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Tips for Pros
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YOU
SAY TOMAAAY TO, I SAY TOMAHHHHTO.... English is not exactly a phonetic language. Take the common letter combination: "ough", How should it be pronounced? As in "doughnut"? What about "through"? Had enough? So when you hand a script to a professional voice-over person, please have the courtesy of supplying a pronunciation guide for the unusual words and family names that might be in question. Spelling is seldom a help when it comes to names. How do your say "Stein"? Is it with a broad "EEEE", or does it have an "EYE" sound? The spelling doesn't tell you. If you drive US Rte. 1 North of San Francisco, you'll cross the Tamalpais Mountains near Mill Valley. "Tamalpais"..... go on, say it. If you've never been there (like me, until recently) you wont know that it's pronounced "TA-MA- PIE- US"... accent on the third syllable. Took me a while to learn to ignore that "L". There are small towns by the name of "Henrico" in both Virginia and North Carolina... not too far from each other. But one is "HEN-RYE-KO" and the other is "EN-REE-KO". The difference between Beaufort, North Carolina and Beaufort, South Carolina is that one is "BOH-FORT" and the other is "BEW-FERT". See what I mean? The world is filled with other examples... and, most likely, so is your script. So if you're supposed get someone to read your script right the first time, you'd better come to the studio with pronunciations. Because we voice-over folk make a lot of money from those of you who don't come prepared and have to hire us to come back to make repairs at a later date. Frankly, we'd rather do it right the first time, if you'll just give us the information we need. Do
you take the breaths out, or not? This is the source of common debate
worldwide in recording studios that specialize in spoken word production.
The problem is that often the sound of the announcer sucking in air for
the next sentence become loud enough to be distracting. But if there is no background... no music... no other sound but the announcer's voice, the listener may start to turn blue after a minute or two! We tend to want to breathe sympathetically, and will often mirror the respiration pattern of whoever is speaking to us. When there are no discernible breaths, the listener becomes uncomfortable and perhaps even catches themselves holding their breath, waiting for the sound of breathing. An uncomfortable listener is not a good thing in advertising and promotions. Since we can't always know if there will be background noise when the narration is heard, there is a safer alternative that is not much more difficult than removing the breaths. And that is to isolate each breath as a separate file in the digital editor, and knock the volume of the sound down about -12 db. The breaths are still there, but very faintly. There is enough for the human brain to discern and accept as normal breathing, but it's low enough in volume that compression and other signal processing effects will not make the breaths jump up to the level of the voice itself. No distraction... Natural sound. What could be better? It doesn't matter what's going on in the background... you're going to sound great! Of course if you don't have a digital editor you're going to have to teach the announcer to talk without breathing. Good luck! The real difference between the "Tips" page and the "Rants" page is that, while both call attention to problems in the recording studio environment, the "Tips" page offers solutions. This was brought to my attention, through example, by one of my favorite people and a gifted female voice talent from Greenville, SC, BJ Koonce, who asked me to comment on the condition of the faxed scripts we so often get in our business. She didn't just point out the common problems, she also offered some suggestions for solving them! Good for you, BJ! The
problem is that those of us who get paid to put a voice to someone else's
words have to be able to read those words clearly! Thanks to ISDN connections,
we can have our voice recorded nearly anywhere in the world in real time.
But the script invariably arrives at our location as a fax. And it's often
printed out in the teeniest possible font... like about 6 points! Plus
it's usually a copy of a fax that has been faxed a couple of other times
before during the approval process, causing the crispness of the type
to yield to a fuzzy sort of haze where letters used to be. Tiny, and fuzzy,
and reeeeeeealy difficult to read. A printed price like $29.95 starts
to look like your ex-wife's name! BJ suggests using at least a 12-point font, and I'm inclined to also suggest a serif font instead of sans-serif, for better legibility on a full page or more. Plus, the fax machine receiving the scripts must also be properly set to avoid reducing the size of the incoming transmission. Sometimes the size problem is on the receiving end, not the sending end. And, for goodness sake, give us double spacing and wide margins in which to take notes and make revisions! She also brought up the subject of using all capital letters, rather than a mix of upper and lower case type. As the voices for your scripts, we have to be able to understand exactly what we're saying. Knowing how to separate names and titles from the rest of the material is generally a function of capital letters, and is vital to our ability to read something correctly. Most of the time we have to read your script"cold", without much time for preview (that long approval process, again), and we need all the clues we can get as to HOW to read it. We get that from the format in which you print it. That means capital letters, correct punctuation, and a sense of how it will sound out loud rather than whether it precisely follows textbook grammar rules. So here are BJ's suggestions to writers: (I'm interpreting here, so don't take these words as being precisely her own.) Assume that it will go through several generations of faxing before it gets to the talent, so make the font, spacing, and margins generous in size. Write it in both upper and lower case, as appropriate, and pay attention to your punctuation as well, so that we can tell how you want it read. And, above all, read it to yourself OUT LOUD before you decide it's ready for recording. Sometimes those wonderfully constructed pieces of grammar sound like shit when spoken aloud! And thanks, BJ. You always know the "write" thing to say.
You've been sitting at the microphone for 45 minutes, reading the same dreary piece of copy over and over for a producer who hasn't got a clue about how to direct you. Forget spontaneity! You're concentrating so hard on delivering each little bit of direction regarding nuance, emphasis, pacing, sparkle, intensity, passion, and focus that now the playback sounds like a robot on heavy drugs. Everyone is getting frustrated, and you are obviously in a pattern of diminishing returns... getting worse instead of better. What do you do to save the session? You've already been told the script is sacrosanct, so not a word can be changed to put it into verbal English phrases to make it easier on the ear.(There's another subject for the "Rants" page!) The producer is new and can't seem to describe the desired sound he hears in his head, and you can't get it dialed in either, because he keeps reading it to you in a nasal monotone (his natural voice), saying: "There... Just like that!!" Time for a break!! Depending on whether you can sense how the producer is feeling about things, you have a few options. You MUST achieve a temporary lull, somehow. Perhaps you can remember a joke or funny story (the longer the better). Take your time delivering it. You could develop a minor stomach cramp and ask for a short potty-break. Get the producer to talk about himself for a while (usually an easy task), or find something in the news to talk about. The point is to clear everyone's mental RAM, purge the conscious cache in your head of all copy points, focus somewhere else that has no script or studio issues, and when everyone is fairly relaxed again, go back to your problem. But, this time, don't think about all that old direction you were given. You worked so hard at it that it's now become married to the words, deep in your subconscious mind. You'll be free to focus on the copy content... the meaning behind the words... instead of the technique of how to deliver it. And it'll suddenly sound a lot better to everyone's ears Of course, if you're not paying attention to the copy content to begin with, it's never going to sound right! You're in the wrong profession.
There is always going to be the commercial writer/producer that can't bear to edit his "perfect script", in spite of the fact that it is much, much too long. Take heart. There is always a way to get that commercial to fit the 30 or 60 second hole the stations give you. You may not like the way it sounds, but there's always a way. Decades ago we used to wind Scotch tape (the office variety) around the tape deck's capstan until it made the recording speed up to fit the hole. Things are better now in the digital era. If you have a decent nonlinear audio editor like Pro Tools or Fairlight (my favorite), you have plenty of algorithms for squeezing sound into tight little time frames. But what do you do when they get squeezed so hard they start popping and crackling with digital artifacts? Change the algorithm. Instead of squeezing time directly, stop short of the point where the artifacts begin to occur and switch to vari-speed. Just speed the damn thing up until it's fast enough to fit the hole. Then get rid of the "Donald Duck" effect by using the pitch-shift algorithm to bring everything back down to a fairly normal level. Because it's a whole new algorithm, you have a whole new percentage range to work in, giving you much more elbow room to compress the selection. And if your editor doesn't have vari-speed, there's always that old reel-to-reel and Scotch tape! By this time it'll be so fast the human ear will recognize that somebody's been screwing around with the sound, but it wont be because of digital artifacts or added noise. It'll just be obviously faster than nature permits. Play the super-compressed selection for your clients, and hope they have the good sense to shoot the writer.
The biggest problem with directing talent is learning to communicate with them (us). We don't want you to read the spot to us. What you hear in your head is NOT what's going into our ears! If you could do it right, you wouldn't need us. We need to be able to hear in our heads what you hear in yours when you direct us. We want to know "where the words are coming from".... Attitude. Emotion. Relationship to the listener. And "where the words are going"... Who's the target demographic? How receptive will they be? And what, exactly, is the message behind the words we're reading? If we don't understand precisely what we're saying and why we're saying it, there's no hope of communicating it to the listener. When you tell talent to "hit that word harder" or "come up on the end of the phrase" or "put a little air in your voice when you say this", or any of that sort of direction, you are telling us how to do our jobs rather than giving us the tools with which to bring our expertise to the table. Everything about the performance has to come from a position of understanding the message... not from artificial technique or imitation of someone else you once heard. Show us that position. Make us understand the message completely, and the reason for it, and we will give you what you hear in your head. Instead of describing the sound, describe the feeling you want from us. And it's really nice when we find a producer who isn't married to the sound in his head so much that he can't appreciate an equally appropriate and perfectly correct alternative interpretation from the talent. The best creative products contain the combined best efforts of a team of specialists, guided by someone with the ability to recognize excellence in others.
We've all run into monster sessions: A series of several very complicated commercials, a long audio post production job for video, or a huge custom music project for a special event. You spend hours building all of the elements and tweaking the sound as you go, so when everything is in place and it's time for the final mix you've already got most of it set up and ready to go. This is the homestretch, and you wrap the job up and go home tired but happy. A couple of days later you happen to punch up the mix as you search through your old DATS for something, or maybe you attend the event or see the show on the tube... And you're horrified! "What the hell was I thinking? The EQ sucks! There's distortion in the low end... and that one track overpowers everything else in the mix! How could I have ever let that shit out of the studio?!" Tired
ears, buddy! Tired ears. Give it at least one night. Sleep on it. Then approach the mix with fresh ears. Don't even reload the session's presets in the board and editor... Start from scratch and get all those elements to settle into their proper places with a completely new attitude and approach. You'll be a lot happier, and so will your client.
Every working announcer has one. It's "the" word.. The one you just cannot pronounce properly in a naturally flowing sentence. For many it's "regularly", as in; "...sold regularly for $19.99, now only....(etc.)". Personally, my word is "integral". Keeps coming out as "intra-gull", dammit! There are only two ways to overcome these problem words when you encounter them in a script... either change the word to something else that means the same thing, or change the way you say the word. Most of the time either our pride or the copywriter will forbid us to change the word, so let's study how to go about changing the way we view the word... making it easier to pronounce correctly. We can say the word over and over several times correctly and then immediately begin to read the sentence containing the word and hope that it will feel more familiar and flow smoothly off our lips. But sometimes that old trick doesn't work and we have to try something different. My first trick is to rewrite the entire sentence in the margin of the script, and change the spelling of the word to something phonetic and, preferably, familiar. "Regularly" might become "regular lee" or "reg you lurly". Your brain knows that the different spelling is coming so it wont surprise you, and you should be able to let your brain absorb the letters and trigger your mouth to pronounce what your eyes see, producing a nice, normal-sounding "regularly". My second trick is to change the pace of the sentence.... break the flow into a different, but alternatively correct pattern. I'll change the place where I would ordinarily take a breath. Or I'll place a different inflection or emphasis on an adjacent word. I'll find something to change in the sentence that still sounds right, but shatters the mind-lock that has occurred from trying too many times to say "the" word. One last resort is good old Webster's Dictionary. Look the word up and pray for alternative acceptable pronunciations. Then hope the producer will let you use a less common but still proper pronunciation. My bugaboo word , "integral", is correct with the emphasis on either the first or second syllable: "IN-te-gral", or "in-TEG-ral". The first is preferred but, on a bad day, the second may be my salvation! And if you still can't seem to get it to work, you can always hope you have a talented guy at the controls. With today's DAWs, a clever engineer can almost create a word from pieces of other words in your narration... or, at least, take the one and only close approximation you uttered (in a passing comment you made while the record light was still on) and stick it in one of the outtakes to produce a clean-sounding version. If the engineer talks about razor blades and tape with an air of nostalgia, he's your guy! Or gal... I know several very good female engineers in the biz, too.
I got an e-mail from an old friend and fellow voice artist in KY asking about a common occurrence with people in our profession. She wrote: "So, do you ever get these out-of-the-blue e-mails from some kid wanting advice on how to do VO work? I've gotten two of them in a week. Just wondering what you tell them..." Well, Kathie, I usually tell them two things:
GOT A TIP TO SHARE? I certainly don't claim to have all the answers... or even correct ones. In fact, I could use all the answers I can get! I invite you to offer any tips you have to share, in any aspect of the industry. Send 'em to MrVO, and I'll share the best with all the rest. |
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This is aggravated by compressors, limiting amplifiers, and various other
signal processing gizmos typically used to make the voice cut through
any background noise.... like in a car's dashboard at rush hour, for example.
While giving the voice more power, and elevating even the more subtle
tones to a higher volume and awareness, this signal processing also tends
to boost the gasping effect of the announcer's normal breathing, causing
distractions. The common cure is
to simply edit out the breaths... Just take 'em out, leaving only clean
voice sounds. This works just fine as long as there is music or sound
effects or always some kind of noise where it is going to be played. 
When
you've been working all day or, worse yet, all week on a project, you're
so damned deep in the forest you can even spell "tree"!
Your brain started ignoring little things in the mix long before all the
elements were in place, and you won't hear them again until you've given
your ears and your brain a rest... A long rest.