A talent for voice, a voice for talents: CreatiVoices Productions

A talent
for voice, a
voice for talents:
CreatiVoices Productions

With pod casting now becoming a
growing phenomenon , it was only a
matter of time before the need for
professional voice and
production facilities become apparent. This is where CreatiVoices Productions
steps in.

With this teen-idol aura, Pocholo "Choy" Gonzales appears too
young at first glance to be running a
business, particularly one that has ambitions of turning an entire industry on
its head. But Choy has been working since he was still a student, and his efforts to develop leadership among
children and youth led to his being recently recognized by no less than Nokia
as part of a group of
self-motivated Asian youth devoted in social empowerment.

And he is out to professionalize the entire Philippine voice talent
industry- a huge, invincible,
behind-the-scenes business the few people know about and, as a result, is prone to abuse by the media. CreatiVoices
Productions, a voice talent
agency and professional recording studio, seeks to resolve this problem, and
one of its initial strategies for
penetrating the market is through the growing trend of pod casting.

Desktop Broadcasting, for better or worse

In the same way that desktop publishing has placed the power of the printing
press into the hands of the individual, pod casts now offer the individual the
power to broadcast audio streams to the world at large via the internet. The
word "podcast" taken from the "iPod" and broadcast,"
has quickly entered the common phraseology among the geek set although
listeners need not own an Apple iPod.

The podcasting community is indeed growing and there's now a little bit of everything, from
high-traffic sites such as Leo Laborite's "This Week in Tech", to
cult sites such as the Filipino "Top Dogs," to thousands of nameless
individuals who are now trying to express themselves over the internet through
the power of the podcast.

Unfortunately, says Choy, just because you can do it doesn't necessarily
mean that should. "Anybody with a
voice recorder and an internet
connection can make a podcast,
" says Choy. "But the problem is, will people really want to listen
to you?"

True enough, with the power of broadcasting now placed in the hands of the
amateurs, except to find legions of podcasts that are, to put it bluntly,
indigestible – with garbled sound, faint volume, background noise, little or no
editing, lots of dead air, aimless blather, or simply cursed with an
uncharismatic voice. Any of
these can be enough to make listeners tune out almost immediately.

So even if anybody can make a
podcast, CreatiVoices Productions believes that truly serious podcasters who
want long-term audiences would rather let the pros guide them.

Podcasting primer

"To make a really
good podcast, you need three things," says Choy. "First, you really
need a good script. Next, you
need a professional voice talent.
And third, you need a
broadcast-quality studio facility to record your podcast in."

Most amateurs make the mistake if just sitting in front of a microphone and muttering whatever comes to
mind. And while this maybe sufficient to feed the podcaster's ego, nobody
really wants to listen to the aimless ramblings of some stranger. A script helps to organize the presentation,
and organizing the script requires some level of creative skill.

The podcaster's voice can
be the second obstacle. Not everybody has aural charisma, and sometimes it
takes a pro to convey one's
message with the proper enunciation, confidence and diction. Fortunately for those who want to convey their
messages themselves, voice
training is available.

And while anybody in a
bedroom with a microphone can
record a podcast, the truth is
that the typical home environment doesn't have good acoustics. Besides, you
wouldn't want to be in the middle of a
serious discussion and have a tricycles
with a bad muffler puttering
by. Also, most over-the-counter microphones do not capture the nuance of the voice sufficiently. So it helps to
record at a studio, where the
environment is completely controlled and microphones are studio-quality.

CreatiVoices Productions seeks to address all of the above by providing
scriptwriting and editing services, professional voice talents
and voice training, and a world-class recording studio. But
it all began with the voice.

Birth of a vision

"CreatiVoices is all about voices," says Choy. Choy set up the
company just last November 2005. "It's a
recording studio and is the very first voice
talent agency in the
country."

The problem, says Choy, is that the voice
talents don't have a choice. Without industry standards or
representation, they would just accept any project that comes their way,
without knowing what the proper rates ought to be. Veteran radio drama voice talents are the most hard-pressed, since they are now
old and know of no other means for
their livelihood. "From 500 pesos it became just 300 pesos per script. And
now they're just getting 80 pesos per script. Imagine that. Nakakaawa,"
says Choy.

Even powerful networks abuse their voice
talents. He was a voice
talent at ABS-CBN for several years, where he became the voice of Sanchai's father in the
popular TV show "Meteor
Garden," among
others. "I was earning a
thousand pesos per episode in 1996. But now they just earn 200 to 500 pesos per
episode. Imbis na tumaas, bumaba." Voice
talents get work mainly
because the director is their friend. No contracts exchanged hands.

Choy was relatively fortunate. Aside from radio and tv, he has done hundreds
of commercials, including mimicking the voices of Senator Juan Flavier and
their host Mike Enriquez (for
which he won a Best Voice Talent
award at last year's Ad Congress). He has thus made his first million with his voice.

But not every voice talent is fortunate, and this is
what CreatiVoices seeks to address.

Podcasting the pro way

CreatiVoices has invested in world-class equipment. In its efficient studio,
an Apple G5 rests beneath a
desk. Connected to it is an array of professional digital recording devices.
"The software alone cost almost a
million," says Choy.

The company takes pod casting seriously. "We use scripts for our podcasts. And then we record in the
studio so there's no outside noise and the voice
is crisp," says Choy. Next comes the editing, which adds music, opening
and closing billboards, and stingers into the production.

The end result is a clean,
professional, world-class quality output that's worthy of being broadcasted
around the world.

CreatiVoices is targeting a
primarily corporate market for
podcast services. "Imagine the potential. Let's face it: people don't have
time to read anymore. So instead of issuing a
company newsletter, for
example, the company president can instead send a podcast to all his employees. And they can listen to
it on the way home from work or while doing other things."

A voice
for the future

Of course, the more professional the podcast quality, the more
"listenable" it will be. And this is what CreatiVoices is banking on
– that podcasts will be taken seriously by the Philippine market as a legitimate venue for corporate communications. This, in turn, would then
fuel the company in its drive for
professionalizing the voice talent industry.

Not bad for a four-month old firm that's riding on a trend barely a year old.