VO market in SL?

I'm new to SL (AV born on 1/22/07), and have been trying to find my "niche", as it were, since just about day one.
I'm a semi-professional voice-over artist in my first life, and I'm considering expanding my work into SL. I had a few questions to pose to folks who've been living in SL for a while, if you don't mind.
I'm all about honest answers, so if you don't think any of my ideas will work, please tell me!

1. Is there any market, in your opinion, for VO work in SL? A few ideas I've come up with so far include making "personality" sound-sets for AVs to use in guestures and such. I've got a list going of what I would consider the most-used sounds in SL, and a list of expanded phrases/sounds that could be used to furhter define your AVs personality. I would also sell custom work involving recording a phrase/exclamation defined by the buyer.

2. I know almost nothing about how SL's backbone works. I do know that uploading .wavs to SL costs $L10/file. Can these then be set no tans/copy before selling?

3. I've done some searching both in and out of world and have found very few vendors doing this type of thing. Is it that I've found a little-exploited genre, or is it more that there just isn't interest in this sort of AV customization?

4. Is it possible to use a standard vendor object to sell sound files like you would clothing or furniture? Would this be practical?

Any advice you could give me would me MUCH appreciated!

(Apologies if I have posted this in the wrong place! Please move this to the right spot if I've erred! )

I think you have a great idea. Copy, No transfer version is possible, you have complete control over the permissions of your creations. If you have time, I am fairly confident that I Have a gesture vendor that will allow your potential clients listen to your sound clips and if you like I can show you a few things to help get you going. Me and my sis have a commercial sim and Im sure we can help promote you as well.
Information is always free btw so no charge besides I help you, I,m sure I can come up with a project or 5 that You could help me with


Have a good day

Sara

I saw one seller doing just what you propose on SLboutique a few weeks back. You could try contacting her and ask for her experiences if she's willing to share.

From a personal point of view, I'm not fond of sounds at all (in particular the howling one) and (for me) it can take anywhere to 10 seconds before it actually starts playing so it usually ends very out of sync with the gesture.

Sounds are no different than anything else, you pick which permissions the buyer will get .

I never use gestures but I think I read somewhere that everything in them needs to be full permission. Maybe someone else can comment on that?

I think it would be a lot more effective and customer friendly if people were able to listen to the sounds before buying them (which would rule out selling them on SLB or SLex I guess).

Possibly not the advice you might want to hear, but given people's buying frenzy of scripted prim bodyparts, appropriate sounds will probably sell just as well .

That is correct. If you are going to sell sounds in gestures, you can sell the gestures themselves with restricted permissions, but sounds you sell cannot be used in gestures. Just fyi, you'll probably want to sell your recordings as both a gesture and the sound separately. Hey, maybe just box them up both together.

I'm all about it! As soon as the grid is back up, I'll send you an IM. Thanks for the help!

Good point. I did see a vendor (I'm sorry, I can't remember who) set up in Icedragon's Palace who had some sort of "preview" set up for his/her audio sales, but I never got the silly thing to work. I'm not sure if that was a lag issue on my part, or if the system just didn't work that well to begin with. *shrug*



Luckilly, I'm not opposed to doing adult VO. You take the good with the bad, you know?

Stupid question: why wouldnt' you be able to use a sound you purchased to create your own guesture? Is it a permission issue? I guess I need to get into SL this afternoon learn how guestures work, huh?

Unfortunately, I know jack about animating.

What Kitty said, you can only make gestures from full-permissions components. I (or rather one of my customers) found this out with my yawn animation; I can make a gesture with it, but she cannot. There are reasons to have a sound file outside a gesture which is why I suggested selling them together in a box.

I quite agree that there is often enough lag to make the entire action inappropriate at times; is it that sound files take a while to upload/download/think-about-it?
However, I think usually the gesture waits for the sound that I've noticed.
There are some funny VO's in chat.
Am I to believe that there might soon be synthesized voices added to the chat? This might make VO's partially redundant but then, probably a while to go yet

Sound is spatialized, so the farther away you are from it, the fainter it will be. It could be that they were working fine, but that you just had to cam over (sounds play based on the camera position, not your avie's position) a whole lot closer to be able to hear them .

I think you're on to a great idea here, and I can think of a thousand uses for a professional quality voice. The one that I keep coming back to, though, is doing commercial work for one of the SL Radio stations on a freelance basis. The advantage there would be that you wouldn't be limited to the 10 second upload limit, since commercials would be streamed, not uploaded, to SL. At any rate, I'll keep my eye out for your store once it opens. (And please, please, please, do custom work!)

Kam

They actually had a solution for this... instructions above each item directed you to stand on the colored floor square in front of the display before touching the sample player. I think, in light of the information that it's camera placement and not AV placement that targets sound reception, that a chair might be a better option in this application.

It certainly bears some thought. Thanks for your input!

Thanks! I've considered the radio stations, as well. I need to send out my demos to them. I'm going to invest some $ into upgrading my VO setup before creating new files to sell, though.

And yeah, I will CERTAINLY to custom work! I'll post here when I get it all going!