GTT Partner: Joe Cipriano and the Promo Masterclass

it's about setting the priorities for goals and he said you look at something that you want to do is it one day or is this day one and he fired me up and I said dang it I am no longer gonna let this you know kind of have a thumb on me this is day one that I'm going to create a curriculum I'm going to learn how to teach what's the best way to teach how can I do this in an effect Ive way it pushed me through the year took seven months to develop what we have now as

the Joseph prano online promo master classes George the tech hi everybody George the tech here

again with another incredible trusted partner profile interview and I know it's incredible because I have somebody who's so beloved in the voiceover community and by myself as well as a client and a friend for so many years in our business his energy is infectious and he just brings so much positivity which is perfect timing for what we need right now so let me bring you on camera today our good friend and an amazing coach as well Joe cypriano how you doing Joe W thank you I'm doing great George

what a wonderful introduction thank you nothing like some coffee to get the brain cells firing that's right I got mine going right here well so it's coffee o' talk where I am but not where you are where are you

right now we're in West Palm Beach uh we're spending uh kind of like half and half throughout the year um Los Angeles is home no doubt about it and uh where my studio bricks is that you and I uh put together I think it's about five years now George um that sounds about right yeah I mean look at how many studios you've done for me and we we can talk about that my favorite was the one in Bel Air that was a groundup bill in a in an Adu house in the back oh my gosh

that's the one everybody still talks about the clubhous and uh it was incredible um but you know how how things have changed when we built that we needed that I needed that I remember doing videos for you I had helicopters overhead because we were pretty close to UCLA uh medical and videotaping outside with and I go okay George I'm going inside click nothing it was awesome it was great so the most satisfying thing ever and I'll tell you Joe doing your studio was well I mean it's been a long time

but you probably still have some PTSD I mean that was a massive massive renovation on the home and we were interlacing the studio renovation or build really with the rest of the big project right so so we would do a little bit of work in the studio Studio that that we might have the framers right and the framers do their thing true we were using the same contractor it's right yes it was very cleverly done you had it really thought out but it was we had another fell who was like the project

manager and he was like the battle ax guy yeah right and so it was complex and I'll be honest for me it was a firsttime thing you how cool put a tremendous amount of faith in my ability to pull that off and it was a bit nerve-wracking for me and when it was finished first of all it was complex bu it was a complex build because it was in your Cabana pool house and the Cabana pool house was an old building and a newer Building melded Together the studio was actually in two

portions of the it was it was complex right so yeah yeah when you sent me that video however many months later it was you know and you said and you shut the door and then I hear you go ah into your u87 that was I can't tell you how satisfying that was I mean for you but for me man what a side of relief it was incredible so we're half the year here

in West Palm Beach half the year uh in Los Angeles because my daughter and her family my two grandkids that I I never post pictures of you probably don't know what they look like that's not true I post pictures all the time um H are here so we're back and forth but now my son and his wife in LA are about to have a child and so we will have have uh grandkids on both coasts but it's still a back and forth thing and I love it here I love it at home my friends are at

home you're there you know all all my pals Townson and Reno and Jack Daniel and yeah we all get together whenever we can and and also the Don La Fontaine uh voiceover lab and what you've done there

and what I mean you and I could talk for hours because I mean the amount of history that we've shared starting but with Don La Fontaine and moving forward it's legendary I mean we we could talk for hours and hours true and and Don was alive and uh you know you were doing video stuff for him right uh uh yeah his hobby was editing making videos he loves making videos which is what I do now which is kind of fun but you know back then Don was shooting mostly his family

that was his love you know his daughters and uh I would sit there and he'd make a video and watch it together and I'd look over at his watch his and I'd see a tear just roll down and I was like oh wow okay and that changed everything from being like Oh God this guy's a scary uh scary uh influential guy to like he's a dad and he's got a big heart you know and then I really got to connect to him and we had a lovely time in a short time together but we had a lovely time I love that I

met you and and actually and then uh you know when Don passed I mean even before that you were working for a lot of other voiceover people but uh I think then when we started building because of Paul Pape saying we've got to do something and coming up with what it would be and it became the lab the amount of time George listen when you talk you talk about the amount of time and work and energy and also you know trepidation doing my studio working on that when we

finally finished it and if you were to count up the hours that you uh dedicated to that and donated uh I tried to count up the hour it was a very big number I remember being on stage you know at the opening and we were all up together and emotionally it just all hit you and it was a such a wonderful amazing moment it really really was yeah yeah and now we're flashing forward 12 years lat 13 years later we have a new lab that's just even more insanely overthe toop and incredible and

it lives on and thri incredible uh you guys want to know more about it yeah it's sag after Foundation SAG Foundation and you can read about the Donald F thing lab and the actor Center yes um but so your journey your journey invoid a book so we don't need to go there right you Jo's book living on air adventures and broadcasting and the Audi book is absolutely a must listen as you would imagine it is incredibly beautifully produced it's got vignettes it's got production it's awesome and may I uh

throw out a thank you to AJ McKay for that that's the first time that I worked with AJ McCay he did the whole production it always seems like people who work with me he was the same thing at the end of it he said oh my God the amount of work I put into that I am never going to do an audio book again poor AJ it was an audiobook plus it was a to be a little bit more like a like a a radio play we did original music with Greg Chun and uh it was awesome and Maurice Tobias directed it

so wow it's an incredible sort of force of talent and it's all the these people worked with and but again that shows your character because instead of you going well I need to go pop Hollywood people that you know have done a thousand of these you're like no I'm going to go with my circle of people that I love and trust and and want to work with and I don't know if necessarily they're I mean they're all talented but let's just give it a go and you trusted AJ and he flying colors you

trusted me uh with your pro you know that that means a ton man yeah well I've been lucky I I I've met some incredible people along the way you included I guess I I I'm very happy that maybe I have a a good barometer for people and quality of people I've been very fortunate that yeah I mean I've trusted people that I know for my personal life into projects it doesn't always go that great I I have this growing Cadre of

amazing talent that entering the sphere of coaching and you've coached for a while but you have come up with this really amazing program not only that just like a system and gotten teasers of it and it's really impressive so give us a little background and how it came together well you know uh just uh quickly the wrap up to it I always asked to um coach coach promos come to vo Atlanta come to different conferences go to vo Retreats and things like that and I would do it because I wanted to do it

I wanted to give back but quite honestly I never felt comfortable in coaching and teaching I know great coaches and I know great directors and I felt geez I don't know if I have that quality uh about me because I look at a script George and and it kind of like Don you know I learned from Don Don and I were the voices of the Fox network in those early years from when it went on the year for 20 years and we were just Chriss cross in studios you know he's doing drama I'm

doing comedy uh sometimes we're doing combos together but he was the same I mean he was a great actor but he could look at a script and know okay this is what I need to do with this and I have that as well maybe not as you know precise as Don but I I look at a script and so I just do it because uh inherently I know what needs to be done and so my shortcoming was in how do I teach I'm not so sure I can direct I can't tell people how I do it um and I finally got tired of that you know

because I would go into these coaching situations live and I would still feel a little uncomfortable I'm a very confident person but that's the one area that I felt that my confidence was lacking and I got tired of it and it was New Year's 2023 I woke up uh an and I were with friends in Orlando Florida we had done a great New Year's and everything I'm scrolling through uh Instagram and there's the Rock and uh the rock it it was the morning of new years's and he

said hey I want to share something with you guys I have this quote on my desk and I refer to it all the time and it's about setting the priorities for goals and he said you have to decide is you look at something that you want to do is it one day or is this day one and he fired me up and I said dang it I am no longer gonna let this you know kind of have a thumb on me this is day one that I'm going to create a curriculum I'm going to learn how to teach what's the

best way to teach how can I do this in an effective way I want to do it online it pushed me through the year took seven months to develop what we have now as the Joseph prano online promo master classes finding the uh platform for it which my daughter-in-law Sarah cypriano found and she is a graphic designer she's social media um Superstar um awesome designer and she designed the whole look of it we figured out how we're getting scripts up how we're going to get people to read to video because

that's part of the CL so I'm teaching like uh three different sty types of promo sessions that you will encounter you know whether the spot's not cut yet the spot is cut and you have to view it and and match the timings and then the reading to picture part of it everything was going great until we got to reading the picture and it's like ah I should have known there this was like what happened to us with ISDN when I first bought AOS in 1992 and fox and I hooked up and I go

hello and they go hello and I hear myself say hello again what's that I don't know what's that oh my my god you're kidding me there's a delay how are we going to read the picture what you guys don't know is the irony of iron live stream that we're using to record this is out of sync from picture about three or four seconds obviously for the video it'll be fixed but you know we had to figure out how we going to do this and a brilliant mixer Steve Carlton we were on 24 track at the time

there was no digital he said hm I wonder if I put the audio from the spot on a different track and move it 10 frames earlier and then send that to Joe he reads to that and by the time it comes back it'll be 10 frames later and will'll match up with the spot that we're watching it became known as slipping and that's how we did it and how everybody since then was able to read to spots on ISDN and Source connecting so that means he had to Route out through a probably a delay and

adjust the delay time until he get things to m i mean that's now noways it's literally just of track and Protools you hit slip you go to slip mode and you drag and done when I got to this part in the online book and I like I couldn't figure out how we were going to read to picture uh without having a delay uh if you just have it up uh if say you're doing it in your studio and the audio is coming out of your speakers uh when you speak it cancels out the audio you know so uh little things like

okay okay just putting the spot you know I have a QR code you shoot the QR code with this you have the spot here now and then you just hold it up and and you read to it it's got three beeps and you do it you know or you could do it with your iPad so it's with you use another source to run but the Simplicity that's the key thing is it's thinking we could have come up with a a mix minus sort of thing if you do this if you bust it this way but you got to make it easy people

can take the course they can be in their studio if want or they could take the course on their cell phone or their iPad you know and it's asynchronous uh George as you know so uh and that's the Brilliance of this platform and we had to make some changes to the platform I got to know the guy who owns it uh he's a brilliant guy and he's helped me along the way and has actually gone back to his tech people and said okay this one guy that is using our platform needs this like

but this one guy needs this and uh you know I might have to wait but they get it done for me and um he helped and uh the cool thing about asynchronous and in teaching and the Epiphany from The Rock

and getting it done and and having a a curriculum um is I wanted it to be personal right I wanted to work one-on-one and when we found this asynchronous for those that don't know I mean you know the definition of the word word but it's a a use in online teaching that I think is is going to be used more and more and more it allows you personal one-on-one you and me dealing with your read my reaction to your read and my direction to your read and then you coming back and saying okay Joe can you

explain this to me I don't quite get it I go back and I say oh sure I get it it's a conversation right but it's over the of a span of time anywhere from an hour to two days you are notified that your coach has left a video or audio message for you inside the platform in our booklet where uh the script and the promos are you're notified you're working you're busy you can't get back in for a day you go back in you view it you react to it you do the read over

again I get a notification maybe I can't get back for a day so the time in between doesn't matter this is what I love it's so brilliant about it there could be a span of three days but you're still working one onone talking to one another it was mind-blowing to me so that's the basis of the of of the whole course you know so the whole concept of asynchronous training is something I want to adopt for what we do for our customers as well because it's so effective I've i' I know I'm good at

teaching and I'm doing a lot of videos and they're helping people but I feel like we could help on such a deeper level yeah with that additional interaction you know and I the follow-up part of it because that was what I couldn't solve so I'm going to be finding out more about how you're doing it there are well you know what there are a lot of ways to do it there just doing a a a Google search you'll see all of the online teaching platforms because we were in it pretty early we had to

propri tize a lot of it and make changes in go through with these guys to make the changes that they don't make available to other clients which I think is amazing but uh you know nobody had used it in a way that I'm using it they were using it more for presentations and kind of static PDFs and all of that sort of stuff and the main part of the platform is a communication tool that was only meant for side conversations and I made it the centerpiece of the entire piece which was they were like

okay we're going to have to dedicate a lot more server space uh to this because we we did not we didn't expect videos and audio and and text to be going up and I got them just this year to allow us to upload rather than record live which the students love because now you can do everything in your studio you can edit you could do whatever you want a lot of you voiceover people as you know George are very sensitive to what they sound like and they were just sounding

like you know unprocessed audio right and so now they if they want to EQ It Whatever It Is they want to do I always say it's not the quality of the recording it's the quality of the read so don't worry about it I I can hear what you're doing so now they can do that and they can output it and then they upload it in our Communicator so it makes it even better I love this because this is such a parallel story to the way we buildt our new website where I found an existing platform and Development

Group that created Jennifer hail's

website called skills hub. lifee and so I was like you have built a tremendous amount of what I need now let's build my site and AD adapt it so you find a team that's built something and you say can you adapt this can you adapt this and I love that they've been willing to do that and work with you well it's just the culmination of you know what made me so happy that initial um inspiration from uh Dwayne Johnson The Rock and saying dang it I I'm going to do something about this and and then going

through the Journey it's been really wonderful now listen uh this is what you really call Niche teaching I'm only teaching promos and I'm not going to teach commercials I'm not going to teach a narration or or anything I mean of course I do you know in show and I do live and all of that but still this is where I'm focused this is my love his promos uh I I'm most comfortable with it and I feel I have the most to offer to go through all of the discovery you know

and then implement it and now it's been up and running for a year and a half the response from the students and the experience has been wonderful I have a friend who was very involved with University of Phoenix uh in getting them up and building them and now he's working with some other online uh teaching facil ities as well and he was saying you know the true litmus test of anything online in in teaching is your graduation rate you know you have to have a high graduate rate that's what I

was going to get to so I was kind of curious about how things are going so we've been very fortunate even though it's a go aty own pace sort of thing and I literally have students that have been in it for six months they're still moving forward it was meant to be like this because because we have busy schedules you're busy I'm busy uh somebody gets a audition and a job from it and you know all and then life you know I was going to ask you your students overwhelmingly are working

professionals already corre exactly exactly so this allows the go at your own pace uh and you don't lose anything from it and you can jump back into it at any time um but our graduate rate is 100% it just is how long it takes you know so it could take two weeks to a month it could take six months or more absolutely and uh for me I can jump right back in because what I do is if I get a notification I go in and somebody is doing a read I go up a couple of videos or audio in the timeline and then

I can see what my direction was I can hear their previous read what my direction was and then boom I'm caught up it takes me 40 seconds to catch up on where I am brilliant man I love that do

you have a success story you want to share at all like a student that stands out I mean you have a lot I'm sure so many uh you know Marie Westbrook uh who you know uh Marie is is such a talent and she is a good example of somebody who takes the master class because the master class is geared towards working Professionals in promo who want to do more and she was already doing very very well uh but since the uh the class she says that her bookings have just jumped

and her confidence this is a big thank you and shout out to Joe supriano in his online promo master class which was a fantastic mentorship program [Music] I can attest to the fact that my bookings afterward definitely went Next Level and not only that but I felt like I had the confidence and the knowhow to really be ready for the sessions that came to follow high potential is your next Obsession yes high potential new Tuesdays on ABC so uh thank you so much P She uh has been great and you

know other talent that have taken the class it's a about success and moving your career forward and it can be bookings but you know what it can also be like for example with Greg um Greg stepp was to get to a point where he could do a promo demo with Chuck Duran and that was his next step and now he has this awesome promo demo I've never experienced anything quite like the Joe cypriano promo master class and now I'm proud to say I'm a graduate yeah yeah yeah

yeah way oneon-one with Joe you get to learn promo techniques tips and tricks of the trade that uh only he can share with you and it prepared me to record my new promo demo with Chuck Durant for exclusive access you can't get anywhere else unseen highlights Stellar analysis I'm excited that we back from the best in the game go inside the NFL now on the CW thanks Joe I appreciate the help and the continued support we know how this stuff goes we are realistic about coaching and it's we

know that going through a program and getting a demo does not instantly create a job out of out of the ethers it's a right it's a process it is it is and it really is about moving forward and gaining the knowledge using that knowledge putting it into use you know and then that keeps moving you down the timeline listen I love this idea of is it one day is it a one day goal or is this day one I mean you have to commit to it and move forward yeah yeah first when you said the one day day one I was

like one day Oh you mean like one day one day I will do it I'm gonna I'm gonna or he could be like I'm gonna do this one day uh exactly it's the same thing this is day one I am doing it no more one day now it's day one what a great quote and I love that it fell on was it New Year's day that you New Year's morning yeah go go Rock The Rock has got his his his social media game is strong huge yeah it's not the only thing that's strong about the man well oh my gosh it's such a pleasure

hearing that story because I hadn't heard that story yet and we've known each other a long time and I I love hearing how that came together and it's working for people again it inspires me to want to do better in terms of the way way we teach and improve our our methods and um and we're going to be doing that as thanks to you how do people if

they're ready and they want to know more how do they come and find what you're doing you can go to promom masterclass.com and that page is dedicated to showing examples and getting you ready determining whether you want to do the intro course or or if uh you want to do the master class you know I have a lot of people that come in uh when I do like X session at vo Atlanta or at TVO where we do the you know the Mastery classes and things like that dependent upon that we decide on

where's the best if I have somebody that comes in out of the blue I go you know take the intro class and and get a feel for it you're going to do every type of promo that's out there every style of promo session you'll know immediately gosh do I love this or does this scare the heck out of me you know now on the billboard on the title of the website can you give me an ABC on that I I need to hear three different reads on that promo masterclass.com of course ABC's for

Speed that's true that's true well it's a pleasure I've I've derailed my thought because uh I I I find something I think is funny in my head and I get stuck on it and I yes exactly think of anything else to say that's the nice thing about editing well I appreciate your time Joe I know you're busy and you've got a lot going on and and I'm so glad you're getting to enjoy your family as well and being on both coasts is a blessing I mean it's so cool and you're a role

model to me I will tell you that with all complete honesty so thank you so much for being here with us