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Hello, welcome to Avio's Journey and A Vo's Journey podcast. It's Friday, Friday, May 17th. It is great to be coming to you all. I'm. I'm excited. We hit number 200 this morning for our Coffee time videos. That is so cool. And, you know, we are. I think this is episode 270, if I. If I'm correct for our podcast. You know what? We've been in the 200s way too long. We are getting closer to 300, and I'm. I'm really excited about it. We'll have to do something special for 300. You know, do a giveaway. Always like to do a giveaway when we hit, you know, one of those hundred marks. So, you know, that's always a lot of fun. But very excited to be coming to you guys today. Our topic we're going to be talking about, and I think it's one that is simple, yet extremely profound, and that is audition until you're blue in the face. That is the topic of today. We're going to dive into that and really talk about auditioning, where to audition, maybe a few tips on how to audition. Maybe get a little bit more attraction with your auditions, all of that, but the main topic is audition, audition, audition until you are blue in the face. All right, so just a couple of housekeeping things. Don't forget that we have coming up on Monday, the start of our Memorial Day week special, and we're super excited about that because we're going to be opening up Avivo's Journey Elite Academy for a really low price, just to get people's foot in the door, give it a shot and get a chance to check it out. And if you like it, you can stick around. But it's a lot of exciting things going over there. And of course, it's a nice stepping stone into Academy voices and getting voiceover work. I'm really excited about that. So make sure you check that out. That's starting on Monday, going through Memorial Day week, Monday to Monday. So really thrilled. So don't forget that. Okay, so. And also, don't forget to check out Academy Voices. And there's a form on there. You can just go there and check it out. Look at the talent roster. There's so many more people who've applied. I haven't been able to get to everybody yet because we're just super swamped there. But keep plugging away and I will get there. So very excited about that. We're working on also some really cool certifications that we're going to start doing to really help voice actors know, for example, about their audio is quality, things like that. So we can really start bringing some of that to the industry. I think that's going to be a really good thing. All right. But anyway, so let's go ahead and dive into what we want to talk about today. Audition, audition, audition until you are blue in the face. Now, if you've watched any time with me, you know that I have a love hate relationship with auditions, right? Some days I'm all about auditioning, you know, and I'm, you know, all for it. I'm all in. And then other days I'm like, oh, I don't want to audition. Okay. And I think that probably I'll just go out on a limb. That's probably most of us feel that way, you know, And I think that's because the nature of auditioning is that we are just doing these auditions, throwing them out in the ether, hoping that something happens. And the act of auditioning itself, and I've talked about this too, gets kind of boring. I mean, the reality is you audition, you audition, you audition. And then what's even more challenging and frustrating is that you do auditions and no one responds to you. Not even like a response to say, hey, thanks for your audition. We didn't choose you because of xyz. Like, we don't even get any response. We don't, we. Or it wouldn't be even nice if they said thanks for the audition. But a lot of times you don't even get that. And on some of the platforms, you get notified that you didn't even get, like, listened to. So that's, that's another whole problem there, right, with your, with the auditioning. So I think that that's, that's something to think about, you know, that can frustrate you about auditions. Okay. But let's, let's kind of talk about why, you know, I'm saying audition until you're blue in the face. The main, and this is a great topic for Friday, I think don't forget ever, ever in your business, and I think any business, the main goal of a business is to get clients, is to get actual business. That's the main goal. So if that's the main goal, which it is, then our main job is to do the few, the fewest of things that will get us work. All right? What I mean, fewest of things? I mean, the things. The, the only things, right? We're going to do only things. There we go. That's better. We're going to do only things that are going to get us work. Yes, of course. I know someone's thinking about Anthony. There's. I've got to do this and I have to do that. Usually there are other things you have to do, and they're necessary evils to running a business. But the majority of your time, effort, thought, needs to go into doing only things that get you business have the potential to get you business. Since forever, pretty much, auditioning has been the way that performers are hired, right? Because basically in the mind of the creator, the producer, the client, they have something in their minds that they want to put into their, you know, a voice, a style, a feeling they're trying to get across into whatever marketing, whatever education, whatever entertainment they're putting out. Okay? And they have to try to find that in a sea, an ocean of talent. And auditioning is the way that people can sift through those oceans and find hopefully what they're looking for. I wanted to phrase it like that because I wanted to kind of get your mind wrapped around the idea that auditioning is your foot in the door. But it's not a. I mean, it can be, but most of the times if you have good training and you're working hard at your craft, it's not a referendum on your talent or abilities. Okay? You know, I've always. I've said this for the longest time, and I'm going to say it again just so you understand. I'll never be cast in a movie as a six foot five basketball player. I'm not six foot five. All right? And I'm not a basketball player. And I'm never going to be cast for that. Why not? Because I'm not a good actor. Because I don't fit what they're looking for in that role. Okay? That has nothing to do with how good or bad I am. And because we are an entire world made up of different types of people, different sizes, different colors, different thoughts and feelings and identities. We all have a place in what we do. All of us. It doesn't matter. All right? Whether you're short, tall, skinny, fat, young, old. All of us have a place in what we do. This is important. I'm saying this for a reason. Because I work with so many people who fear they're too young, they're too old, they're too happy, they're too sad, their voice is too high pitched, their voice is too deep, their voice isn't happy enough or their voice is too level or their voice, they don't fit this criteria. They don't fit that criteria. They don't hear. There is so much room for all of us. Auditioning is the process in which that is being found, that is being sifted through, that is being searched for. And most of the time, and this is true most of the time, the auditions that you do, and you know this, if you started auditioning or auditioned at all, they do not ever, ever adequately tell you what it is they're really looking for. Most auditions that we see on platforms now that we do a lot of auditioning on, okay, there is very little information, sometimes a sentence or two about directions and thoughts, but there's no context, there's no, this is what we stand for, this is who we are. This is the character that you're doing. And here's a two page bio on who they are, what they believe, what their opinions are of life. We were working last night in Avil's Journey Lead Academy. Thursday nights are our script reading nights and we were working specifically last night and taking your character, whether you're doing a commercial, whether you're doing an animation character, a video game character, you know, documentary, whatever you're doing, okay? And making your character have an opinion about their life, right? Because if you don't have an opinion, if you don't have an outlook, if your character doesn't have layers to them, then you basically are just reading words off a page and you're trying to make it sound interesting. A lot of very successful voice actors and things that you see and that do very well with auditions, you'll notice, it seems like, why does it seem so effortless? And why do they, you know, why does it seem so confident a lot? Sorry, I've got a cold today. But a lot of those people, right, who've gotten to that point, what you're hearing is confidence and their opinion and outlook on life for them shines through from what the words they're saying. It's an extension. It's an extension. The words are an extension of that opinion. Now, I use the word opinion loosely, okay, not so much. It can be a singular opinion or it can be a broad opinion about life in general or about something particular. Like it could be opinion about the food that you like or don't like, or could be opinion about the state of the world. In your opinion, right? In your, like these are these. And remember, it's that character. So having that opinion really pushes you to start to think about, well, what is, you know, what am I saying? What is this character actually saying subtext wise the story underneath the story. What is the story underneath the story? What does that character care about? Here's the thing. We're not just like I was saying a few minutes ago, we're not going to get those directions. Nine times out of 10 and a lot of times the person who has even posted the stuff, they don't even know because they're searching for someone to bring it. They might have an idea in their head of a feeling they want to get to, but. But a lot of times they don't know how to get there. They're not trained or spent the time to dive into the psyche in that manner. That's our job. That's what we do. That's what we are trying to do is get into the mind of that character, that person, that opinion or opinions. Then the words that we have for auditions or whatever, that is an extension of that opinion. So the idea here is that you should be able to have those opinions, those layers for whatever character that you're doing. Remember, a character can be for a real commercial or a video game character or an audiobook narrator or an E learning narrator, a documentary diary, say meditation, whatever. It can be for anything. It can be an automotive ad. You are still playing a character, right? And that character has some sort of opinion and an outlook on life, right? Even if it's a lot, even if it's a word. You know, I always love that funny thing where it's like EA Sports, like, well, how am I supposed to have an opinion of the world on EA Sports? You know, how many times you could say EA Sports differently, okay? And I'm not saying that you need to write down the two page bio, but you have to have some sort of outlook or opinion, all right? To effectively, you know, bring more than just you speaking on words on a page. All right? So I wanted to kind of give you a little tip there and think about that. Think about you in general when you go to do something, all right? It's always based off of, think about you as a person. It's always based off of you individually. You know, your thoughts, your experiences, your opinions about life and about the world and about your family and about friends and about, you know, the government and about money, about your, your aunt, your pets, every. You have opinions about everything, right? Some might be stronger than others, but those opinions shape how you step through life. Okay? And the same goes for us as voice actors, but 99.9999% of the time there's always that like 0.1% of someone who does bring something for you. But the reality is, 99.99% of the time, you have to make it up for your auditions, for the characters you play, for the voiceovers. You do. You have to make it up. That's the wonderful thing about this. We get to pretend, you know, it's like that. That Lord of the Rings or that. That Sir Ian, right? It's like, how do I become Gandalf? I pretend. How do I become a wizard? I. I make it up. I pretend. That's the whole thing. It really is pretending. Of course, some people are better at pretending than others. That. That boils down, if you want to know. Auditioning, voice, acting, acting in general. How good do you pretend? That's it. It goes back to when we were kids and we're playing and we were pretending. How good do you pretend? Okay, now the idea of auditioning until you're blue in the face, that's a. So we were talking. I kind of went off. You know me, I go off on tangents. That's why I thank you all for listening. Sometimes I think people probably don't listen because they can't, you know, like, he's like, God, he's everywhere. But I, you know, I kind of. None of this is scripted, as you probably can tell. So, you know, I just let it go. I let it fly. But anyways, so I was. I was. I wanted to share with you the thoughts there about, you know, what is auditioning, you know, in my mind and that. Those opinions and things. But let's go back to now. Why. Why did I say audition until you are blue in the face? I could have said, you know, pick a couple auditions that are really meant for you. And that is a tactic, right? Some people do have a better percentage of audition, like jobs to auditions, Right? And a lot of times those people, they search specifically for auditions that meet, you know, whatever criteria, like maybe very specifically their age, the style that they go for, the feel that they like to do, etc. And that's great. There's nothing wrong with that. But what I'm saying is, is that this whole. Because I hope I laid that out before. This is a sifting process. You don't know what those people are looking for. They could be looking for you. Exactly. You. They could be looking for the sound of your voice, the feel of your voice, the feeling they get when they listen to you read the words. They could be looking for you. Exactly. But they don't know how to put that down. They have no clue how to Put that down. So all they can, right, is put the audition out there and listen. And a lot of times people don't even know what the heck they're looking for. They're hoping that you bring it so then they can say, aha, that's it, I found it. They don't know. They just know they found something they liked from you and it elicits the feeling they were hoping to have to feel. Right? That's. So you have to audition in order to find that. And the act of not winning an audition, that's not again, a referendum on you and whether or not you are good at this or not. Okay. It is the fact that they are sifting through to find what they are looking for. Now I have to, because I can hear it. I'm hearing it in my head, me telling myself, and I'm sure someone out there is thinking the same thing. It can be. It can be also that you do need more, you know, acting training, right? You do need to make sure, you know, your audio maybe is not up to quality. I mean, there are specific things that we as voice actors, we are, we as business owners have to make sure that the product we are producing is of the highest quality. Because the people we are competing against, many of them have very high quality, very high standards. So we have to make sure that our standards meet those standards. Okay, how do you know that? Well, again, going back to VO's Journey Lead Academy, wherever you are, you need to be somewhere where you have people who are helping you, you with your standards, who can, you know, you can go to them and say, I respect this person. I think they know what they're talking about and they can give. You know what I mean? We as a community agree that they know what they're saying. So I can rest assured. And you know what? I'm going to give you a secret. You can do all that too. And you will still, you will still might not have the confidence even after you get someone telling you that you're doing great or you're doing good, your audio sounds good, your voice acting is good. You still will not feel fully confident until you do these things like auditioning, until you're blue in the face. Getting work and then getting job after job after job, it takes time. It doesn't only take time to build a business, but it takes time for you to build confidence. And I'm telling you, one of the only ways you build real confidence is by doing this, getting booked, getting hired over and over again. And then you will realize one day, you'll wake up and say, oh, crap, there are people who really love my voice and there are people who will never hire me. And that's okay because there is enough people in this world who will hire me that I'm going to be perfectly fine. You'll, you'll realize that one day, but in the beginning, you won't realize that at all. You'll think there's no one anywhere who wants to hire you. You just say that you suck. Something sucks. So the idea here of the auditioning until you're blue in the face, not only does it clearly get you one of the closest ways to get work on a quick and regular basis, but it also builds confidence for you, right? It builds confidence. You need to know that you can audition. You need to know that you can audition and get work. You need to know. You need to know this because there's going to be times where you're trying something and you're doing something and you're going down a rabbit hole. You need to be able to know this is what I have to do. This is the only thing I really have to do. I know if I do this, it's going to produce that. You've got to audition until you're blue in the face. If you are stuck somewhere, you're not getting work, you can't figure out what to do. Take a step back. We've talked about earlier this week in some of my videos, especially the first bit on Monday, we talked about tracking, right? We talked about tracking. Most people don't track where they are. And I think I put out a video yesterday, you know, a short on tracking. Look, you need to start tracking what you're doing. See if you are actually, you know, doing auditions on a regular basis. How many are you doing? You know, two to three or four a week is not enough. Not enough. Somebody say, well, what is enough? Auditions. What does that mean to audition? Blue in the face, as many as you possibly can, literally. And when you start getting work, don't stop auditioning unless you want to be on a non stop roller coaster. You've got to separate your time. I want you to think about that is a daily activity that you need to do is just audition, audition, audition, audition, audition, audition. No matter what, just audition. Here's another thing about the auditioning, right? You're going to get better at it and you're going to get faster at it. A lot of challenges I see are people are like, well, I want to audition more. But the reality is either a, I can't get more auditions. Okay. Or B, it's taking me for, like, it takes me 30, 45 minutes or an hour to do one audition. So how can I do, you know, 20 audition, 30 auditions in a day. I don't have that much time. I can't do it for 20 hours. You'd be. So if it's taking you that long, you should be shooting for five to ten minutes an audition. I don't care what it is, whether it's an audio book or a commercial, it should not take you more than five to ten minutes. So if you game that out logically, you should be able to get six to eight auditions done in an hour. And if you start to play your cards right and start to learn how to manipulate, you know, open multiple windows, bam, bam, bam, bam. You can actually pump out a lot more auditions. Now. You're going to hear all sorts of things. Like, on this platform, I get penalized if I audition too much. On this platform, I've got to do this, and on this platform, I got to do that. Screw it. You will always have something telling you, don't do this, don't do that, don't try this, don't try that. You have to break through all of that. Not saying to be dumb about what you're doing, okay? But I'm just saying that don't stop, don't stop ever. We had the quote this morning from Walt Disney, get a good idea and stay with it, dog it, and work it until it's done right? That's it. Stay with it, do it, dog it over, over again. I think I've said that enough now. You're probably like, I get it. We get it. Guys, thank you so much. It's been a wonderful week. We've got a lot of good content out this week, I think. And, you know, I tried. I wanted to make sure that this week we. I put out because, you know, the last. Gosh, I feel like the last year content has been rolling out. It has, but it's not been as steady as it's been in past years, you know, and this week I really wanted to do, you know, try to make sure that we've had that steady content, not just from, you know, the shorts, the videos, but also getting back into podcasting. There's so many people who listen to podcasts. I listen to podcasts, you know, and so I'm very happy and thankful that you guys have been listening to all of these. And please feel free to share them. You know what I mean? Follow them. You know, we're going to keep going with this format seems to be working and, you know, I, I'm really impressed by what I'm seeing. You know, we have a lot of amazing people at Avio's Journey Elite Academy. A lot of them are starting to see really great work coming in and it's picking up and I'm really excited and blessed about that. Academy Voices is growing. You know, this has been a building year. There's no doubt about it, you know, so there's definitely been ups and downs. Don't forget there are summer doldrums. All right? If you've been in this industry anytime, you understand there are cyclical. We are in a, we're in a cyclical business. Okay? So summer typically is very chaotic or sporadic, right? Very sporadic. Meaning, like there's, you know, sometimes you get some good business, sometimes it seems dead. Okay? So just remember that. Remember that. So don't freak out. Keep auditioning. It's the whole point. Keep auditioning. All right, you guys have a wonderful, wonderful weekend. Thank you so much. Don't forget, we're coming back on Monday. We're going to be launching our week long Memorial Day special. So can't wait to get you guys signed up and check out Avio's Journey Lead Academy. Get your assessment done, start getting you closer to getting on Academy voices and all that jazz. So thank you guys so much. Have a wonderful weekend. Goodbye. Goodbye. Peace.