After Broadcasting School Career Spotlight: Voiceover Acting

If you think all you'll learn to do in broadcasting school is work in radio, think again! In addition to the training you'll receive that'll allow you to be a great DJ, you'll learn the techniques and tricks it takes to have a great potential career in voice acting. If you have big dreams of moving to a city such as Chicago, New York, or Los Angeles, and pursuing a career in this particular branch of the entertainment industry, you might have what it takes to be a successful voice actor.

Among the many other skills you'll learn in broadcasting school, you'll receive voice training that will help you work on your tone, elocution, and so much more. You'll learn how to announce, how to refine your speaking voice, and how to keep your voice in practice through speaking exercises. You'll be taught techniques for proper breathing conservation and control, how to control your resonance, diction, and articulation, even how to stress and inflect words correctly. By the time you graduate broadcasting school, you'll have learned everything you need to know about having a great speaking voice — a speaking voice that could get you started on a career as a voice actor.

Take a look at a few of the most common gigs you can get as a professional voice actor:

Commercials: Even if you don't want to be a DJ, you can still end up hearing your voice on the radio after broadcasting school by doing radio commercials. Having a strong voice is essential for this; you'll need to keep listeners' attentions before they switch to the next station, and you'll need a great handle on speaking quickly, clearly, and concisely. Ever heard a radio commercial where the fine print took up the last ten seconds or so? If you want that voice to be you, start practicing now. With experience in radio commercials, you'll be much more qualified to potentially move on to doing voiceover work in television commercials!

Cartoons: Although the big screen cartoons of today are often staffed heavily with well-known actors, there's still a place for the dedicated voice actor in the animation business. From the wide selection at Cartoon Network (Adult Swim, anime, and good old-fashioned Warner Brothers shows) to shows on networks like Nickelodeon, there's no shortage of jobs out there for those who wish to do voice acting for cartoons, and a broadcasting school education can only help you. There's a unique opportunity here for women, too - it's very common for women to do the voices for young boys in cartoons, since their voices will never change or break as teenage boys' voices do.

Dubbing: If you have a passion for foreign films, you could become a part of them! Popular foreign films often come to these shores in need of either subtitles or dubbing, and sometimes both. But foreign films and TV aren't the only options. Are you into anime? As it becomes increasingly popular on these shores, airing on cable and available in book form as manga at most bookstores, the demand for dubbed anime shows and movies increases. With the skills you'll learn in broadcasting school, you could be an essential part of making the foreign entertainment you're interested in accessible to a wider audience.