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eLearning

Voiceover Read Rate, and How Improving It Increases Your Bottom Line

Voiceover Business

pile of scripts improve your reading rateWhat the heck is a read rate? As a voiceover artist, your read rate is the difference between the length of your raw voiceover file and the length of your finished, edited one. And if you do any long form narration, it’s something to strive to ever improve. For example, if it takes you three hours to read one hour of finished text, your read rate is 3:1. Chatting with several colleagues recently – professional VO’s who’ve been in it for 5 or 6 years, I discovered that for the majority of them (all of them making a decent living), this is their read rate. But there are a few of us, present company included, who read at a rate of 1.2:1 or better. A tight read rate means your narration business is much more profitable.  Your costs per hour and your opportunity to increase your bottom line is greatly enhanced. want to make more money? Have more time? Let’s break this down.

Voiceover Read Rate Case Study

Let’s examine an imaginary case for read rate. Say you just booked a job at the eLearning narration rate of$1200 for a finished hour. If your read rate is 3:1, it will take you 3 hours to narrate and  6-7 hours to edit those 3 hours. So that means you spend 10 hours to produce that one hour of finished product, and you will be working at a rate of $120 an hour. Not bad. But it can be better. For the same job, with a read rate of 1.2 hours of raw to 1 hour finished, not only does it takes you less time to read, but it also takes you less time to edit. 1.2 hours plus 2 to 2.8 (to keep my math simple) to edit and it now took you 4 hours to produce an hour instead of 10 hours. You are now working at $300 an hour. Nice! Those extra 6 hours can be filled with more time to audition and narrate, or time to market or improve your craft or hit the gym. Sub out your editing to a good sound editor and your time/money profit increases further.

Getting Paid to Improve Your Read Rate

$100 bills, make more money voice over businessUnlike a lot of things in the current voiceover market, a tight read rate is one area where having a few years of experience reading the news live on TV or radio really helps. As well as several years as a DJ and a newsreader, I worked the six o’clock supper hour news shows at two major market networks, and a third national cable station doing weather. They had different approaches to presentation but the CBC gig was the one that really improved my read rate. For CTV and the Weather Network, our weather presentations were totally improvised. You fed the numbers and maps to the control room, stayed up to date with any changes to the forecast, and built your 5 minute presentation around the boards and maps unscripted. The CBC format demanded that I type up my forecast ahead of time to feed it to the teleprompter. Working with a prompter doing weather, helped in so many ways. While anchors and reporters have a more stylized sound, weather people don’t. Ad-libbing, right? You have to make it sound like you’re not reading. In that way, weather people are kind of the equivalent of TV DJ’s (minus the cool factor). So even though I was reading, I had to make it sound like I wasn’t. The biggest giveaway? Flubbing a line as I read. We just don’t do that in real life. One thing that greatly added to making sure I didn’t muff my lines was the pressure I put on myself to sound flawless. What helped create that pressure cooker? Heightened concentration.

Taking Your Read Rate to the Next Level

roman road. improve your narration, solidifySince leaving TV and radio (over 20 years ago) I’ve been a full-time pretty-much-constantly-working VO artist. Before technology disruption made it affordable for us to create our own home studios, my motivation for improving my read rate was saving my clients studio time, aka money. This made me a popular client choice and fostered a lot of repeat business. The texts given were always read cold (without having seen them before). A visual artist friend of mine talks about the years it takes to build the eye-hand coordination to be able to faithfully (re)produce images (in her case paintings). There’s a brain connection that has to be exercised regularly to make it happen. It takes time and concentrated effort to forge it, but then once that connection has been created, it’s pretty much like a Roman built road. It’s permanent. In breaking down my own process to do the same with voiceover, I’ve gathered a small, but effective compendium of techniques to be able to improve eye-mouth co-ordination which I’ll be sharing at my X session Narration 2.0 at VO Atlanta 2019.

If you’ve already signed up, looking forward to working with you. And if you haven’t, there are only a couple spots left. See you there!

3 Ways Storytelling is King in Voiceover for Ads and Business

Voiceover Business

So…what’s your story? Or rather what is your relationship with story? Chances are it’s tight. We humans love story. We swim in it, soak in it, eat it up daily. Hourly, even. But have you stopped to consider your relationship with story as a voiceover artist?

actor LeVar Burton speaks Kim Handysides Voice over
Source:Craig Barritt/Getty Images for AOL Inc.)

Levar Burton, (Reading Rainbow guy, Geordie from Star Trek:Next Generation, Kunta Kinte in Roots) as the key note speaker at DevLearn 2017, stated that story telling is our super power as human beings. Intrinsic to that power is the ability to project ourselves in a moment outside this one. Speaking to a few thousand eLearning developers and creators, he recommended habituating  the gateway to story, using the ubiquitous chestnut “What if” to better engage their users and learners.

How voiceover artists use “What if”?

By bringing it to everything you read. If you’re trained in acting, you recognize this as incorporating Meisner technique or Practical Aesthetics. If your background is broadcasting, think of it as finding that personal angle to hook the 6 o’clock supper hour news story on. But make it personal to you. The copy is a retail radio spot for a weekly special about cheap chicken and toilet paper? Use “what if” to imagine those prices really making a difference in your life. Maybe you’re a millennial who’s just left home, you’ve got a new family and all your money is going toward diapers, or you’re on a fixed pension. If the copy doesn’t provide it, build your backstory to better present it. Your “what if” world-building will help your message connect on an emotional level.

Emotion Amps Up VoiceOver Storytelling

brightly lit scan of brain & head
Source: Fine Art America

Settled around the crackling fireplace, the smells of Sunday pot roast lingering in the air and your grandfather tap, tap, tapping the tobacco in his pipe as he launches into a story about his youth. How did you feel? Lit up like a Christmas tree?  Our brains are actually wired to process info best through storytelling. We have an eons old history of passing everything on aurally. Whether legend, cautionary tale or recipe on how to live life, we figured out over millennia the kids would get it faster, deeper, better if sewn together in story. In fact, three times more areas of our brains light up when we bake info in a story cake than if we just slice it up into naked factoids.

Persuasive Voiceover and Influencing Action

Your story (i.e. commercial ad, corporate narration, explainer video, etc.) if told well (i.e. with emotion, with enough world building and an appropriate “what if”) will prompt your listener to action (which is what your client wants) and fill out their time cards appropriately or sign up for the corporate baseball team or go and put that brand of frozen pizza in their shopping cart next time they need groceries. What we do is powerful stuff (when done well). Our clients entrust us to tell their stories to their clients. It’s a big responsibility. We are the Hermes of humanity. The messengers. To ply our trade well, we need to understand both the needs of the message maker and message receiver.

Morphing a Memorable Message

Matthew McConaughey in Lincoln ad Kim Handysides Voiceover
Source: MLive.com

A story told well stays with you. Romeo and Juliet. A Christmas Carol. Harry Potter. Yes, these are all written stories which we’ve read at one time or another, but the same holds true for stories told in spoken word. Morgan Freeman in Shawshank Redemption, Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump, Kate Winslet in Titanic. Great stories, but also, really great voiceover narrators. Those voices, telling those stories stick with you.  Same with ads. The Alka Selzter man from the 70’s moaning “I can’t believe I ate the whoooole thing,” the tiny grandma from the 80’s shouting “Where’s the beef?” or more recently, Matthew McConaughey rubbing his fingers and musing, “That’s a big bull” in the Lincoln ads. Story makes the message stick.

Tell Your Voiceover Story

drawing of a crown and word kingBack at the DevLearn conference, LeVar Burton wrapped up his speech on storytelling to the eLearning crowd by telling us what we imagine and what we create are inextricably linked. So true. Everything man has ever created existed first as an imagining, shared with another in, most probably, story. It begs the question, whether copywriter, voiceover artist, producer or “other” creative, what will your unique contribution be? What are your stories? And how will you tell them from your singular perspective?

eLearning Project Flow and where you Come in as a VoiceOver Narrator

eLearning, Voiceover Styles

mystery box question markUnless you’ve come to voiceover from an online learning background, understanding how an eLearning project is put together is a mystery to most voice over narrators. I sat down with a good friend of mine who’s risen through the ranks in the industry and is now a department manager at an international e-learning content creation company, and asked him to help me to demystify the process. To better help we ‘talent’ see where we come in. Here is the result:

Analyze and Brainstorm

A project comes into a content development company and some sort of an analysis is done. Perhaps it’s with an analysis and research team. They will take an overall look at the material, try to make sure they understand the mandate, ask for more clarification if they don’t, and then develop a course outline and a budget. Very often the integrator or project manager or content manager or all three will also attend the analysis. They’ll be there to brainstorm ideas and add their expertise at this early stage and high-level look-see.

Start the Game

team of fists bumping
Credit: Pexels

At the project kickoff, the team presents the results of their analysis to the client and meet face-to-face or via zoom or Skype to make to make sure everyone is on the same page. At that point the team players assemble. There’s a Project manager assigned. This is the person who will manage deadlines and tasks and liaise with the client. The visual designer will create templates the course website (if that’s part of the package) and the look and feel of all the visuals. There is a QA person. This is the one who ensures that everything done is correct. There is a content strategist and/or instructional designer. This job may also go buy other titles but is essentially the person who will either write, order and take the content and design or create the course. Sometimes a SME (subject matter expert) writes the material and hands it off to the ID. There is someone who may coordinate the project between the administration of the company and the project and there is an IT department sometimes called technical or development department who will take care of plug-ins and other assorted computer technical stuff. Finally, there is an integrator, the person who takes everything and puts it all together.

Storyboard and Fill in Content

They make a story board template. And a website template if applicable. This will happen if the client has a website and their own LMS or learning management system. The company may provide hosting services of the content for the client, too. Then they get the story board template to the content department so they can write material to fit into those templates. A high level course outline is created along with learning objectives and capsules of what content will go where. This is sent for approval and if they get it, then they develop those storyboards.

Bring in the Narrator

Mic on floorThe integrator oversees and checks over all the story boards, sends the client static images either with talking points and animation cues and gets approval of the script. Then, they (or the project manager) send the script to the voiceover narrator to record. By the way, this particular friend works with both non-professional and professional elearning narrators and is vehement that pro narrators always bring in a stronger ROI. While the narrator is recording and editing the team animates and integrates the storyboards. The QA team then listens over to audio before they integrate and meanwhile the integrator purchases images, edits and prepares animation to sync. Any pickups in the narration are done, and then they integrate the audio to the animation and sync it slide by slide.

QA and Bugs

At this point, there may be a peer review. Some companies have this, some don’t. A peer review helps the team to learn things from each other they didn’t necessarily learn in school or on other projects. The QA team listens watches the full program and makes sure that everything works in different environments, for example in mobile platforms. They do something called a regression which fixes any bugs, but which may also create other bugs, do a final QA and send the Beta version to the client for review period.

Release the Gold

Once they get feedback from the client,  they integrate any changes and then launch the product. The product has gone from prototype to Beta to Gold. Some companies also do a postmortem to see what they can learn from experience. Sometimes an instructional designer may do all parts of the project from start to finish. But the outline I just sketched is the way one company I work with creates their content, and it’s fairly common. I hope this is has been helpful.

Kim Handysides is a successful Award winning voiceover artist. Studying the eLearning industry has made her a stronger eLearning narrator, and led her to become a speaker and coach on the subject as well. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How Professional Voice Actors Break Down their Prices

Voiceover Business

Hands in mud Kim Handysides Voiceover
Credit: Karen Maes

What’s the first question I’m asked along with how fast can you get this back to me? “What are the prices?” I, like most voiceover artists will answer with a clear as mud, “It depends.” So, let’s demystify this.  Professional voice over actors base their rates on three major parameters: use, population and time. Geography also sometimes enters the picture. But  other factors also weigh in heavily in on how we cost out the licensing of our work and determining voice over fees. Let’s break it down.

Hourly Rate + 30 years

A buyer trying to haggle with my friend Eileen Raucher-Sutton a brilliant watercolor painter in the art world, asked her, “Come one, how long did it take to paint that?” She glibly answered, “Oh, about two weeks. And 30 years.” Voice over, like other art is rarely bought by the actual time it takes us to do it. Like athletes, we work long and hard for decades to be able to tickle the ears of a target audience. To be able to make written words flow, sound conversational, upbeat, or however else you might want them delivered. To be able to roll out two or three different characters in one job or imitate Jennifer Lawrence or George Clooney. To rattle off 10K eLearning words before lunch,  a directed commercial session and 25 prompts for an award ceremony before quittin’ time, because it never rains but pours and Mama’s bills are piling up.

 

athlete running up stairs Kim Handysides Voice over
Credit: Clique Images

80/20 rule in VoiceOver

Most professional voice actors only get to narrate twenty percent of the time. The rest is spent chasing down the next gig. Like pro athletes, there is a lot of time between games. There’s auditioning, filling out NDA’s, drawing up specs and (shudder) paperwork like invoicing. There’s collecting, oh, and marketing. There’s the constant care and upkeep of craft, updates to software and sound booths so we can improve and hopefully be in demand. Most who hear how much we make per job for the relatively short amount of time put into it don’t take these factors into consideration. And of course, unless the job is a Union gig (in which the rates are non-negotiable) the voice actor is not getting any contributions to their insurance or retirement with that job. Flat in, flat out.

 

Voice Acting is My Day Job

A professional voice actor, doesn’t moonlight on the side. Or work anywhere else. This is their main source of income. Day after day. Decade upon decade. We will be there if you need pickups in a week, a year or ten years from now.

 

Voiceover Rates Per Use

Voice acting has tons of applications. Well, maybe a hundred anyway. Apps, toys, and events, games, eLearning and commercials, VR, audiobooks and inflight announcements, corporate explainers, web shows and medical animations. The list goes on and on. Curiously, some of the most difficult and technical work (gaming, audiobooks and dubbing) is paid less. Broadcast has always landed the biggest dollar, although its market is sliding away to a growth in digital ads.

Crowd in city Kim Handysides Voice Over
Credit: Meric Dagli

Voiceover Fees Per Population

Simply put, the more eyes and ears exposed to your project, the higher the voice over prices. In the Unions, this parameter is cut into population units. A city of 3 million might have 7 units. A city of one million would have 2 or 3. Each unit brings a certain amount of money. A college campus program, awards ceremony, or local play are on one end of the spectrum, a national commercial or TV narration are on the other.

Voiceover Prices Per Unit of Time

How long will the voice over be used? Typically an ad runs 13 weeks. That’s the Union model definition of one cycle. A year is four cycles. If you need to license the voice over in perpetuity (aka forever), you need to purchase a buy-out. In Union world, buy-outs are 1-5 years and then residuals kick in. That’s another consideration. I collect a few bucks a year for a cartoon series I did in the ‘90’s. Another time consideration is the length of the session in which you do the work.  A commercial session may be 2 hours whereas narration on a television series may last 8 hours. VO’s who work from their home studio often offer a free one hour session included in their price.

Voiceover Production Costs

Who will be  editing and mastering the recorded voice tracks? Is that voiceover service included?  A voice actor who works remotely from their house already comes with built in savings in not charging you studio costs. Studios range from $100 per hour to thousands in the big cities. Some voice talents offer post production themselves, but busier ones subcontract that. Which means that cost ($20-30/hour on a 1:3 clean to unedited ratio) comes out of their pay. Most voice actors amortize the costs associated with their sound studios into the regular cost of doing business.

I’m a female voiceover artist who’s happy to work in either my studio or yours. Although I get to take my dog to my studio, so there’s that. I hope this outline has helped.

How to Win in the eLearning Industry as a Voiceover Actor

eLearning, Voiceover Business

The eLearning Industry is expanding rapidly and needs good (read: great) voiceover actors to help make their training projects achieve end goals and win results. Here are three things you can do to stake your claim in this booming industry.

 

Educate Yourself about the eLearning Industry

Kim Handysides eLearning
Credit: ActuarialLearning

By and large, the people who would hire voiceover talent in the e-Learning industry are a bright and bookish lot. That is to say, they are more comfortable with you going to play in their playground, rather than you asking them to come to yours. So, find out about their process. Creating content for eLearning is very different than creating an ad campaign or writing animation. The Instructional Designers usually author the projects, who then hand them to a Project Manager who assigns tasks to graphic designers, animators, IT (and the VO), who send everything to an Integrator who sends the project to QA and then it’s ready to send to the client. They have different goals (aka getting participants to learn something) and those goals are chiefly broken down into knowledge retention (as in the academic arena) or behavior change (like, getting employees to be safe or fill out the correct forms or do whatever they are doing now differently because it is costing the company time, money or a variant thereof, like reputation). Learn what their pain points are.

 

 

Reach Out to eLearning Employees

Kim Handysides Voiceover
Credit: SpectrumNet

You have something they want. Your storytelling ability. Your engaging, natural, passionate, professional audio, quick turn-around sound. They need that. Otherwise their projects fall flat. Not all of them know that yet. But, in any conversations you might have with them you can be confident of your ability to meet their goals (whether it’s info retention or behavior change) because there’ve been studies that prove people will tolerate poor quality video over poor quality (or less-than engaging) audio. People largely process information visually. Because the processing window is much smaller for audio, this translates into us being more picky about audio quality. Cool, right? You know this yourself. You will listen to a show while cooking or cleaning, without really checking on the video that much. But if the audio is off (on any show) you won’t watch it.

 

 

Help eLearning Freelancers & Other Voiceover Narrators Win

Helping
Credit: Vikiaviligban

Once you’ve learned about your eLearning market, and reached out to them with confidence (in your ability to help), do more. Help them out in other ways. Recommend other VOs for characters, for when you’re too busy or for variety. Recommend VOs in other languages than yours for jobs. Recommend them for eLearning jobs you hear about. This is especially helpful if the eLearning professionals you work with are freelance and are always looking for their next gig. In this way, you evolve from just another talent knocking at their door for narration gigs to a trusted partner in their work world.

 

What has your experience been working with the Elearning industry? I’d love to hear from you whether your encounters have been positive or otherwise.

 

Kim Handysides is a female voiceover artist who loves learning. 16/7  (‘Cause ya gotta sleep sometime)

Voice Over Rates: How to Find the Razor Sharp Edge of Pricing your Professional

Voiceover Business

After sorting out how to find the right voice with top notch audio quality and a quick turnaround time, the big question for producers hiring voiceover professional is rates. How much does it cost to hire a voice actor to narrate your material?

The simple answer:

Voice over Rates
Credit: Election Academy

 

Union

 

First let’s sneak a peek at the Union vs non-Union rates. If it’s a Union (Sag-AFTRA-ACTRA) gig, the minimum or “scale” rates are set and negotiated between representatives on behalf of the actors and the producers who are signatory to the union. The actor then may agree to do the job for scale, or ask for “scale and a half,” “double scale,” etc. This is more common for experienced or in-demand actors.

 

Rates are a hot topic among artists who make their living with their vocal chords. Sometimes a contentious one. Whether those artists are union, non-union or both (i.e. Fi-core, for financial core – SAG AFTRA members who pay their union dues, but rescind voting rights to be able to work both sides of the lot).

Voice over Rates How to Find
Credit: Nick Maillet

Union folk walk the tight line between anxiously guarding hard-fought for rates and keeping rates competitive in the rising tide of non-union work. Being organized, they are also the loudest complainant that rates for the most strenuous types of voice work are the often the lowest. And, it’s true. Genres, like gaming, audiobook work and dubbing are all low-men on the totem pole. Long-form audiobook narration is a rewarding, but slogging marathon and dubbing while exhilarating, requires tight precision in timing and delivery. Gaming demands intense energy and characterization of life and death situations, where the stakes are always high and the pace to perform is wickedly fast. (At a studio where I often direct commercials, narration & demos, I was invited to audition as a gaming director. I was told my direction was spot on, excellent even, but the time I took to get the actor to deliver the performance was just too long for the gaming world.)

 

Non-Union

 

If you have not signed an agreement with the actor’s union(s), or your project is being produced virtually (with input from various contributors around the globe), then your project is non-union. Rates for non-union jobs generally depend on two variables: the project and the actor. More specifically, the length, use and intended/projected audience of your project, and the quality of the voice actor (and occasionally both how busy that actor is and the depth of your relationship).

 

Voice over Rates
Credit: Free in Society

Professional voice actors who work non-union jobs most often charge prices in line with union gigs. Most producers who are not Union signatory, still want great talent, they just don’t want to either be locked in to residuals and buy-outs on every production or have the flexibility to pick up both union and nonunion work themselves.

 

Use, Population & Time

 

How a voice performance is used is the most important identifier in determining price. Commercial advertising (broadcast, theatrical, web, etc.) commands the highest fee structure and is also based on population. How many eyes/ears will see/hear it? The sliding scale works from local, regional to national ads. And there are differences in price for different countries. A national ad in the USA has 5 times the potential viewership of a national ad in the UK and 10 times that of Canada. The prices reflect that. When you take international ads and audiences into account, international economies also come into play. The average weekly salary in Jamaica is 1/3 of an average American weekly wage, and people in India make less than 1/10 of what those in the US make.  Commercial rates may be negotiated as a lump sum or follow the Union model and be broken down into a rate for the session (the time during which the ad is recorded), the use (where it will be seen), population (by how many) and for how long (for 13 weeks, generally called “one cycle” or longer, up to a full buy-out – all uses for all perpetuity, in which case, you are looking at a big-ticket item).

 

There is also quite a difference between commercial and narration rates. Typically, we think of narration as corporate or business videos, and training or eLearning programs. Narration rates are often set in either 10 minute increments (which follows the format of the union rates) or by number of cents per word. For example, the lion’s share of voice artists will say any narration up to the first 10 minutes will be around $300 US (give or take $100) or approximately 0.20 per word (give or take 0.10). Rates for subsequent increments of 10 minutes are generally lower on a sliding scale to a fixed rate (eg. no lower than $100 per 10 mins).

 

Voice over rates
Credit: Professionally Speaking

Until you get the hang of it, it can be confusing. Whether you are a producer or a voice over artist. In fact, on our side of the negotiating table, the majority of vetted professional voice over artists discuss our rates amongst each other to keep our prices within what is fair to us, to producers and to respect what the market will bear.

The best way to sort out pricing is have an open discussion with the voice talent you want to hire. Just as you often have a budget range, in most cases, they will have a rate range. The ideal is when your budget range and their rate range find common ground.

If you’re looking for a female voice over artist and want to discuss rates for a project you’re casting, contact me. If I can be of any assistance, I’d love to help.