Wrap Up: 2024 VO Atlanta
They don't call it the "Superbowl of VO Conferences" for nothing. VO Atlanta is a monster compared to other VO conferences. Between March 7 and 10, one thousand attendees, speakers and panelists descended upon the Atlanta Hilton to network, learn, and let off some steam.
The conference has something for everyone, at all levels of VO career, from business tips to in-depth small group intensive workshops, a full-blown kids program, and so much more.
Keynote
This year's Keynote speaker was Maurice LaMarche, maybe better known as "The Brain" from Animaniacs' Pinky and the Brain. I'm told that it was a wonderful presentation, which I look forward to watching on video replay sometime in the coming months. While I'd have liked to experience it live, and perhaps meet the man himself, I instead took the opportunity to enjoy dinner with my friend, colleague, and automotive voiceover heavyweight; Cliff Zellman.
In fact, I missed quite a few sessions this year...
Group Challenge
One of the, for lack of a better term, side quests one can participate in at VO Atlanta is the group challenge. In this event participants are assigned to groups of 6 - most of whom they've never met or worked with before; and charged with the mission to write, record, and produce a 30 second spot for air in the Atlanta market, within about 30 hours.
This year's challenge was to create a PSA for Atlanta charity Open Hand. While I certainly could have attended several of the sessions I had planned on Friday afternoon, instead I opted to knock out the script and try to get the team together to record that day so that we could be done and free up the rest of the conference time.
As I had a full recording setup in my hotel room, and all the tools and plugins necessary, I volunteered to act as the engineer for the project; I ended up pretty much filling the role of team leader and writer as well — though I did have help from two of the others with tightening and tweaking the script to where we needed it to be.
There are SO many things that we'd have loved to include in the script, but 30 seconds go by quickly, and it's generally not so great to rush through a ton of words to try to cram more information into the time than is reasonable. So instead we chose to highlight the length of time the organization has been involved in the community, and allude to national efforts they've recently been involved with, then shift gears to inform listeners that the organization depends on volunteers and donations to succeed in it's mission. But we didn't only want to leave it there, we also wanted to be sure listeners knew that if they or a loved one was in need, they should be in touch.
That's already a lot to cover in thirty seconds, so we couldn't dive too deeply into the vast array of services Open Hand provides. But, I know the whole team is proud of what we managed to produce. This was all recorded and produced in my hotel room, during a massive, busy loud conference, less than a mile from the busiest airport in the country.
While my team did not win, we felt privileged to give our voices to this worthy cause. The winning team's PSA will air on Atlanta radio.
Sessions, Panels, Drama, and More!
On Saturday I managed to get to about 2/3 of the sessions I'd originally planned on, and absorbed good bits of information in all of them.
There was apparenlty some drama in a panel discussion about online casting platforms, which included the present, interrim CEO of voices.com. Following a history of deceptive and questionable practices, recent missteps and poor choices around AI, and the recent shake up and removal of former CEO David Ciccarelli, no one could really be surprised that this panel was a powderkeg waiting to go off. Somehow I missed the heads up on it, and was sitting in another session, so I can't comment further, but it sounds like it'd have been a very engaging session to sit in on, hearing many of my colleagues confront the new face of the biggest "Big Bad" our industry has, second only perhaps to AI voice cloning and so forth. But, that's one I certainly look forward to catching in the video replay for sure.
I attended a panel hosted by Joe Cipriano, featuring industry heavies in radio imaging and TV affiliate work. I don't currently work in TV affiliate, and may never — but I do work in imaging. Hearing about the cascade of success after one lucky "right time, right place" break of Issa Lopez...not to discount her immense talent even one iota, mind you, was inspiring. These are both very difficult genres of voice over to break into, and generally a long, slow process to accumulate clients. As Rider often points out, adding one station per year is considered doing really well in imaging. I added two in Fall of 2023, and look forward to adding more in the coming year, especially as I add demos for additional radio formats.
Another offering at VO Atlanta are X-Sessions. These are extra-fee small group intensive workshops, and offer incredible value to attendees. After doing FIVE of these my first year attending to conference, I opted for a lighter load of just two this year; and withdrew from one so as to free up my morning for the group challenge; which I'd thought was kicking off in the morning but ended up not until midday.
I don't regret either approach; loaded up on X-Sessions, or giving up most of a day to the group challenge, but for the next few years of attending I think I'll focus entirely on networking and attending the regular programming so I don't have to feel so schedule-constrained.
In any case, I will be attending future conferences, these are my people, this is my scene.