Beau Weaver
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Beau Weaver is a Los Angeles based voiceover artist, heard used widely in motion picture marketing and program promos for the broadcast and cable networks. He also voices national television commercials and narrates documentaries. He is one of the most versatile performers in the increasingly specialized voiceover field.
[edit] History
Before he moved into freelance voice work, Beau was a radio personality on some of America's legendary pop stations in the seventies and eighties, including KHJ/Los Angeles, KFRC/San Francisco, KCBQ/San Diego, KILT/Houston, KNUS/Dallas and others. In the early eighties, Weaver was one of the pioneers of satellite delivered broadcasting as one of the original on-air talents on the Transtar Radio Network (now Westwood One). He also hosted a nationally syndicated music show called Let The Good Times Roll, distributed by ABC Watermark. Beau was inducted into the Texas Radio Hall of Fame in 2003.
Many of the top VO talents in Los Angeles and New York benefit from some of Beau's innovations. In the early eighties, Beau began voicing promos for independent television stations and affiliates across the country from his location (then) in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Utilizing phone patch and Federal Express, he began to popularize the notion that location was no barrier to using top talent, no matter where the client might be. When he relocated back to Los Angeles in 1984, he voiced daily promos for stations in Chicago, Boston and many other major markets from a studio in his home. He was notable as being the staff announcer at FOX owned and operated stations such as WFLD Chicago and KTTV Los Angeles during the 1980s.
By 1990, Beau began to send his work to clients via an early digital hookup known as Switch 56. the forerunner to today's ISDN network. In the early 1990s, as commercial studios were experimenting with proprietary networks of digital audio codecs, Beau was connecting to studios all over the world from his home setup in Hollywood. Other Beau Weaver innovations include the following: He was the Los Angeles VO talent to put out his demos on CD in 1994. He was the first VO talent with a personal website, with streaming demos in 1995. And in 1997 he was the first VO talent to deliver broadcast audio to clients using what was at the time a little known audio compression format known as MP3.
Beau is also widely credited for being the first voice talent to use aggressive marketing to build awareness of his work. Before Beau Weaver, voice actors waited for the clients to come to them. Much of what is now considered standard practice in the voice talent field has it's origin in Beau Weaver.
One of Beau's most memorable credits include a stint as the voice of Superman in the Ruby-Spears animated series, brought back to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Superman character. He also voiced the lead for Marvel's Fantastic Four series as Reed Richards, also known as Mister Fantastic. Other animation roles include the narrator in the Ralph Bakshi version of The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Feryl in the mystical adventure series The Visionaries.
Beau is heard on the networks doing promos, and television campaigns for films. He is also the promo voice for many top radio stations in local markets. He has voiced Hollywood awards shows and game shows. He was the promo voice for the Los Angeles Dodgers and for many years voiced the Tournament of Roses Parade. Some of his more unusual credits include show opens for dramatic network series' such as NBC's The Pretender and Profiler and work with "Weird Al" Yankovic on his television series The Weird Al Show, and his parody album, Off The Deep End.
Beau Weaver divides his time between Los Angeles and Ojai, California, where he maintains residences and home studios. Samples of his work can be found at [1]
