Meet Voicereel.com — A Visual Portfolio Builder for Voice Talents

Over the last few years, the voice-over industry has grown and changed considerably. Online marketplaces and the widespread availability of affordable recording equipment have made starting a career in the voiceover business easier than ever before. However, many newcomers are unable to provide high-quality VO services due to a lack of adequate training, audio engineering experience or business skills.

While everyone must start somewhere, and some of these new talents will be able to learn, grow, and evolve into industry professionals, currently “newbies” are usually grouped in with more experienced pros on casting sites, audition pools, and search platforms. This overcrowding leads to a cluttered atmosphere that confuses the branding of pro talent and can make it difficult for them to stand out, reach new prospective clients, land agency representation, and showcase their work effectively.

As the voice-over industry grows, it’s important for talent to have a strong personal brand online. The voice-over portfolio — usually called a “demo reel” or “voice reel” — is vital for professional voice talents to reach more clients and increase awareness in the crowded market.

We’ve created Voicereel.com as a simple-to-use portfolio system for voice-over talent to highlight their skills in a modern and professional-looking online presentation — that they can have up and running in matter of minutes, with no coding experience.

After launching our private Beta version this year, with over 1000 early users, we’ve continued to develop and shape a tailored platform for voice-over artists to showcase themselves to potential clients, agents, and anyone else who may be interested in their work.

Here are some principles and ideas that led us to create Voicereel:

• Voiceover Websites — There are great options today for creating your own website; however, these tools and platforms still require some creativity and a bit more technological know-how than many VO talents have. Voicereel offers artists an incredibly easy way to create a professional portfolio and “home” for their voice-over work online.
• Your Work First — Your portfolio is the showcase of your achievements, your expertise, and your skills for future jobs. Just as designers do, it’s very important to keep your portfolio updated, showing past and current projects. You never know when new opportunities will arise.
• Personal Branding — Your space on Voicereel is a microsite created around your work and personal brand. You won’t be sending clients to a source where lots of other, competing VO talent can be found. When you share a link to your Voicereel portfolio, there are no internal links to other talent profiles.
• Self-Marketing — It’s becoming more and more important for artists to market their personal brands on their own and engage with new prospects regularly. Consistent marketing will always be a crucial part of a successful business. Voicereel.com plays an important role in helping voice talents to promote their brand and build their Voice-Over career.
• Beautiful Design — We’d also like to see VO talent have a way to present their work in a more personal manner. While file transfer options like Dropbox or WeTransfer offer great ways for talent and clients to share files back and forth, this is rather impersonal, and we feel there is opportunity for a platform that allows for a more impactful presentation of auditions and other samples.
• Transparency — Voicereel provides a transparent space for business opportunities and transactions, without a middleman. It’s a place where artists can showcase all the unique aspects of their talent and provide all the necessary information that a prospective client might want, including contact information.

Presenting your work with Voicereel

Voicereel offers a simple-to-use, drag-and-drop style interface that allows VO talents to create their own hub that showcases their voice demos, expertise, social network profiles, contact information, and anything else they may choose.

Further, the platform automatically displays all of these elements in a beautiful, feature-rich, and mobile-friendly design that will leave a lasting impression on those who view it. This makes Voicereel a great first “home” for talent on the web, or a great complement to an existing personal website.

Let’s take a closer look at some specifics:

Organize your demos

The user-friendly interface allows you to upload demos of your work and properly label, tag, and categorize them to begin building your portfolio. When uploading a clip of a single spot or work example, you have the option of including the client/brand as well. Each demo and audio clip you upload will be displayed with all of the relevant metadata that you provide.

You can quickly edit, remove, and manage all your demos visually, without needing any technical skills. Furthermore, you can arrange your audio files into folders for your own private organization.

Share Playlists

With playlists, you can create groups of audio files to share publicly or privately. Some ideas and potential uses of this feature are to create a “read style” playlist that you can share with clients, filled with individual clips demonstrating a variety of different readings. Or you can use playlists to create “extended demo reels” where you may, for instance, create a “Commercial Demos” playlist that is populated with full clips from your commercial work, rather than short snippets like a traditional reel. This gives prospects who listen to your reels a way to further explore your work and your talent.

Your Public Profile

You can choose the URL suffix that you would like to represent your Voicereel profile and simply share the link anywhere you would like to promote yourself and your VO services.

Presentation-Focused

With Voicereel’s Presentation Mode, viewers can listen to and view your work in a beautiful, clutter-free player and easily navigate to the different audio files on your profile in a seamless and intuitive way. This is a great way to showcase specific audio clips to prospects or clients who may ask to hear a sample of previous work or an audition for a project that they are casting.

Need Privacy? No Problem

Every file and playlist on your account can be either public, for anyone who visits your profile, or private, for you to share with those you choose. This can be handy when working with clients and prospects with whom you may wish to share specific demos or playlists.

What’s Next

We have some great updates coming soon. Our plan for Voicereel.com is to constantly improve and adapt the platform to meet the needs of the voice-over artists who utilize it. Here are some of our plans for the future, to make Voicereel a more useful tool for the voice-over community.

• Video Support — We plan to add the capability for talent to include video files on their profiles to showcase acting or dubbing projects that they have worked on as well as final spots featuring their VO work.
• Embed Player — This will allow users to embed their Voicereel-hosted content (clips and playlists) and utilize all of the presentation features of Voicereel on their own sites and social media.
• Landing Page Builder — This will provide more design and customization options for users to have even more control over their profile and bring the Voicereel platform closer to a full-featured website-creation tool for voice talent.
• Proposal and Estimate Generator — This feature will allow talent to send out quotes and proposals to prospects from the platform and include media from their Voicereel profile, as well as store templates to help streamline marketing efforts.
• Social Media Content — With Voicereel social content, users can customize template videos and other content with their own media and information, and then share on social platforms as part of their marketing plan.
• Integration with other Apps — Integrating the Voicereel platform with services such as Remote Recording, Payment Gateways, Cloud Storage, Communications, Email Campaign tools, or other common services and platforms that VO talent use, would be a great way to add to the value of Voicereel.
• Voice-Over Listings — This potential feature would be a way for prospects and clients to use Voicereel as sort of a transparent “directory of VO” that they can use to source talent for their projects.

We are excited about where Voicereel is and where it can go!

Voicereel is built to support the marketing needs of freelance voice-over talents. By creating your online presence easily, your time can be spent on what matters most: growing and developing your career.

In order to build the best possible product, we would appreciate your feedback. If you have any comments or questions that can help us further improve the platform, please feel free to drop us a line anytime!

We look forward to sharing the journey with you.

This post was originally published on www.voicereel.blog

For more information, follow us on Twitter and Facebook or visit Voicereel.com