This evening, while enjoying some in-studio conversation with the lovely and versatile Leanne Heintz (a wonderful voice talent just now starting to extend her VO reach via the internet), I was bragging again about the Voiceover Bulletinboard, or www.vo-bb.com.
Leanne had come over to record an audition at my place and had some questions about computers and home recording and microphones that I could answer…and many more I couldn’t. Naturally, I pointed her to my best information resource: my friends at vo-bb.com.
Moreover, we had just finished talking about “blogs”, and I had mentioned how much help I had gotten just by asking my friends on the (…all together now, say it with me…) vo-bb.com.
Since joining a conversation about the exchange of blog page links, I doubled my exposure just today to other voice talents and those who read their pages. The only reason I even had a blog page to trade links ON was because of several friends I met on the board. And out of this huge support group, I have only met one of them face-to-face since corresponding on the vo-bb (and yes, Bob survived the experience)!
There are other online gatherings of voice talent, although everyone pretends ignorance of such things when we’re on that internet gift of Deirdre “D.B.” Cooper. Some are very comforting and helpful in their own way…like the one Julie Williams established over at www.voice-overs.com. Some groups are more like squabbling one-upmanship contests with just enough helpful information and good natured members to keep you coming back. But the vo-bb.com? To quote Robin Williams quoting Quasimodo: “Sanc-tu-aryyyyyy!”
I told my friend Leanne she should be using the board not only for information, but for companionship while she’s feeling stuck at home doing a masterful job taking care of her young kids (one of them, a great little guy named A.J., is a Downs’ Syndrome baby). I told Leanne about all the ego and rancor that isn’t allowed by the divine Ms. D on the vo-bb. I told her it was a lifeline for those days when we listen back to an audition we’ve just cut and think, “Who am I kidding, really?”
I do have hopes of traveling sometime in the future, and meeting some of these “names” at voiceover workshops. I’m preparing an 8×10 glossy from some of the sample headshots Kara Edwards recently posted, so I can get her autograph in person someday (and not just because my young son, Ricky, loves Dragonball Z).
Meanwhile, I continue to tell anyone I can about this terrific, helpful, silly, serious, baffling, and bountiful group of people who are mostly names and avatars on my computer screen. Good friends, nay, great friends I’ll probably only know through the portion of their personas they freely share online.
Oh…and I also told Leanne I was trying to make myself write shorter posts. Looks like I blew that one.
– over and out –