I have a good sense of humor and all, but a lot of videos circulating around the internet these days are nowhere near as funny as these two featuring Yoda and Darth Vader and their respective voices for the new Tom Tom commercials.

Darth Vader has some trouble with words ending in a hard T.

And Yoda has trouble being seen and with sentence construction.

Definite props must be given to these voice over actors for their amazing impersonations of these classic characters. (You get props too if you can tell me who they are in the comments).

Not only did they record these commercials, but they also recorded the whole track for the GPS itself which I cannot even begin to comprehend the amount of reading and takes that would… well… take.

These make me wish I had a Tom Tom, because I’m sure the voices are just as hilarious as these commercials.

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Outright
This service automatically imports your paid invoices from Freshbooks and keeps track of your expenses, profits, estimated taxes, and can export to ANY financial or tax software. Did I mention this was FREE!? This site is one of those sites that will help you stay organized and help you keep your books in order, be that for your business or for personal use (I use it for both!).

Google Documents

In my mind there is no better company in the world than Google, I could devote a whole blog post to how awesome their company and all their services are (hey, that’s not that bad of an idea!). This has to be my favorite service of theirs (not including the search engine, GMail, or their advertisement services). This is your space online to store all of your documents. That may sound boring, but it’s awesome! The service is free (once again) and you can store, edit, view, and share ANY kind of document: PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, real text format, and plain text. Check it out! It’s really handy for helping clients with scripts or showing them your rate card, or any of another billion uses you can think of!

Launchy

Do you ever get tired of meandering through menus or digging through your dock to try to find that program? Well, no more. Launchy is a lightweight program that runs in the background and is activated by ALT+Space. When you activate it, you can launch any program on your computer just by typing in the name. How cool is that? This program saves me tons of time, I’m sure it will for you too!

Audacity

I’ve saved the best for last, especially for a blog about voice overs. Audacity is one of the best audio editors on the market, free or not. I use it when I’m not running windows (on Mac or Linux) and I love it! It has all the functionality of most audio editors and gives you some awesome capabilities when it comes to filters, importing, and exporting of audio. If I were to have a figurative voice over toolbelt, audacity would be on it. Try it out, what have you got to lose? It’s free!

Well, that’s not all the open source software in existence, but it’s definitely a recap of my favorites.

How do you go about obtaining the software that I mentioned? There’s a couple of ways. On some of the listings, I provided a link in the title of the software. Click on that, and away you go. If there is no link in the title of the software, just google it and make sure you download it from one of the top few links (to make sure you don’t infect yourself with a virus or anything.)

Happy Open Sourcing!

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Paypal.

Paypal is a service that allows you to send and receive payment without sharing your financial information with anyone. I use it on my website to take payment from clients. (See the bottom of www.voiceofmichael.com). Since I am a business member of paypal, I can take credit card payments as well. There are different levels of paypal for different users, check it out and see what level of service is best for you.

Since every voice over person I know does work remotely (and sometimes never even meets their clients face to face), how do you expect them to pay you? If you’re waiting on a check in the mail, there’s a good chance it might not show up. Cash by mail? Forget it! Western Union? That’s getting desperate. You need Paypal so you can make money on the internet. It’s very secure, probably one of the most secure sites on the net. Go to their site and sign up right now!

There are other payment services on the net, but I can’t remember them off the top of my head. Share other payment services you use in the comments.

Hope all of you had a happy holidays, I know I did. Be looking for the next post soon! Subscribe to my feed at the top of the page to get my posts delivered to your mailbox instantly.

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Getting by with a little (or maybe a whole lot of help) from our friends involves reading blogs like this one and talking to other VO people about what they do and how they do it. The best way to do that is by posting to VO bulletin boards like these:

http://www.vo-bb.com

http://www.voiceoversavvy.com/

http://www.voice-overs.com/forum/

http://www.radiodaddy.com/ http://www.voicedaddy.com/

I’ll go into more detail about the previous links. Radio Daddy and Voice Daddy are awesome ideas. It is a forum where people request free voiceovers. Some people have their issues with this board, but I don’t. I think it’s an awesome way to practice our craft and help someone else at the same time. If you’re new to voiceover, read my last few posts, get your studio setup, register with RadioDaddy and just start doing it! Ask for feedback from the voice pros. They’re always willing to help. I am a voicepro on Voicedaddy.com which is the same thing as RadioDaddy… almost. There’s a little less traffic on VoiceDaddy.

There’s plenty going on all of those forums, it should be enough to keep you busy for a few hours.

There are more forums out there, but I wouldn’t waste your time with them. You’ll see what I mean if you google search for “voice over forum”.

Happy posting!

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