Collaboration | Dave Courvoisier's Blog

VO Scholarship

MCA-I is an organization familiar to many a voice actor. It stands for Media Communications Association – International, and likely there’s a branch near you.

VO Peeps may also be a blog you’d also recognize. It’s authored by SoCal’s Anne Ganguzza.

Well, MCA-I and VO Peeps…along with VOICE2012 (stay with me here) are collaborating to offer the first annual Career Education Scholarship Fund.

According to Anne’s blog: “The Program provides both need and merit-based scholarships to working voice-over artists, as well as those new to the business. Scholarship Awards may be given on a cash basis, or in the form of product and/or educational services useful to a VO Professional. The First Annual Scholarship will be awarded on May 15 to one deserving Voiceover professional and will consist of: One Full VIP registration for VOICE 2012! June 13-16, 2012.”

This event is seeking both applicants and donors. I don’t see a downside, actually…somebody who really needs it gets a pass to VOICE2012, and you have the reassurance of knowing you helped a fellow professional.

Be sure and follow all the links in this article to get the facts. Our thanks as well to James Alburger and Penny Abshire, too, for their donation of a pass to the VOICE2012 event to make all this possible.

Read Anne’s most recent blog about the scholarship for further info and links.

‘Love it when things come together like this!

CourVO

The VO Success Pyramid

…Lets make that the (PERCEIVED) VO Success Pyramid…

‘Defined as a hierarchical representation of the levels of work/success/challenge/acknowledgement/accomplishments traditionally accepted as reasonably desirable in our field. By nature, the pyramid is tiered from lowest-paying and least prestigious to the best-paying and highest profile jobs available to the voice actor.

OK, Dave, but why?…why put it on paper?…what’s the advantage?

Only to benefit us all with a global view of what’s available to us, and how the different levels reflect the accepted market for compensation and opportunity.

You may be working in 2 or three (or almost all) levels at the same time. Pay levels for one level may actually match that of higher (or lower) level within different silos of job descriptions.

If nothing else, think of it as a healthy exercise of describing the job sphere for voice actors.

Below is what I’ve come up with so far. (click on the pic to enlarge)
It’s not complete! I’ve got links below for how you can collaborate and change/augment/fix/ contribute to the pyramid, which is also available in .pdf format here: VO Success Pyramid

As I said, I’ve put “place-holder” descriptions for each level with some of the more obvious and conspicuous jobs that are being held by various professional working voice actors.

This is a collaborative Google Doc.

HELP ME FILL IT OUT.

Collaborate on this document.

With that link directly above you can add, suggest, augment, change, delete, omit, and otherwise totally fulfill or mess-up this document, so I’d ask you to please honor this idea in the manner it which it was offered, and not be destructive.

Or just email me your suggestions, and I’ll add them myself: CourVO@CourVO.com.

CourVO