Voice actors make money

BUSINESS BITS
Miguel Camus

Voice actors make good money making the right noises. In the Philippines, a name that has become synonymous with voice-overs is CreatiVoices Productions. It is a four-year old company cofounded by Pocholo “Voicemaster” Gonzales, himself a longtime voice actor.

Doing voice-overs has grown into a lucrative part-time industry due to the continuing expansion of the electronic media. “Before, voice acting was just for radio,” says Gonzales. “Now there’s also the Internet, PodCasts, video games, and cartoon and TV show dubbing.”

The most popular of these voice-over applications, he says, are audio- book recordings, animation or TV show dubbings, original content (pre-voice recording), and radio and TV advertisements.

Voice-over talents, who are paid on a per project basis, can actually earn some P30,000 to P50,000 for doing audio books alone, which are mostly textbook translations; about P10,000 to P20,000 for radio and television advertisements ; P500 to P1,000 per episode for anime and soapopera dubbings; and up to P30,000 for original content creation.

So how does one get into the voice-over business? Gonzales says that voice-over training is a prerequisite no matter how good the aspiring voice-over talent is, and he emphasizes that doing voice-overs is not just a hobby but an art and a profession.

Indeed, this was why Gonzales decided in 2007 to put up the Philippine Center for Voice Acting, the first and only professional voice acting school in the Philippines. He established Creativoices itself with an initial capital of only P20,000, but it has become almost an industry by itself.

As the training arm of CreatiVoices, the center conducts a two-month voice acting program for a selected number of students using modules imported from the United States.

The P8,000-program consists of once-a-week classes and runs four times a year, with classes that start in January, April, July, and October. The center has five instructors, all respected voice-over industry veterans.

“When you train with us, in one day I can make you create 20 voices,” says Gonzales.

He says that although the center does not guarantee voice-over jobs to students who finish the program, it gives them support in landing voice-over contracts. In fact, almost a quarter of his stable of 400 local voice-over talents are graduates of the program, and a lot of his talents find work with other voice-over companies.

He explains the industry practice: “Even among my talents, there are no exclusive contracts. In my own case, I’m not exclusive to my own company; I work with different recording studios as well.” Considering that projects don’t come regularly, he also cautions voice-over talents to treat doing voice-overs strictly as a “sideline” profession.

Active in the industry for over 15 years now, Gonzales has done voice-over projects for hundreds of radio and TV commercials for practically all of the major telecommunication companies, fastfood chains, beverage companies, financial institutions, and government agencies as well as politicians on the campaign trail.

Some of his former students at CreatiVoices have done very well themselves upon finishing its voice-over training program. For instance, Jo Carol Fernandez, 18, communications sophomore at the Miriam College in Quezon City, has done many voice-over projects for anime shows since finishing the training.

She says she dubbed voices for major characters in the shows Bokura Ga Ita (26 episodes) and Negima as well as for other projects outside CreatiVoices. On the other hand, Mark B. Aragona, 30, writer and financial consultant, received an offer to do three advertisements for a large telecom company barely a month after finishing his voice-over training.

“Let’s just say I made five times my investment for those ads,” he says. Aragona likes the fact that doing voice-overs is very flexible in terms of time. Although some projects can take up to an hour, he says, doing 15 minutes of voice-over work for an advertisement is already long.

Voice actors like Fernandez and Aragona are able to cultivate and hone their talent for professional voice-over work through CreatiVoices, which has since grown into an agency with 10 full-time staff and some 500 local and international on-call voice actors.

The company has not only given the voice-over industry a common face but now also enjoys instant recognition as the industry leader. Says Gonzales of people wanting to go into doing voice-overs: “If you have a job, and if you’re really good and I want you to take the character, I will wait for you.” And he tells aspiring talents to see doing voice-overs not just as another job but also as a way of having fun, like what he himself does. “I’m just doing what I want to do,” he says. “This is not work; I’m just playing.”