
OTM DEMO REEL
PRODUCTION
Your Demo Reel is Your Calling Card
Your voice-over demo is a collection of voice samples that showcase your sound, range and style, allowing Casting, Studios and Agents to hear what you can do before bringing you in to audition or booking you for a job.
On The Mic offers demo reel production to students whose voice-over skills are market-ready. A common mistake is creating a demo without first investing in sufficient training. With only one chance to make a first impression, it’s important that your demo showcases a skill level that is competitive in the market, and is professionally produced.
For adults a specialized demo for different areas is the best approach, so it’s best to prepare for the animation, commercial, and narration demo’s separately.
Kids and Teen’s demos are more of a medley of animation and commercial Voice-over, this demo is more focused on highlighting the quality of the individuals voice than lots of character work.
When you make your demo with us, what’s included in the production is the cost of the Studio, Engineer, Director, as well as the mixing and editing fees.
DEMO REEL FAQ
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Our rate for full service demo production in a single genre is $1200 + GST and $599 + GST for kids and teens demos.
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The demo production service includes a pre-demo consultation with the director, a 2 hour record in studio with a professional studio engineer and director, the mastering and editing of the demo by an engineer, and all music and sound effect sourcing for the demo.
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2 hours but we will bring you back for pick ups if we feel like we are missing anything critical to the final product.
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Yes you can, you will need to find a local studio to record in and arrange to have the Protools sessions sent to one of our mastering engineers but we can direct you remotely. We will factor the price of the studio into our rate if this is the case.
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Michael Daingerfield is the main director for animation demos and Noel Johansen is the main director for commercial demos. But if you really jive with a specific direct then we can discuss having them direct your demo.
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If your reads are professionally competitive and you have a wide range to showcase in a specific area of voice-over, then you are likely ready to begin preparing for the demo. In terms of actual prep we encourage you to record samples for everything you plan to deliver on the demo and write a comprehensive script including the copy, music notes, and sound effects direction. Send them to Harrison at info@onthemictraining.com and he will get back to you with notes.
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Record and listen to everything you plan to include on the demo, be thoughtful with your edits and make sure you’re not doubling up on styles or voice types. Write your script early and keep editing down for economy of words and timing. In the end every second of your demo should have purpose.
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60 – 75 seconds is the optimal time in our experience.
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While we will assist you with scripts for a commercial or narration demo, we do expect that you will have some scripts from classes and other sources. Just be aware that a lot of the online script courses get used for demos, and nothing under sells a demo like scripts that agents and casting people have heard a hundred times.
For animation it is highly advisable that you write your own scenes to best highlight your character voices. You only have 7 – 10 seconds to highlight each voice and show your acting talents, so it’s important that each voice feels like a small slice of a fully fledged character. In the end, every character should sound like it was pulled directly for a broadcasted show or feature.
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In our experience you’re looking to come into the booth with 8 – 12 well written characters that each show a portion of your range and the types of genres and archetypes you fit into. The end demo will likely feature less than this but until we put together a dialogue edit it’s better to have too much rather than not enough.
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We aim to showcase between 6 and 8 styles of commercial voice-over in the demo, which means you should aim to come into the room with 2 – 3 pieces of copy for each style that you can select depending on the flow of the record.
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Due to the long form nature of narration you should aim to have 3 – 4 styles showcased in a narration demo which highlights a variety of broadcast narration styles and genres.
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If you have a strong demo in any genre of voice-over: Animation, Commercials etc., but you want to add/replace 2-3 spots/characters, this option allows you to revamp your demo instead of having to redo it entirely. We do reserve the right to assess your demo initially, so that we don’t end up with an imbalanced demo where the quality of the old and new spots/characters don’t match.