WYT EP 1 - An exciting auditions and bedding down new skills
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Hi, my name's Deanna. Welcome to Walk Your Talk episode one. This one was recorded in my car, so you have to forgive the really shitty noise quality and sound quality and stuff that's going on in the background. I couldn't really be bothered taking it all out, and besides, this is just how things go sometimes.
So in this episode, I am gonna talk you through an audition I did really recently. There's a bit of a process that goes on here. I had to learn a new skill to be able to do this audition really effectively, and it's something I've been working on for a pretty long time, so let's just get right into it.
Okay, we're recording. Good. So I had an audition yesterday, um, and it's a fucking big audition, right? It's, it's a national client and it's a voice of, right? So, so big deal, right? Long term. Um, national client, tv, radio, online, all the bits in the advertising, voice service space. This. Woo. Cream of the Cru, right?
And, um, so I, I got to audition yesterday. My agent sent me an email saying, we want you to audition to be the new voice of blah. Insert big client name here, . Um, if I get it, I can tell you about it, . Well, even if I don't get it, I can tell you about it. So you'll find out about it later if you wanna know. But anyway, insert big name client here.
Um, and the cool thing was, right. What they were looking for was like a really iconic. Young female sounding Australian voice. Right? So there's a couple of things about that that's really cool. Um, the first is that I get to just lean into my Australian accent, you know, and often I try and smooth it out a little bit, like just take some of the kind of like really Australian bits out of it.
And, and this is an opportunity for me to really lean into those Australian isns, which is really nice. Really, really nice. The other thing is, um, the style of Reed that I suspect that they're gonna go for when. About young, iconic Australian female at the moment in Australian television. A lot of those reads are like really paired back and almost neutral in their like inflection patterns and their emphasis and, and they're really, really laid back.
There's all like, it, it feels like there's nothing going on, right? But here's the thing. I had to start learning how to. Reads, right? Because I come from a very strong retail background spaces the queen of retail for like 15, 20 years, right? Like it's . I did so much retail, really varied retail, but all energized and, and like excited and enthusiastic.
And that takes a certain amount of physical control and muscular attention and that kind of thing, right? Um, and when, when I, a couple of years ago, stopped getting, you know, really regular work because. When Covid happened, so maybe it's more than two years ago now when Covid happened, right? Um, a lot of that retail advertising dried up.
It just kind of disappeared because people didn't wanna be bashed over their head with by this thing. Now they didn't want fomo. They didn't want like, come on, come on, come on. Cuz everyone was already really fucking stressed about shit and dealing with a whole pile of like, Mon on, wear a mask, don't get sick, don't pass it on.
Holy fuck, people are dying everywhere, right? Like, it just was, there was so much demand placed on people already that the advertising space, at least in Australia, went, um, no , we're not gonna do more of that to people. And everything got pulled back and became really soft and I stopped getting work right at, at that point, I stopped getting that kind of work and.
And so I called, my agent had a chat with her. There's actually a post on my Instagram from like two or three years ago, uh, like talking about this conversation that I had with her, right? And I said to her, what's going on? I'm not getting any work. And she's like, well, that's because there's nothing on your demo that suggests you can do this kind of work, right?
And I'm like, ah, shit. Okay, cool. I better fix that. So we booked in some time with a studio here in. and I went in and tried and tried is the operative word here, right? I went in and tried to do those really, really soft paired back, hardly any breath control, like just really, really, really gentle kind of reads and I couldn't do it like my body was getting in the way right, and all of my muscle memory and all of my patented stuff around delivery choices, breathing.
Um, you know, projection, pitch pace, all of the different tools. The way I emphasized, the way I inflected it was all really fucking ingrained in my whole kind of, Voiceover production system that I've got going on in all of my tools, right? So I had to undo all of that, and it took like six months for me to even get to a point where I could wind back the, the muscular control and the, the muscular like tension to.
Get myself into a space where my articulation was softer and my breath support was much, much, much gentler and my onset of of sound production was softer, right? Everything before was like hard and punchy and fast and fun and smiley, right? [00:05:20] And I had to pull all of that kind of back out, and that was, that was fucking hard, right?
So this is why I know that it's fucking hard to do this stuff and it takes time, right? This is why I'm telling you this story. This. Takes time. Okay. Even when you've been doing it for 25 years, sometimes more because you've been doing it for 25 years, right? So, but, but regardless, however old you are, you have patterns in place that need to be unwound, right?
Even if they're not voiceover patterns, they might just be speaking patterns or breathing patterns, or movement patterns, or reading patterns, right? But those things have to be undone before you can build new stuff, right? So that's one of the reasons why it takes time. So I had to undo. All of that structure.
Right? And, and um, like unconscious fucking competence, right? Which is really intense. It's hard work. I'm doing unconscious incom unconscious competence, right? So I undid it all. Took about six months to undo and then I started getting that work coming through the door and it was awesome. It was really, really, really cool.
And, and, Few years I've done lots and lots of that kind of work, right? But about six months ago or so, I was asked to audition to be the new National Voice of rac, right? And there's a big, big, if you don't know who, rac, I'll just Google them, right? Um, big company in Australia. Big gig, right? And fuck, I really wanted it, of course, cuz you always want the big national voice of kicks, right?
Like they're the cream of the crowd, right? They're the shit that you really, really, really want to get. So I really wanted it, and I was down to a short list of three people, right? So I got to go into a studio. I was directed by, uh, an engineer, producer, um, voice director that I've worked with for years and years and years.
It was all really comfortable. It was excellent. I loved all of it. We had a really good time. We recorded some stuff. I, um, I submitted it. I didn't get it right. And the, the, uh, female voice who. It is beautiful and fantastic. Really, really amazing. Does a very, very different read to what I did and was directed to for my audition, right?
And it was much more neutral, way softer, way softer than even where I'd gotten to with my, oh, I'm gonna do things more softly kind of process, right? Really, really understated, hardly anything going on like a, but like a. On the surface of the water, right? Like super chill on top. But there's, there's a lot of work going on in the background to generate something like that.
So, Okay, so to bring it back to to where we started, right? This audition that I had yesterday for insert big client name here, right? Um, the two things that are super awesome about this right, is that I get to lean into my Australian Nest, but also. To bring it back to that whole conversation around style and decisions around auditions and all that kind of thing.
This time when I looked at that Australian iconic female, young, you know, there, there were no adjectives in there that said excited or enthusiastic or anything like that, right? And so I immediately thought about the R RAC campaign and I've listened to that really. , right? The reeds are awesome. They're very cool, and they are absolutely of that incredibly neutral, but not nothing at all.
There's so much going on in there, but it's so subtle. Okay? So I decided to lean into that for this audition, right? Lean into my lovely Australian nest when I let it come through, right? But also lean into that neutral, neutral, neutral. , right? And I did a couple of reads to myself of the script, and then I just popped open Audacity and I recorded three in a row.
and I sent them off to my agent and she was like, oh, these are fab. I love them. I think they're exactly what they're looking for. So this is good. Right? It's nice to get that feedback from the agent cuz you know, you know, it's, it feels good , it's really nice to, to get that kind of approval right. But also, I, I knew when I sent them off that, that I was doing the thing that was in the right zone.
And here's the, here's the kicker, right? It's taken me years to get. . Right. And I've been trying to do this for a pretty long time now. It hasn't taken me years to get to a point where I can do it. I could do it a while ago, right? But this time it just flowed out of me. Like fucking melted butter, right?
Like it just, it was like a ribbon of, of exactly what I needed it to be. And that is what takes ages and ages and ages to do. And it's really interesting, right? Because there's, who did I read this from? I, I don't remember where these numbers came from. It might be James Clear. But it might not be. I'm not sure.
So the, the kind of prevailing theory is that it takes about 28 days to like form a new habit. But really all you've done is just kind of like learn the new thing, right? Takes about six months for that like thing to become. At that like unconscious competence kind of stage where you don't have to think about it while you're doing it.
You can just do it, and then it takes two years for something to become part of your personality and how you operate and what you do. And that is what just happened for me, right? So yesterday was the first experience I had that proved to me that that read is now part of my reper. [00:10:40] Without me having to think about it, I can step into that straight away and it's taken two to three years.
So I want you to keep that in mind, right? This shit takes time and you have to be committed to the long haul. If you wanna get to a point where things are in that unconscious competence space, that that's mastery, my friends, that's mastery.
