On “not playing the game”
A cool, well meaning dude wrote me an e-mail critiquing my new voiceover resume site, www.michaeldeanvoice.com.
I won’t reprint his e-mail here, because I didn’t ask his permission, and he took a lot of time with it, and I don’t want to look like I’m slamming him (I’m not). But here’s the reply I sent him:
—-
Hey sir,
I appreciate you doing this offlist, and for taking all the time to critique it. Some good comments here.
First, please look at the site again, I believe I already changed it before you wrote your letter…My podcast link is gone, the font colors are changed, and there are Flash players so you don’t have to leave the page.
As for the “1997 design”, well, I learned HTML in 1996, perfected my style with it in 1997, and actually haven’t changed a bit since then. But I like it. I think it looks good in this day and age, and not like most other sites. You think StinkFight looks better, but it’s a Word Press template, and looks like all the other Word Press sites. People often tell me to update my Web sites’ look, but they invariably suggest I homogenize it into the latest flavor. That’s not for me.
Yes, having a YouTube video seems “below the fold”, but that video has gone viral, it’s had 127,000 hits in about ten days. I’d like to think my voice contributed in some small way to that.
I’ll look into the site you suggested, Voice123.com, I did briefly a few months ago, but it seemed like a lot of wannabes to me. I’ll look at it more closely though, and consider buying space to put a reel on there. But I’m generally offended by sites that “talk to me” when I load them, and the voices that load at me as soon as I go to that site, the ones put there by the site’s owner, sound horribly generic to me.
I sound like a stoned surfer with a slight lisp. I’m not going to get work doing dog food or hemroid cream or Chevy truck commercials. Nor would I want to, even if it paid a lot. But a lot of people really love my voice, and keep asking me to do free work, so I think there’s a demand for me to get more paid work. I just don’t want to do it the “normal” way. I never do anything “the normal way.”
Basically I make a living making media, and I mostly do it my own way.
Check out the CV link I’ve added to the page. None of it is “below the fold”. I do a lot of different things: writing books, making films, producing and creating music, writing for different media sites, and I’ve done paid voice work.
Usually when I’m starting out with new things, people tell me to “do it the way everyone else is doing it”, I don’t, and end up making a name for myself doing it my way anyway.
Most of the work I get from any of the many different things I do for pay is from referrals from people I know anyway, so I’m not that concerned with looking like the latest flavor.
Respectfully,
MWD
November 30th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Ooops. I found out later that “below the fold” means “below the line you have to scroll to see on a computer.” (It’s an old newspaper term, for stuff you can’t see in the street box.)
I was thinking it meant “unimportant”. I think I was thinking of the film biz accounting term “below the line” which means “everyone who isn’t important enough to be on the movie poster.” (”above the line” is the director, stars, producer, cinematographer and writer.)