Korean Job Discussion Forums

[mandoo]

How much are voice actors paid here? Is it scaled by the hour, or the kind of job you are doing? For example, if I was reading material for educational use, how much can I expect? I saw an ad once for edu. materials, and they were only offering 100,000won- seemed pretty low to me, but I've no idea..... Thanks for your help-this info isn't easy to come by, as I don't know anyone here who does this work!

[World Traveler]

It used to be 100,000 won per hour (and no, I am not exaggerating). Nowadays, the pay for voice actors is going down, which makes me .

Don't accept crap payment, because if you do, it will drive down the price for everyone, yourself included.

[fezmond]

I got 80,000 for 15 mins work but that was for EBS and I got the gig through a friend.

Walk in, read the highlighted questions, walk out and get paid a few days later.

[World Traveler]

Yes, the pay is great (or was), but it is going downhill fast. It sucks to lose so much money.

Fezmond, when did you get paid that much? Recently? Or a while ago?

Also, all places used to pay cash on the spot (better).

I wish I could think of a way to slow the decline of the going rate (to get more money for myself).

[nick70100]

It varies a lot.

My first experience was about a year and a half ago. It was for a CD to accompany a children's book being put out by a fairly large publishing company. Apparently they needed someone new because their previous guy had left the country, and a friend of a friend asked me to do it. The pay was 100,000 won per hour and it sounded like easy money so I said why not. They sent the scripts to me in advance along with some examples from previous recordings of what they wanted me to sound like. So although 100,000 per hour sounds like a lot, you only get paid for the recording time. If you spend an hour prepping and an hour recording you're down to 50,000/hour, prep for 2 hours and you're only making 33,000.

They took me to a legit recording studio and started going through the scripts. I thought it would be easy, but it turned out to be quite complicated. Not too fast, not too slow, longer pauses between words, but not too long... And as it was for children they wanted a certain level of enthusiasm/cheesiness that was quite difficult to get exactly right. They were willing to do as many takes as necessary to get it exactly the way they wanted it. It really was much more difficult than I ever would have expected. When I finished they paid me, thanked me, and said they would call me back if they needed me for any future projects, but I never heard from them again. I'm not even sure whether I actually made it on to the CD or not.

On the other hand there are plenty of low-budget projects going around too. I did a few recordings for TOEFL listening practice books. This really was just reading a few paragraphs out loud, rather than any actual acting. I could have done this with minimal/no prep. There was no real studio for this, just speaking into a microphone connected to a computer in an office somewhere. No re-takes unless you really seriously screw something up. Pay was also much lower, in the 30,000-40,000/hour range.

I haven't really been doing this long enough to know whether the rates are seriously declining, but even from my limited experience there seems to be a big difference between the places offering 100,000 per hour and the places offering significantly less. The 100,000 per hour jobs exist, but they want actual voice actors, whereas the 40,000 per hour jobs will take more or less anyone who speaks English.

[mandoo]

Cool- thanks for the replies! 40,000 won/hour sucks- better off teaching privates, in that case

[fezmond]

[Zyzyfer]