Meet Charlotte Ann

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Charlotte Ann. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Charlotte below.

Hi Charlotte, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

I grew up with a Mom who worked multiple jobs and ALWAYS did the right thing. She was loyal to the companies she worked for and would often talk to her employees about doing what was best for the business as a whole. She knew that if she called out of work, others would suffer and so she never played hooky. She taught me to work hard and never let the team down.

But perhaps the greatest lesson she taught me was to be transparent when I’m struggling or something is not working. When the higher ups of her company would come in and ask her if everything was going well, often her counterparts would rush to assure them that yes, everything was great! But my mom was never hesitant to let them know if something wasn’t working so that they could come up with a way to fix it. She said it didn’t help anyone to lie about how processes were or weren’t working because then nothing could improve.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

I’m a professional voiceover artist so…I talk to myself in a box all day. Haha!

I voice all kinds of projects from tv and radio commercials, to video game characters. You’d be surprised at how often you don’t realize you’re listening to a voiceover artist. Sitting in that airport and hear the announcement about unattended baggage? It was someones job to record that. Listening to your benefits presentation on a computer at work – someone recorded that! Waiting on hold on the phone and listening to a calm voice tell you that you’ll be helped soon? You just might be listening to me.

The brands I’ve worked for include Apple, Cinemark, LEGO, Nintendo, REI, Subway, Target, and Whole Foods among many others.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

Voiceover is less about having a good voice and more about learning how to connect with the message you’re trying to convey.

It’s important to be present throughout your daily life. If you’re having an argument, notice what your voice is doing. If you’re chatting with your best friends over coffee, what inflections and pauses do you make with your voice? You’ll use these things to inform ways in which to stay natural when you’re saying words that were written for you.

It’s also super important to practice reading aloud every day. I’ve often been thrown scripts with no prep time, sometimes pharmaceutical scripts with long medical words, and I have to be able to rattle them off without a hitch. The more you read aloud, the quicker and more comfortable you’ll be when you have to do it in front of a client.

But truly – what I spend much of my time doing, and what many aspiring voice actors don’t realize is the bulk of voiceover work, is marketing. I’ve got to find those clients! And I’ve got to make them happy so they keep coming back and tell their friends. Voiceover work is different from on camera acting because much of it comes from my own marketing efforts and only a small portion comes from my agents.

All the wisdom you’ve shared today is sincerely appreciated. Before we go, can you tell us about the main challenge you are currently facing?

We’re all hearing it all the time…AI. Yes, AI will and has had an impact on the voiceover industry but there are ways to use it as a voiceover artist that are advantageous and I don’t think the robots are going to take my job.

I like using AI to help me brainstorm new ideas for social media posts or marketing emails. I think it can be a great tool to help jumpstart those creative juices. But to those who say that AI will voice everything soon and we wont have a need for real, human voice actors? I just don’t think that’s true at this point.

I’ve had clients be honest with me and tell me that they tried using AI voices for their projects but the majority of them come back. There’s a connection that people pick up on from a human voice that you just can’t replicate from an AI voice. It’s also a ton of work to adjust that AI voice in all the ways that you want so it sounds juuusssttt right. Someone on your team must spend time doing that. Sometimes it’s quicker and easier to just explain the vibe you want from your script to a professional and let them do things with your script that you had never even thought of.

I think as a society, we’re starting to push back on the robots in our lives. We don’t want to interact with feeling-less bots all the time. And I think companies are taking notice of this and prioritizing human creatives for much of the work again.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m all for the people that invent the robot that will put away my dishes from the dishwasher or fold my laundry but I don’t need them to draw me pictures or write me songs – I’d rather get that from someone with a soul.

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