Benjamin J. McElroy of McElroy Films agreed to answer a few questions about their experience at Voices.com and how they've used the service to find, select and hire talent.
Recently Ben completed a project at Voices.com and hired Jay Johnson. Read more on the hiring experience of McElroy Films
How has Voices.com helped you with your project needs?
Voices.com helped us pinpoint and hire the right talent for the job on a tight deadline fast and efficiently. Voice.com was a crucial part in achieving our goal of getting professional VO for our project, which in turn made our client very pleased with the finished video.
Voices.com helped us tremendously by putting us in touch with the right person for the job. Before voices.com we would shop our project around to local talent. Now Voices.com puts professional talent right at our fingertips. We can search through hundreds of qualified talent and choose the right one for the project.
How did you use Voices.com?
Our client was looking for a specific tone and ethnicity so we made sure to put specific parameters into our job post and immediately found samples that matched our criteria.
Did you use the Featured Talent Directory or browse the talent search engine?
We occasionally look in the Featured Talent Directory, but we primarily just post a job to find the right fit.
Did you receive enough responses to your posting or would you have liked to see fewer or more?
We received many responses. At first it was great, but we soon had to close our post because we were getting too many. The one thing we wish could happen is if the system would bounce pre-recorded demos from showing up as responses. We only like the responses that feature our sample read.
How did you select the talent?
We chose Jay Johnson out of two other possible bids. Our client was directly involved with the selection process and Voices.com makes it easy to pass along samples in mp3 format for proofing purposes that helped our greatly in the selection process.
Was the talent of professional grade?
The talent was professional sounding and obviously had the right tools and equipment to deliver us quality work.
How was your overall experience with the talent you hired to record the project?
The overall experience with the talent was very professional and enjoyable. We spoke to him prior to the recording and we made sure everyone was on the right page. Jay was willing and able to achieve exactly what we were looking for.
What challenges did you face using the Voices.com system to find talent?
Our firm was contracted to produce a promotional video for Bottom Line of Boston. We had less than two weeks to shoot, edit, and deliver the work for their annual gala event with hundreds of viewers. We needed to hire a professional voice over talent quickly and efficiently. The client requested specific attributes for their voice; Male, English speaking, ethnic sounding and strong prominence. For editing purposes we needed the file delivered in WAV format.
Did you have any difficulty using the system to find talent, review responses, make your deposit via SurePay, receiving the finished work?
We had no issues at all. Voices.com makes it very easy to search, review, and make a deposit. Once our voice talent was selected, we took delivery and made our final payment with SurePay.
We were on an extremely tight deadline. We had less than two weeks to shoot, edit, and deliver the work. We needed to hire a professional voice over talent quickly and efficiently and the services Voices.com provides allowed us to do this.
How would you describe your overall experience with the site?
Voices.com help our company achieve our goals by giving us quality samples we could review and pass to our client for review. Within an hour of our post we already had 20 + responses. Voices.com handled all our transactions for deposit and final payment seamlessly through their secure Escrow service.
Voice over narration is a powerful component in video. The challenge that exists when finding voice talent is that you need to find someone with the right sound, pronunciation and flow for the project. That's where voices comes in, they deliver all your response in a convenient list with previews for us to sift through talent and pinpoint exactly what we're looking for.
Will you use Voices.com again in the future to hire the same talent or hire a different talent?
We will continue to use voices.com with out a doubt. We're already moving a few projects into production that we'll require VO work and the first place we're going to is voices.com
Have you or will you recommend Voices.com to business contacts that may be in need of voice over services in the future?
We've enjoyed working with Voices.com so much that we've recommended voices.com to many of our business contacts and other production firms. People are amazed a service like this actually exists.
About the Client
McElroy Films is an independently owned Video Production company in Massachusetts. We offer groundbreaking work and feature High Definition Filming. We specialize in Corporate, Non Profit, Educational and Internet Videos. Additional services include Weddings, Events, Music Video Production and Independent Filmmaking.
Benjamin J. McElroy
Owner | Executive Producer | Videographer | Editor
http://www.mcelroyfilms.com
Project Details
Project ID: 12136
Project Title: Bottom Line - 2nd Post
Category: Educational
Language: English
Voice Age: Middle Aged
Project Close Date: March 10, 2009
Selected Talent: Jay Johnson
