2024 as a British female voiceover...How it started, how it's going...
Having worked as a British female voiceover now for 13 years (!) and in the spirit of celebrating our achievements, (which I highly recommend!) I wanted to write a quick post about how the first quarter of the year looked for me, and it’s actually been really fun looking back at what the past few months have brought into being!
One of the highlights of January for me was being booked to voice a radio campaign with one of my VO besties, the mega star British Female voiceover, Alexia Kombou. We played two friends chatting over coffee (didn’t have to dig too deep for that one!) for a financial brand. There was a lovely moment towards the end of the session when the director commented on how great our chemistry was, and we could tell him we are mates in real life! Alexia has a great voice and is a pleasure to work with!
Hot on the heels of that session was a Voice of God booking which has to go down in history as requiring the most amendments of any job i’ve ever worked on! Luckily the producer was a good friend who was working on the event, a huge corporate show over in Spain and according to her everything was slightly chaotic. Many calls, texts, name pronunciation nightmares and voice messages later we managed to pull it all together in a tight turnaround time, and the event was great success!
Q1 was radio heavy, and saw me jumping on source connect and cleanfeed to voice radio commercials for theatres, dog groomers, multiple campaigns for the English National Opera, care homes, construction companies, car dealerships, house music nights, and dental implants, to name but a few! There was a TV ads for Monzo, corporate gigs for brands like Panasonic and the Food Standards Agency, sizzle reels for TV shows and in-store messaging for Asda. I got to play a truly terrifying character for a game (under NDA - more on that later) and multiple characters in indie videogame “No Plan B” which is out now on Steam. I also voiced my first ever fiction audiobook for Audible “The House of Mirrors” by Erin Kelly, which really deserves a blog post all of its own!
I have also had a little flurry of new clients in the last few months which is amazing - some from referrals and some from direct marketing. There’s my inspiration to keep on keeping on!
One thing that brings me joy is I’ve had cause to work on my midlands accent these last few months too, having been booked twice for it - it’s one of my absolute favourite accents so its a pleasure to work on it and listen to it, to do it justice. When i want to get into it I just have to think about my yoga teacher Amy and i’m in! It’s nice to use my home studio as a rehearsal space, and just play around with different voices and characters. The British accent has so many gorgeous variations which fascinate me.
Interestingly, at some point over the last few months, I decided to add a page to my website for my singing reel. Up until now i’d always kept my music life and my voiceover life separate. For some reason I felt like I couldn’t be a British female voiceover and a singer at the same time. But over time I had noticed more and more crossover, to the point that it just seemed silly not to include it. There’s been a bit of synchronicity happening somehow, because just as I made that decision I was asked to start working on production music again by 3 different sources, all completely new people who sought me out. Which feels really good after all the hustle!
Put like that it all sounds quite rosy - but of course in amongst all that work there were a million failed auditions, down-to-the-final-3-but-they-went-with-someone-else auditions, a company that went into liquidation before they paid me, (yay), an unpaid invoice from last year that i’ve had to hand over to Equity - bad vibes, plus a ton of emotional wobbles. When we choose this life, we choose the uncertainty that comes with the highs.
So i’m excited about April and beyond. I have a lovely new children’s audio project lined up (under NDA so can’t say anything more yet) and an acting for games workshop with the woman the legend Andrea Toyias to attend at GYGO London, which is super exciting, and also totally terrifying. I’ll write more about that after when i’ve recovered!
Check out my latest highlights video on YouTube here