If you enjoy wasting your time and learning things you could easily learn from a private voice coach at a lower price then by all means sign up. The additional star is for the big name (at least as far as Vancouver is concerned) talent they've managed to wrangle as instructors, though this is part of the con. They give you the impression that by rubbing elbows with known talent that by some transitive property you'll end up a national commercial or a cartoon, but this is nothing more than a carrot before a horse. The fact is that there is fewer animation voice over being done in Vancouver, and the ones that are done in Vancouver tend to take from the same talent pool that's been dominant since the 90's. If you're name isn't "Barr" or "Dobson" or "Tong" or "Corlett", forget it. But they'll never tell you this.Most commercial directors nowadays typically prefer to use services like Voice123 or Voices.com. So what do you get? Well, you get professional voice actors giving some insight and valuable tips, but nothing that any of the other acting coaches in the city couldn't give you at a better price. The format of the lessons isn't really conducive to education either, as your instructor's attention is guaranteed to be split between you and about nine or ten other people, dividing their time and wasting yours. And the classmates...God save you from your classmates. You're likely to encounter the most deplorable menagerie of theater fairies and drama queens this side of high school production of "A Street Car Named Desire", and that's not counting the yahoos and 20-something women who never had any intention of taking the class seriously in the first place. At the end of it yo'll have an hour or two of unfocused rehearsal time, and maybe ten minutes of unusable audio that could maybe be useful in a demo via some long lost alchemical arts that have been forever lost to time with the Philosopher's Stone, and all for six hundred dollars. The information provided by the instructors is valuable, but it is also readily available online or by any number of other more frugal means. My advice would be to use the money you would have spent on "OTM" to find a decent USB microphone, some sound proofing-materials for your home, and book some lessons with an acting coach either in-person (the city's lousy with them, so shop around), or online (the great Pat Fraley offers any number of personally-tailored lessons on his official website), then save up some more money for a demo and voices.com membership. read more
