Voice Over Jobs
How to Break into
Voice Acting

Looking for voice over jobs? There's plenty of voice over work out there for new voices waiting to be discovered. Voice overs are needed not only in cartoons and commercials, but also in video games, trailers, movies, industrials and more.

If you're an actor looking to branch off into voice overs, you'll find that voice acting can be very lucrative and help pay the bills as you pursue your theater or film acting career. Recording sessions are typically short and you could make thousands of dollars if you book a national commercial or a dubbing gig that pays residuals.

Whether you want to exclusively pursue a voice acting career or not, read this step by step guide on what voiceover jobs are available out there, how to train your voice for voice over work and how to break into the voice-over business.

First, let's look at the different voice-over jobs that are available out there:

• Commercial Voice Over Jobs

  Commercial voiceover jobs include radio spots but also voice-overs for on-camera commercials that run on TV and movie screens. Most on-camera commercials use voiceovers at some point in the spot, so if you have a good commercial voice, there's plenty of voice over work available in this area.

• TV and Movie Voice Over Jobs

  You can book a movie trailer voice over or a narration voice over in a film or TV series, but there's also plenty of voice acting work in looping. Looping is a process that takes place during the sound mix once a film or TV show has been shot. It's a little bit like doing extras acting for sound. Actors create conversations that are then used as background sound to make films more realistic. Unlike extras acting, though, looping on union films pay residuals (and those residuals add up over the years!).

• Dubbing Voiceover jobs

  These jobs are available when foreign films are dubbed into English, especially for DVD releases. Since foreign movies still get a limited release in America, this is not a huge market. If you're a foreign actor trying to make it in America, booking a dubbing gig in your first language can be a great way to pay the bills while you work on speech and accent reduction classes. Keep in mind, though, that most dubbing is done in the country where the film will be released.




• Cartoon and Video Game Voice Over Jobs

  This is the area of choice for those who are great at character voices. Nowadays, video games are a huge market because each game has so much content and different scenarios. Animation voice-over artists are needed not only for character dialogue but also for all kinds of sound effects for things like fight sequences and more.




• Narration Voice Over Jobs

  Narrations are required for numerous projects from documentaries to corporate and educational training videos to books on tape and more. In our automated world, there is also more and more work for clear voices on phone recording systems and voicemail messages.

But what do you need to get those jobs? Let's look at the voice over training you'll need to succeed in voice overs…

…and once you've trained your voice, read our page on how to get voice over work and how to nail voice over auditions.

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