If you are new to voice over I’m about to give you some insider information that will help you breathe a big sigh of relief.
The secret is: you don’t have to read the script perfectly all the way through.
I know this may seem obvious to people who’ve been at this awhile, but many new beginners assume that in a real recording session, you can’t make mistakes.
They curse and beat themselves up if they stumble while practicing or auditioning, thinking that flawless perfection is the goal.
If they only knew the truth!
Every piece of recorded production is assembled in the recording studio. Flubs and noises are edited out. Breaths are removed. The audio quality is tweaked and sweetened-it’s as if you have a celebrity makeup artist for your voice!
In fact there’s so much work done in post-production that the industry rule-of-thumb metric is 3:1. That means, on average, it takes 3 hours to produce one hour of finished audio.
Now if that sounds like a lot of time, there are ways to be more efficient in the studio. The best voice actors can get their finished recording time down to 1.5 to 1 (90 minutes to record a finished hour of audio)
Here are some tips for more efficient studio sessions:
- Read and prepare the script carefully before you record<br>
Flag difficult pronunciations and call the client if you have questions - Mark your copyCross out any punctuation that doesn’t make sense. Mark pauses and breath points.
- If you’ll be editing. Clap when you make a mistakeYou’ll see a spike in the sound so you can quickly locate the edit points
- Practice, practice. PracticeBecoming a smooth efficient reader takes time. You’ll make less mistakes as you train you eyes to read ahead of your mouth so you know what’s coming
- If a client is listening, don’t apologize for mistakes
It’s annoying, unprofessional and slows down the session. Simply stop, go back to the beginning of the sentence and read it again. The engineer will mark your mistake and edit it out later.
So when doing voice over, relax and have fun and remember, anything can be fixed in the mix.
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Susan Berkley is a top voice over artist and founder of The Great Voice Company, a company devoted to teaching great voices around the world how to become successful voice over actors.
The Great Voice Company is an international leader in voice over training and in providing top quality voice over recordings in all languages to discerning businesses and marketers. For additional information visit www.greatvoice.com. Do you know this about voice over scripts.
