Day in the life of
Voice Actor – Kira Gurnée
I am a professional Voice Over actress with my own broadcast quality home studio and can be heard on TV shows, films, commercials, and literally thousands of projects for brands including Sony, Google, Reebok, eBay, Facebook, OPI, Disney, Mastercard, and many more.
I have been in the business for over 15 years and seen it go from needing to have a big agent and go to a big market recording studio for sessions, to running your own small business as a voice over talent and needing to have your own high quality recording studio. The evolution of technology has made it a much more enticing ambition for many actors to go the Voice Over route (and it is great not to have to spend hours in hair and makeup and waiting for your scene to be shot) but there is a lot more to it than just reading a script into your iPhone. Voice Over is its own animal and needs special training (which by the way will end up making you a better on camera actor too) so you can’t skip that.
Most actors need about 2 years before they are truly ready to compete in the market. You also need professional quality demos to showcase your strengths. Here again, don’t be tempted to do it yourself just because you can edit music. The casting directors will know and it will show. Finally, you need to treat it as a small business and have a solid daily routine just as if you were going to an office job and working for someone else.
My day normally goes something like this:
- Breakfast and coffee (yea!) while going over casting notices and emails from clients.
- Auditioning for all the appropriate projects and creating quotes for them if they aren’t through an agent.
- Prepping, researching, recording, and editing all the jobs I have for the day, including any live directed sessions.
- Then uploading the files and invoicing the accounting departments for them.
- Following up on emails, job possibilities, questions, outstanding payments, etc. Paying bills, researching new tech, updating software, websites, etc.
- Doing any more auditions or jobs that came in during the day.
- Checking emails again before heading to bed since some clients are in other time zones.
- Then zzzz’s and doing it all again the next day!
So, it’s definitely an 8-14 hour work day depending on the day and what you have on your big TO DO list, but it is hugely creative, gives you permission to play for a living, and offers you the opportunity to learn about anything and everything while doing it.
In short, it never gets boring and I absolutely love it!
