The world of novelty ringtones

And so the website was born and, quite frankly, it was rubbish. To the web designers of old, I salute you. I am not a designer or a coder, my skills lie elsewhere, and if you're reading this blog then there's a pretty good chance that you know what they are.

But I was on line for the world to see, and then I decided it was a good idea to list myself on some directory sites. They were free so I figured why not? As it turns out, they turned out to be pretty useful.

A company that developed mobile phone ringtones were looking for someone to recreate dialogue from films and TV shows. Copyright rules meant that they could not use the originals, so they needed someone who could do as many impressions as possible.

The work was fun and fairly simple. I would listen to a clip and try my best to reproduce it, and I came up with a policy that I use in my business still today - if you don't feel the is good enough, you simply don't pay me for it.

Well many of them were good enough and there's a good chance that some of you reading this may well have downloaded me into your phones at some point. But there was more that we could do. We decided to think about what the characters would say if they were telling you to answer your phone or read your texts and this became a whole lot of fun. I was writing scripts, and my clients were always pleased that I had really captured the essence of what those famous characters might say if they were telling you to answer your phone.

Now I admit that my phone has no novelty tones in it, but it's always nice to hear a stranger's phone ring with one my tones, see a smile come to their face of people who hear the tone and know that I had a hand in that.

Eventually, these tones lead to the creation of The Voicemonkey and we will talk  about that in a future blog, although the link is there if you're the sort of person who reads the last page of a book way before you reach the end. I know I am.

Until next time.

Payment Terms and Why They're Wrong

And so for a brief interlude from the story of my life to share some thoughts with you. Have you noticed how a good number of blogs out there are nothing more than rants in written form? There’s nothing wrong with that – I mean you only have to look at some of my older posts to see that I use writing as a means to vent my frustrations without resorting to alcohol, violence or listening to anything by Morrissey. 

None the less, this week I feel like challenging the status quo, and I would love to get your thoughts on the subject. Why is it, in the corporate world, that the buyer gets to dictate the payment terms? 

Just so you understand what I mean, I have people who will ask me to do a job for them and then tell me that their terms are to pay in 60 days. Well how exactly is that fair? I’m the one who provided the service and my terms are substantially less than that!

It doesn’t work that way in other walks of life does it? I mean it’s not like you go into McDonalds and point out to the person behind the counter that you usually pay in restaurants after you’ve eaten the meal! They have a system in place and we – the customer  - need to work within that system.

So how have we let this happen? We’ve considered ourselves as smaller than the customer. If some mighty organization wants to pay us within 60 days then we should be grateful for their business and just accept it, right? WRONG! They have come to you because they want to use the service that you provide. They could probably find someone cheaper, faster, more local or with better terms but no, they’ve come to YOU – you and you alone have exactly what they are looking for. 

Now don’t get me wrong, as a small business I am genuinely thrilled at every enquiry I receive, so please keep them coming, and I am sure that we can agree on some payment terms that work for both of us.

Chapter One - Eric Cartman

The story begins in the small offices of a recruitment company in Harrow in the late 1990s. I received an unsolicited email, and back then receiving any email meant that you had truly arrived - in fact Spam was still thought of as a canned meat and the inspiration for a Monty Python song. If you don't know it, it goes "Spam spam spam spam..and so on". Actually, it might not be so SEO friendly to keep writing that word, so I'll stop. Back to the story and naturally, I opened the mail.

What was presented was a flash animation that someone had created. the whole thing must have been around 100k in memory, so I set it to download and went to put the kettle on. When I returned, there was an image of a fat little boy in a red top and a blue bobble hat who then broke into a very unflattering song about someone called Kyle's Mom. 

I thought it was quite funny, but also thought little more of it. I chuckled inwardly - it was an open plan office - and went on about my day. Months later and Channel 4 ran a trailer for a new cartoon series coming to Friday nights called  South Park and naturally, I recognised one of the characters straight away.

Friday nights were a gathering at my place back then. Good TV, mind altering cigarettes and Doritos were the order of the day. And so South Park began and the little fat boy in the blue hat started talking to his friends and without even blinking, I copied him, much to the delight and amazement of my friends.

Well this continued for a little while until someone asked me the question that was to change everything. "Who else can you do?" he asked. Well I had always played around with voices, in fact in my college play I portrayed 14 different characters, all with different regional accents, but I had never really thought about it. Voices were just something I had always done.

Turned out that I 'did' a lot of people, mostly cartoon characters, and it was suggested to me that I might be able to do something with that skill. So I recorded some voices and built a rather crude website. All graphics, little text, it's little wonder that no search engine ever found it, but back then the shed that housed Google had not yet even been built!

Well I put myself out there and waited. And waited. And waited some more. As for what happened next, well in the interests of turning this into a series, I'll leave that for next time.

Cartman continues to be one of my favourite voices to do. I don't remember who sent me that mail or why, but if you're reading this then I would like to thank you. That one, seemingly insignificant act changed the course of my life forever.

Let's start at the beginning

Several  months ago I decided to hire a group of SEO experts to help me get my site onto Page 1 of Google, along with all the other search engines which make up the remaining 4% global market share.

As they worked tirelessly to see just how many times I could use the term ‘voice over’ without looking like I was trying too hard (that word again was ‘voice over’, just in case you missed it), they noticed that I had not posted a blog in nearly a whole year.

This of course, was bad. At one point I was keen to share my thoughts on anything and everything that came my way. Soon enough however, I realized that these thoughts could be condensed into 140 characters and posted on Twitter, and when you’re raising two children, time does become somewhat of a luxury.

But blog I must, and so it is that I find myself rummaging around the deepest corners of my mind to see exactly what it is that I could share with you, all the while asking the most important question – why on earth should you care?

Well that’s up to you, but if it helps, I promise to keep these short, mildly informative and perhaps even less mildly entertaining. 

One question I get asked a lot (aside from ‘did you pick up the milk’) is how I got started as a voice artist. I’m usually asked this by people looking to enter the industry themselves, and I am happy to tell them, because I know that when I was first looking, I would ask experienced people how they got their start, and I’m forever grateful to those people for the time that they gave me.

So if you’re looking for inspiration, stay tuned – or subscribe to an RSS feed or however these things work. Go easy on me – if I understood all the technical ins and outs, I wouldn’t need to pay someone to do my SEO for me.

My story begins…..in the next blog.