Voiceover Read Rate, and How Improving It Increases Your Bottom Line What 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...
Tag Archive for: eLearning
3 Ways Storytelling is King in Voiceover for Ads and 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? 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 st...
Unless 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 ...
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 d...
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 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...
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: 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 pro...
There are few things I love more in life than story. Nature, maybe. Water, but that’s a subset of nature. People aren’t things…well, not generally anyway. But the point of this big reveal into story at the head of my behind the scenes insights on audiobook narration is that the tales we tell and how we tell them, whether through aural or oral tradition, wrapped in celluloid, tramped across boards or lining the pages or screens of books has been my happy obsession for decades. Prep ...
21st Century voice over means knowing how direct yourself in your own booth. Expertly. If the task seems daunting and you’re a bit shaky on how to deftly turn the tables to be both actor and director, these tips may help steady you on. When you get a piece of text… Orient Yourself Grasshopper Who – are you: The boss? A peer, a dad, an ice princess? Your read for Nok, the sewer troll will be very different from the BFF over coffee. Who – are you talking to: Again, answering...
An educational eLearning client recently asked me for referrals for sound studios builders. They’ve decided to build a place for their professors to record. This got me, the professional voice actor thinking… Both of my university aged daughters have complained about monotone, boring, bad narration in the online courses they have taken which were narrated by their profs. Why is this happening? Why would a prof risk everything they have worked so hard to achieve and turn it into ...
It takes a finessed approach to narrate to and essentially teach health care professionals. As a voice over actor with over twenty years of experience in medical eLearning-voice-over I’ve worked on projects targeted to the general public and medical professionals alike. Although I have no formal medical background, I have found the key is to sound like I do. Medical eLearning: An Adjusted Voiceover Delivery Medical eLearning generally informs learners about latest techniques and impo...
