To understand why you should take advice from Mara Junot you only need to do a quick Google search of her name to know that hers is a voiceover career to be envied. Her website MaraJunot.com gives but a snippet of the projects of one of the most diverse talents in our field. But humbly Mara has been the voice of so many things that we hear on a daily basis.
Check out some of her credits.
1. Voice of Christa and Anna Corea in The Walking Dead video game by Telltale Games, winner of over 90 Game of the Year Awards worldwide.
2. Primary internal voice of AT&T, the largest telephony company in the United States. Voice of Nationwide Directory Assistance, U-Verse applications, AT&T retail outlets and extended text-to-speech (TTS) applications.
3. North American voice for Sygic GPS Navigation, named as the most downloaded offline navigation app in the world.
4. Branding voice of the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team.
5. Voice of Sierra Club, the largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization in the United States.
6. Voice of Anki Drive, the first artificial intelligence-driven video game.
7. Voice of Commander Tiaru Jarok, T’Vrell, Capt. Tren Renalla, and various others for Star Trek Online by Cryptic Studios.
8. Voice of Merrisara Winterwhite, Marigold Tarmikos and others in NeverWinter: Fury of the Feywild
9. The White Warrior, Lady Wei , and Female Player in Kung-Fu Live (by Virtual Air Guitar Company).
10. Explainer videos for Microsoft Surface.
11. Voice of Oreck for 4 years.
12. National Jenny Craig commercial.
13. National Public Storage commercials.
Still Mara is pretty humble, down to earth and lots of fun. I’ve studied Mara’s career for a few years now and I’ve observed a few things that make her so dynamic in voiceover. Mara Junot got to where she is with a very precise formula. And while during the course of our interview, she never divulged all of her secrets, she did give me a little taste of her formula and how she got to the “Carnegie Hall” of voiceover. (Hint)
1) Mara started with a background in radio. In voiceover, this is traditionally thought to be the great NO NO as people in radio tend to go against the VO trend of being natural and sounding announcery. Often radio people struggle to break free from the announcer voice that follows them even in regular conversation. But Mara gives good reason in the interview why this doesn’t have to be true and how she used her background in radio to help her.
2)Mara is like an athlete in voiceover. (Watch to learn why)
3) Something she didn’t mention in the interview was the fact that Mara stays on top of trends and goes where the work is. She networks in high level places which helps her climb even higher.