable voice overs that connect the audience with the brand. Join us to explore some similarities in the strategy behind voice over and video storytelling.
Connect with David: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidgilbertvo/
Connect with Miranda: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mirandaoconnor-mba/
Learn more about The Art of Storytelling: https://www.theartofstorytelling.com/
Anything where a company or organization truly wants to connect with its human audience. They will almost always use humans because the way we talk, the idiosyncrasies, the pauses, these kind of things, it would take you hours to do that, to manipulate an AI generator, to get it to sound human. And we have very good perception of what is real and what is not even the best ones I've heard. People can still tell it's not human. Welcome to Storytelling for Engagement, the podcast where we talk about all things creative and content related to make your story unforgettable. I’m your host, Miranda O’Connor from The Art of Storytelling, and I’m excited to start this storytelling journey with you. So I started doing voiceovers in 2016. Before that, I was in sales and marketing and consumer goods for 24 years. I grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, moved to Toronto, then London, Ontario, and then back to Toronto So, David, tell us, how did you get into the voice industry? I was always a rambunctious kid and I did some strange things to my voice. When I was a young kid, used to love watching Saturday morning cartoons, but I didn't do anything with it. I went to school, University, had a professor say, Oh, you've got a good baritone voice, you should do radio. And I'm like, okay, I'm 19 years old and this is pre-Internet. So early nineties. And I thought, Well, I don't know. I ended up moving to London, Ontario, like I said, for a job. I found a studio and the owner says, Oh, we mostly do corporate videos and we bring a gentleman in who went to Juilliard, and I'm like, Oh, okay. And this is back when, you know, pre-Internet. So all there wasn't that many types of genres and if you needed a voice over was a union talent, it was in a studio, was expensive, blah, blah, blah. So I said, okay, thanks, goodbye. I'm going to go on with my life and sales and marketing. So fast forward to 2016. My daughter was in acting classes and I was let go from my last job I was at and I thought, well, you know, either I can look for another job that's going to take me, you know, 60 hours a week and I'll be miserable at or as the voice acting coach, my daughter said to me, Hey, you've got a good voice. Have you thought about doing radio or doing a voiceover? I thought, What's voiceover? So I did what everybody else does, I Googled voiceover. And so I thought, well, instead of looking for a high paying job or, you know, stressful job, I'll do this. And I took my severance and savings and said, okay, to go full throttle, took acting lessons from him, went through the whole Second City improv program, which I highly, highly, highly recommend. Improv training for anybody. Doesn't matter if your performance or not, because it gets you out of your head. Yeah. And push the boulder up a hill. Got training, took every class I could find. Got professionally made demos, set up my own website, and because I didn't have that acting experience, but I had the business experience, I went after businesses and joined my local chamber of commerce and, you know, Board of trades and whatnot. So that's, that's how I got to here. Yeah. Okay. So that's that's so you haven't actually been in it like for your whole career. So that's interesting. Just since 2016. So what kind of training does a voice actor do? I mean, like you said, it's like any other acting. You don't just get there and have this voice and know how to use it, Right? So what is what is the training like? So just to dispel that first sort of tidbit, you know, any time somebody says to you, Oh, you've got a great voice, you should do voiceovers. No, this is this here. That's just a tool if you don't know how to use it or whatever. And you clearly said that at voice acting. If you're a on screen actor on stage, you have your body, your physicality, you have the scenes, the sets, you have all this stuff to inform the audience. When it's just your voice, you have to be a better actor to convey the emotion, and you're trying to elicit an emotional reaction or a behavioral reaction or behavioral change in your audience. So you have to be able to connect. You have to know what you're saying and who you're saying it to and why you're saying all, all that kind of stuff. So all that background is more critical than anything else and obviously having quality studios and all that stuff. So I hope that answers the question. So, so what is like what is the training? I know you said improv, but like, how do you how do you make your voice do so many different things? Well, so it's it's acting lessons, it's improv classes, then it's voice acting to say, okay, how do you impart this emotion? You have to sort of feel the emotion or if you're training on airport security, you have to really understand what you're saying and who you're talking to. And and it ultimately and more so for for a lot of commercial work, they want authenticity. They want the real they don't they don't want you to talk like this because people don't like being sold to. So you have to be able to take a script that is written either salesy or very dry, and you have to warm it up. And that takes a lot of training, a lot of practice to make it come across. And and, you know, a lot of times when people see a mic in front of the microphone in front of them, they all of a sudden go, Hi, I'm trying to tell you something. And it's that's not and a take, believe it or not, that takes training and practice to get that out of your natural like because you think because people think about how they sound as opposed to how it feels. Right. Which is a big difference. Yeah. Okay. And so do you do some interpretation of the script? When you get a script? Is it just like, like actual acting, acting where you still have to interpret it and, and take some direction. So how does that process work? So that that's I like, I like to think of it like a spectrum, right? So if you're talking an animated show or video game, well, there's a lot of acting involved in that because you need to inhabit an or work from another dimension or, you know, a rabbit. So you have to really create that character in your mind. Like what's driving that person was what's driving you. And when you talk. Yeah. Versus a telephone system messaging, which is very friendly, very professional, you're giving information, you're not trying to be this other character, but you are a representative of that company. So you still have to look at the script. Each script is unique and you have to do your it's called script analysis and figure out who you're talking. What are you saying? Why are you saying it? Who are you talking to? Who are you? Where are you? The more specific, the specificity matters. So you will talk to your friend at a at a little league game or a sports game. Then you would differently to a colleague at a conference or you're presenting in front of a thousand people. You do speak differently. So once you understand that, you bring that into the delivery. Yeah. So when I was looking at your website, I saw you had done a Little Caesar's ad and I was like, Wow, okay, that's great. And then the next one I watched was about farming in Brazil, and it was totally different, right? So, you know, I know you have to be authentic, but it's also it's so also not authentic because you're putting on these different kind of characters. I mean, so so so here's the thing. The youth we all do there is an audition and then there is the actual project. When you're in a session, let's say, with a casting director and the client, or what not, you do whatever they want. If they say, can you give it more energy, can you give it less energy, more of this, more that, then you are delivering to that expectation. If you're just doing it on your own or you're making your own acting choices? It's funny you say that because my kids sometimes will hear recordings of me and go, Wow, that doesn't even sound like you. And part of me goes, Oh, no, it doesn't sound like because it should be me. Like the way I'm talking now. That's how they want, you know, most customers want to hear, but sometimes they want a more polished read. So it's almost like a formality spectrum of, you know, talking to a group of neurosurgeons versus like talking to your bodies after a few drinks, you have to figure out where that script lies. And yes, you may sound a little different than the way you normally speak, but you're talking it's it's relevant to the audience you're you're talking to, because at the end of the day, I'm helping whoever, whoever has words or message, connect that to the audience. Because if I don't connect it to the audience, I'm not doing my job. I don't I'm not getting paid for it. You might as well just use a robot like it doesn't matter connecting. It's all about the connection. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's the same thing that we do with video. I just feel like it's it must be so much harder when you don't have those visuals to help you and you're just trying to get it with the voice. I mean, radio, especially when it's just voice, It does help. If the client can provide you with visuals, storyboards, music beds. This is the thing, because if they give you the track and go, Oh, okay, like a Nike spot, you have that. And then that kind of music like it motivate that can inform the read too, because you don't want to have a especially since if you're making videos you don't want the music to be like a really peppy pace. And you're talking at a slower clip you want everything has to jive, right? So the or that the person who's hiring you or directing you can inform you can give you as much details, information, who, who is the target market, etc. the better the voice actor can give you. Yeah. And you do most of your recording at home, right? Yeah. Actually, I'm in my my booth right now. Yeah. Yeah. So when you're doing it at home and you don't have anyone listening and watching while you do it, is that why, you know, voice actors give different types of takes so that you know, the studio can decide which one they want to use us? Yeah, most times it. Most times it's in the audition. They'll give a couple of different takes just to show range. But then when it comes to the job, if it's anything more than than a couple of minutes, I'll give a 30 second demo and then I'll say, Is this what you're looking for? Is this what you hear in in when you think of this, the audio? Is that what you're thinking? And then I would adjust to, to what they they want. So yeah. What is the longest project that you've had to work on? Like have you worked on a like a TV animation, like a 30 minute show? No, but one of the earliest jobs I had was for the Royal Conservatory of Music, a e-learning course on history of music, which was maybe a couple of hours long over many different modules. And now it's quite interesting because it had it had English obviously, but French, German, Latin, Italian names and phrases that I had to pronounce in that language not Ritornello it had to be Ritornello like I had to. So I had it took a lot of time, but it was it was interesting. Yeah, it must have been an interesting project, like just for you to learn about about all the music too, right? Oh, absolutely. Like most of the things that I do, I do narrate. They do have a certain amount of, Oh, this is kind of cool. I'm learning something new. You know, I'm as I'm narrating and most of the time I don't pre read. I read it cold because it's just on the time to review, especially audiobook narrators, which I don't do, but they can't necessarily always read the whole book. Yeah, but you have to read it cold and make it sound like, Oh, I know what I'm talking about. I've, I'm an expert in this, you know? So yeah, yeah, yeah. It's always interesting to learn from, you know, other people's projects that you are part of. I mean, I learn a lot of everything just from going to my clients and, and hearing their stories. For me, I know what our unique selling proposition is with The Art of Storytelling. I know what we do that is special and unique, and we have lots of different things that we can show visually, show for it and talk about it, but it comes down to voice. I feel like that's just like one. It's just one thing. Like how do you differentiate or how do you sell yourself against your competition? Well, so it's not really competition per se, and it depends on the time I look at it because I have a logical left brain or whatever it is that there's really two different classes of buyers. There's an educated buyer and an uneducated buyer. It has nothing to do with intelligence by the well educated buyers or somebody like you. You know what you're looking for. You know what quality sounds like, you know, quality costs, etc.. And it's a matter of choice. It's you get auditions, you listen to 50 or 100 or whatever it is, and go that voice at that particular time and day. And you wanted a male or female or non-binary, whatever that choice may be, that particular voice best suited the project or the client decided it's a choice. In the uneducated world. It's like, Hey, you're a marketing guy. You sit around a boardroom table going, Yeah, we should do a video or whatever, and you don't know what quality sounds like a sound. You don't know what quality sounds like. Costs, etc. and you're just going by the sound. Oh, he's got a great voice. Oh, that's good. So again, it's mostly choice. But you. I have more leeway in marketing myself that way because I'm. I can reach out directly to these people. Like, for instance, I have a customer who's an architectural glass manufacturer in Montreal, like I do one or two videos a year. I don't audition. It's like, Hey, I'm helping him, and that's it, right? So it's all kinds of customers. But at the larger a bigger level, especially large national commercials, it's all just choice really. But it's also relationships, right? Knowing the right people, having the right relationships with the right people. So it's more nuanced than just, hey, who's whoever? And well, whoever's the best marketer also wins too. Whoever's voice is out there enough. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess, you know, when you become the voice for a company, they're going to want to keep using the same voice, right? Like you wouldn't want to change that. I mean, look at yourself. Like, if you have a, a service provider for something, phone systems, whatever, CRM, like once you've selected something, you don't want to go back and revisit it every six months or a year. And that's the same thing for some companies who either from an e-learning standpoint or a telephony standpoint or, you know, even commercials, they want a brand voice and the more progressive ones will think, oh, we would like to have the same voice on our commercials and our corporate video and our in our phone system. So there's a lot the audio brand remains the same. Right? So there's there's other holistic reasons to have that. But I mean, I was a buyer and a seller to major retailers. And when you're in with a retailer, you're in like they don't want to touch it for a while. Yeah, it's it's expensive to change, right? And it's uncertainty too. Businesses don't like uncertainty. Yeah. Okay. And so how how did you go about building yourself as a voice actor? Like, how did you go about finding your first clients? How did it get going? I had to do the training first. And then while I'm training, I'm talking to other fellow voice actors and it's unlike the other feel, other industries I've been in this industry and the learning development there are very similar. It's very like open and caring and supportive and and you can ask questions from, 20 year veterans and they'll give you the time of day. And so that's where I learned a lot of the avenues to go. And because I didn't have that deep acting background when I started, I did what I knew, I knew businesses. So I joined the local chamber of commerce and I go to every networking event I can go to, and online, email, LinkedIn. I built up, you know, 15,000 connections on LinkedIn. Like my thought was, go where my potential clients are. Yeah, just let them know I'm alive. So, you know, it just follow a path I like to look at in terms of I know this kind of weird analogy, but The Wizard of Oz, right? Dorothy had to get to the Emerald City. That was her goal. And so, you know, if you know what that is, reverse engineer your yellow brick road. Anything that goes off that path you avoid, you know, just because it can doesn't mean you should. And but there's but it's also like an onion. There's many different ways actors can build a business in voiceover. It could be through agents, through casting sites, through production company directories, through direct marketing. It's a number, number of different ways. So there’s no one way I know people who cold call all the time. I hate calling, phoning, you know, even though I have the improv background, when I get on the phone with somebody, I don't have a script in front of me. What am I say? You know, And if you're socially awkward, like I can be like, it can be very cumbersome. Introvert I'm also an introvert, so, you know, I think above everything else, having that self-awareness of what works for you, you know, I know some people who post a lot of stuff on social media and video content and it's great for exposure, whatnot, but, you know, you have to want to do that and love it and whatever method you find work for you. So yeah. And do you find when you listen to like radio or TV or anything, do you notice which voice talents are not the quality one Because I know you said earlier that, you know, there's there's quality and as educated buyers and can you tell from listening which ones are not the quality ones. Yeah Yeah. I mean most of the cases on TV they're usually pretty good, although I have heard some cases where like, oh, they chose that voice or there was a campaign a few years ago from a national bank in Canada and you know, the whole push is for authenticity and, and conversational, right? So this particular spot or series campaign was it sounded like imagine you're lying on a couch in a very prone position and you're like, yeah, bank with us and you're like very almost. And I think what happened was they pulled the engineer's sister out of the street and said, okay, go in the booth and just record because you want something really, really raw. And thankfully I haven't heard that again. But I always get a kick out of listening to either calling up a company or listening to a commercial. Go, Hey, that's Bev, that's Joe, that's Steve, Whatever. Like, it's interesting to me to hear their voice is like a good for them, you know? And do you find you could recognize the voices because the voice is just like, I mean, you sound so different depending on what ad you’re in. Sure, sure. And I now I'm listening. But so my ears are now tuned for not only the person in the delivery, the audio quality I hear if I hear any kind of weird anomalies audio wise, I'm like, Oh, that engineer missed that. Yes. My partner does that. When we watch TV, he's always criticising what did they do there? Yeah, well, it's funny because there was an article yesterday and online I saw about Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer and how he he records. He films using IMAX. So those machines are very loud, apparently. And the way he mixes a sound makes it sometimes very hard to listen to dialog. And he's doing it on purpose. So, you know, in the theater you don't have subtitles, but at home you're watching it on streaming, you could put subtitles. Oh, okay. That's what they say. You can always mess up or or have poor quality video, but you'll lose the audience if you have bad audio. Yes. Correct. Correct. So yeah, that's absolutely correct. Yeah. And I think I think one of the first movies that did something like that was the Blair Witch Project. I don't know if you remember that, but it was like the video work was awful. It was really just like amateur and it was supposed to be. But yeah, once once you can have the audio, people can follow along. So it is it is really important. I mean, even for us and our video is like there's absolutely no way we can get away with poor audio, but you can get away with, you know, a little bit of a blur or, you know, a little, you know, unstable shot here or there. But you have to have really good audio to keep up the quality of the production. The one example I always use is imagine watching Jurassic Park with no audio. Yeah, there's the stakes, the the intensity. It's all gone. Like you don't hear like you don't feel it's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So last question where do you see the AI and the voice generated stuff going? Like, what do you think is what do you think is going to happen to voice actors or not? So before I answer that, I have my own thought about AI in general, and it's more of just like a baffled bewilderment question of all the things that we can use AI for from improving our, day to day processes and email and excel and all the operational side, how did we get to to the the most humanistic pieces of our culture, which is content production, writing, voice, video. Like to me that is a weird thing that we went took AI right to the most human thing we do. So to answer your question though, it I think it's a pendulum, right? There's a mad rush because it's the new shiny tool. I think in the long run, anything that's low value, low risk, will go to AI because it'll be and I hate to say this term good enough, it'll be just good enough for that use. Anything where a company or organization truly wants to connect with its human audience. They will almost always use humans because the way we talk, the idiosyncrasies, the pauses, these kind of things, it would take you hours to do that, to manipulate an AI generator, to get it to sound human. And we have very good perception of what is real and what is not even the best ones I've heard. I can still I mean, people can still tell it's not human. So and it's also philosophical. If the company cares more about its humans and you can tell by whether or not they show up on these, you know, ten best places to work lists and whatnot, they will almost always use humans. Now there are cases where you're developing an e-learning project and it's a two hour turnaround, which is a different issue in itself. And you need a narration for accessibility. Yeah, okay. Or I've actually control my voice with a company in England for these large publishing companies that produce, you know, like news media, like pages and pages every day, you know, they can afford to hire voice actors to record 50,000 words a day. It would just be. So you had that playbook, which is more for accessibility than it is for actual non-visual impaired. So there is a place for it. Yeah, but like I said, if it's something to do with actually you're trying to elicit an emotional response or you're trying to get them to change their behavior using AI it your ROI is just not going to be there. Yeah. And you can't. And the worst thing is you can't talk to the AI and go, yeah, I'm not third sentence the fourth word. Can you give it a bit more emotion on that. Good luck. Good luck. Try to tell the AI to do that. So yeah, yeah. And I agree with you because I think it's like, you know, the difference between using stock photography and getting actual real photography, right? Like, it's pretty obvious when you go on a website that this company is only using stock photography. This is not authentic. This is not really what they look like. But I think there's also a few areas where, you know, just the tool can help. Like for us, it can help along a project because as much as you know, everybody that we interview and film, it's all it's all real and it's all authentic and it's all filmed live. But sometimes, you know, we just wish we could tweak one word a little bit because we're now editing and trying to match up these sentences. But they said something that they should have really said something else, or they didn't say something. And if we could just, you know, take what they said and just create that word afterwards, those kind of little tools I think will help. And I don't think that really hurts anybody. Right. It it helps everybody. Exactly. And the difference being that is editing. It's more like an editing tool. I've seen the that with the script or something else where you can where, you know, they want to take out the um’s, you want to change a word you're using there. And that's that is different than a generative AI where you're typing in words or text to speech and you're like, okay, you type. You go to this Chat GPT you say, Give me a script for a 90 second video. You drop it into another thing, you get it, you get the audio drop and the other thing get the video and boom, it. You know, it's done. That, to me is is a brilliant tool. I wish I use Adobe audition for my editing. I wish that had the capability where I could say, Hmm, how many times did they say ectoplasm in this whole script so I can change it to the right pronunciation and it would highlight. I wish it did that, but it doesn't. But yeah, just things like the script where you want to get rid of the um’s and ah’s. You want to change a word like you said they'd pronounce that wrong. Yeah, that's a perfect that's a great tool. That's a great use of AI because you're not replacing the human you're augmenting the human. So yeah. And do you think the voice actors have enough protection over their voice right now? Because, you know, there's so many stories coming out about they've taken my voice from one thing and now they're putting it somewhere else. How other voice actors in Canada at least being protected. It's interesting you said that because I was just at a conference over the weekend in Dallas and there's an organization called NAVA, National Association of Voice of Actors, which is lobbying through various governmental agencies or whatnot, to to put in restrictions for use because there are some AI voice generators who will scrape audio and then produce an AI version without attributing any kind of royalties. And so I think it's it's no different than 99% of technology where the technologies advancing far faster than regulations. Regulations will eventually catch up, hopefully, and have protection, copyright, trademarks and whatnot. So if somebody uses somebody records me now, don't, and decides to create a model of my voice, there will be tools that we can check to see if it's an AI generated or it's a natural, but it's it's the Wild West right now. And I hope that we have some some sanity in there. And governments kick in and say, okay, stop. If you're going to protect content through trademark copyrights or whatnot, then you must do the same thing for the audio side. I kind of look forward to the point where I'm 85 years old and I'm still getting money cheques from my voice that's being used for things like that's possible, which is an interesting thing that I can't and I can only record so many hours a day. I can only speak so many hours a day. So the point that it gets to being able to license my voice to an AI generator... longer term not a bad idea, the problem is if it's like $0.02 per million words. Not a good idea. Yeah. Never and never for broadcast because broadcast is repeated over and over and over. So yeah, I mean, maybe, maybe there can be a model like stock photography where you can submit your voice and but, but you have to be able to get the royalties for it. So yeah, unfortunately, between, you know, stock pages where you pay, let's say $10 a month for unlimited downloads. Yeah. Or which we're seeing right now in the audio sphere is you know, nine what Spotify is ten bucks a month for unlimited downloads and you're a major act you get what, a quarter or like a fraction of a penny per play like they're not making the money on the actual that's why they're touring so much and the prices are like out of out of sight because they they don't make any money on the actual music. And they make it on the tours and somehow in between all the Netflix and the streaming services they're not compensating the creatives to the point where they should be or that used to be huge. So we're seeing this sort of friction now. Mm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well David, this has been great. I hope all the listeners have enjoyed it. I think it was really interesting to hear David's perspective being a voice actor. And David, thank you so much for joining us. My pleasure. My pleasure. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. And that concludes another episode of Storytelling for Engagement. If you found value in today’s episode, don’t forget to like and share, and visit our website at theartofstorytelling.com to learn more about video storytelling content.