I'd Rather Be Writing » voiceover

The Perfect Voice — Professional or Authentic?

Tom Johnson — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:15:55 +0000

The Perfect Voice

One trend I think we’ll see more and more is the decrease of professional voiceover actors in screencasts when those voiceover actors are merely reading a script they don’t understand.

As an example, watch some of the tutorials at lynda.com. The narrators may not be professional voiceover actors, but they are subject matter experts. You can tell they’re not just saying words they don’t understand. They’re narrating and showing intricate parts of the screen at the same time. They’re describing processes and tips with the right articulation and inflection that shows they understand the software. I’m willing to bet most users would trade a professional voice for an authentic voice.

It’s somewhat of a hard model to break free from. At my work, the norm is to have voiceover talent read a script, while an audiovisual producer creates the screencast. They must have a heck of a time matching the two up, because actually the audiovisual producer doesn’t write the script. The project manager usually writes a script, which is then cleaned up by a screenwriter who is not a subject matter expert in what he or she is editing.

As a result, you end up with a voiceover actor, an audiovisual producer, a product manager, and a screenwriter all working together. Sometimes you may end up with a motion graphics person and a graphic designer as well. That whole model is outdated, in my opinion. It’s cumbersome, heavy, and expensive. There are too many parts played by too many people. To expect a perfect synchronization is too much.

The traditional model for creating screencasts often takes too many people playing too many different roles. The process is heavy and hard to synchronize. What happens when, at the end of this process, you need to edit the script due to a change in the software? You have to go through the entire process again, involving all of these different roles.

Despite my feelings against the traditional model, I’m sometimes a willing participant. This week I played a silent role as a facilities manager in some still shots and video b-roll (background motion). The product manager wrote the script. He passed it on to a script writer who modified the script. They had a professional voiceover actor read the script.

With the recorded script, a techie played another user role to act out the motions in a way that matched the voiceover’s script. We had a photographer and his assistant come to take still shots of several users doing different actions with the product. The next day two videographers came and did the same but with action clips. There’s a motion graphics person who will fit all of this together, and probably another audiovisual producer. There was another person whose job was to coordinate all of this.

When we initially brainstormed the videos, we had in mind a This Old House narrator, or a Bob-Vila type of narrator — in other words, an expert who would explain the process of setting up Internet access and firewalls in a conversational, natural voice. I expressed my concern that a hired actor would struggle with this, but no, they said, actors do need a script but will do it naturally.

Once we got into the project, it was clear that the actor just read the script. He read it well, but it wasn’t transparently authentic, because when he explained where to plug in the cables, he read it too fast — the actor trying to match his words had to move his hand rather quickly. To expect the narrator to actually go through the motions too was perhaps too much.

Now that all the footage has been captured, I wonder if it will look real — the narrator reading words he doesn’t understand, with a montage of still shots and a couple of silent video clips. It will look professional, no doubt. But is it what users want?

My colleague Paul showed me a screencast he helped create this week. In the screencast, a professional actor against a green screen narrated a script about a new website. She explained various features of the new website, all the while moving her hands in the same expressive motion. Someone skilled in motion graphics put the website as the backdrop behind the narrator, panning around and making the graphics move a bit. My colleague Paul helped work on the script, along with the product manager. This video took months to produce.

In the end, it was about 3.5 minutes long, but it lacked all human appeal. The narrator (a hired actor) was too stiff and professional. It was clear she wasn’t an expert on the site. I had no connection with her or the video and just wanted it to end.

In an era of reality shows, transparency, amateurism, and authenticity, the model of the professional actor and the myriad of roles coming together to produce a short screencast is ending. We accept the amateur’s voice, as long as the content is relevant, accurate, and clear. We prefer real people who know what they’re saying over hollow voices and false inflections.

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From Overlooked to Center Stage [5]

Tom Johnson — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 05:55:36 +0000

Catalyst 1: Audiovisual Role

With the instability of contract renewal pending and the lack of housing in the desert, I switched jobs to a non-profit organization, the LDS Church, which had an agile environment and about 600 IT employees and was growing rapidly. They had already been coding an application for about six months and realized that they would need a professional technical writer to explain it to the audience.

It was my first experience in an agile environment. And although there was one other technical writer and a manager at the organization, I was the go-to technical writer in my assigned department.

Not many people had worked with technical writers before in the department, surprisingly. Although the IT organization had been in existence for years, it had only gotten serious about IT for the past two years, and all this time the technical writers were scarce and never centralized. Here I would begin to see my role change from just a writer to something more.

All people expected of me was to create a manual for their product. I was brought into the portfolio manager’s office, and he explained the projects I would be working on for the next couple of years. I could very well have continued on in the same role I had previously played — quietly documenting what I had been asked to document. Creating little reference manuals and online help. Doing no more than fulfill the wishes of the portfolio manager.

Initially I assumed the environment would be the same as before — with a specific list of the applications I could install, a defined list of help formats I had to produce, a style guide I had to carefully conform to. But I soon realized that none of these restrictions were in place. I could install anything, deliver anything, and do it all according to the styles I wanted.

I remember sitting one day in the portfolio manager’s office explaining that I wanted to use a different help authoring tool. He kind of shrugged and said, Why don’t you?

I already had the software, I said.

Then why don’t you use it? he asked. I kind of paused, like a prisoner just unchained might do with his first step of freedom. I felt liberation inside.

I always felt video was a neglected component in the help authoring deliverables. Very few technical writers actually deliver video with their documentation. Managers don’t ask it of them, and if you think about translation, it’s easy to dismiss video out of cost alone.

And yet, when I needed to learn a new software tool, I seemed to always turn to video. In our organization, videos were often produced by other the audiovisual department. In fact, the audiovisual department had more than a fifty year legacy in creating multimedia. They had more voiceover experts alone than we had technical writers.

Additionally, I had no e-learning background, no studio or fancy microphone, and no real knowledge of how it was to be done. Still, videos were always something I had wanted to produce at my former company, so I set about making them.

With the first software release, I produced an online help and a printable PDF, as well as several quick reference guides (which actually made the manager so happy he started to cry), but I also produced videos. I made about twenty of them. I hardly knew what I was doing, so they were all caption based rather than voice based. I had to stay up all night to finish them before the deadline to include them in the application release, but I did it.

About a month after the release, the department manager asked if I could actually create some videos. Huh, I thought? Wasn’t that what I had already done? What they had in mind, it turns out, was something with voice. I had been doing podcasting, but I never felt I had the voice talent to be the narrator for professional work videos. My voice was too wavy, too amateur.

With the next release, I started to drop the inhibitions about my own voice and recorded a new round of video tutorials with voice. My voice. Not relying on a voiceover talent to create the voice component. It was exhilarating, using my own voice. I suddenly had full control over the entire process. I showed a voice-based video to a colleague and a caption-based video asked him to compare. He said he preferred the voice-based video about 10 times more than the silent video with captions.

Creating and narrating videos added a new dimension to my work. Rather than having another department or e-learning specialist create the videos, I was creating these videos myself. By this time I knew the application so well, I could easily write the video scripts without any review. I created the scripts, I recorded the scripts, I produced the videos, I published the videos. I was running the whole show. I didn’t have to hand it off to anyone else. And I realized how much more efficient it was to combine all of these other roles into one.

Feedback from the voice-based videos was as I expected: users liked them. In fact, videos were about the only thing I received feedback on. It was what users said they found helpful. The manuals, the online help — almost no one gave me feedback about those materials. It was always the videos.

Creating videos was my first step in breaking out of my prescribed role into a new sense of freedom. Other writers have similar stories about their first steps in a new role and the exhilaration that follows. Several years ago Larry Kunz collected some stories of writers who also stepped into non-traditional roles. I want to share a few of their stories here.

Diane Feldman (North Carolina) explains how she stepped into a design role:

As you know, tech writers often complain that their jobs are made difficult by software interfaces that are poorly designed and that they wish they could have more input into the design process. One year I attended a session at the annual conference that focused on ways for tech writers to get involved in design. I included a description of this session in the trip report that I wrote up when I came back to the office. Trip reports were posted to the company intranet, where the Engineering Manager for a new product line happened to read it. The short version of the story is that this trip report led to the Pubs team being entirely responsible for organizing the interdisciplinary teams that would design the interfaces for the new product line.

In this example, Feimin Lorente (Ontario) explains how he stepped into a programming role:

I like programming as a hobby (but I’m definitely not a professional; my degree is in English), so I tend to apply it to documentation development whenever I can automate something. About 15 years ago, I wrote a program to pull the error messages out of the programming code, present an interface to the programmers so they could document the message, stored all the information in a database, then spit out a manual in FrameMaker by tagging the fields with MIF. About 3 years ago, I wrote a program in VBA to find the abbreviations in a Word document, linked them to a database so the user could choose the right expansion (or enter a new one), then generated the list in another Word document.

In another example, Wendy Cunningham (Pennysylvania) explains how she stepped into a marketing role:

I was hired as a technical writer for a small software development group. They had a team of programmers and technical support staff, but no marketing department. They hired a consultant for any marketing materials they couldn’t handle on their own…Being someone who quickly gets bored with the “same old” routine, I kept my eyes open for an opportunity to spread my wings. My chance came prior to an annual software industry conference. … I designed an auto-running PowerPoint presentation. … The presentation was a hit. After that time, I became their primary source for marketing copy and was included in marketing strategy meetings. … They found that my in-depth understanding of the software helped me write more convincingly than the consultant.”

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My STC Summit Proceedings Paper on Voiceover Techniques

Tom Johnson — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 13:52:06 +0000

When you present at the STC Summit, you’re supposed to submit a proceedings paper describing your presentation. Given that only a fraction of my followers are members of the STC, and an even smaller fraction are attending the Summit, I’m providing my proceedings paper here: “Developing a Personal Voiceover in Audio” (PDF). (It’s allowed under the STC copyright agreement.)

As you know, I wrote about this topic at length on my blog through a series of posts on voiceover techniques. I had about 10,000 words overall throughout the posts. In this proceedings paper, I mostly used the material from these blog posts, but I reduced the length in half. I also implemented some of the feedback from the comments (thank you, by the way).

It turns out that consolidating individual blog posts into a longer essay works well, as I was able to condense it all in just a few hours. Based on this experience, I’m going to write more series posts. Look for an announcement about my upcoming series tomorrow.

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8. Adding Inflection

Tom Johnson — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 14:18:37 +0000

If you don’t want to sound as if you’re reading copy (if you want to instead sound as if you’re speaking conversationally to the user), consider using more inflection. Inflection is a change in the pitch in your voice, moving up or down the scale as you talk.

Lack of inflection pretty much defines the reading voice. If you read a paragraph of text in a normal reading voice, you won’t hear much inflection. But if you listen to a real conversation, or especially if you listen to actors on TV, their voices move up and down the scale with a lot more inflection. It seems the more emotion you add to what you’re saying, the more inflection you end up including.

According to Old School, inflection is key to keeping the attention of your audience:

If you know anyone whose voice never rises or falls, who drones on and on in the same monotone, you know how soon you lose interest in what he is saying. The voice that holds your attention conveys emotion and interest by change of pitch or inflection. Old and Sold

One reason inflection keeps the audience’s attention is because inflection communicates emotional investment in what you’re saying. When you believe in the content and it matters to you, your words become emotionally invested and inflection naturally follows.

When I listen to Robert Segul on NPR, I can hear the inflection in his voice. Part of the problem with inflection, though, is that you can’t just start inflecting and assume it will make your voice more believable. If you inflect in an unnatural way, the result is corniness. It’s easy to fall into an annoying emphatic rhythm, or to overdo inflection to the point that it draws attention to itself.

An unnatural inflection is almost worse than lack of inflection. You’ve seen the equivalent in text when someone can’t stop writing with ALL KINDS of emphasis that, well, you just find …. S-U-P-E-R ANNOYING. You have to inflect in a believable way.

Exactly how you inflect in a believable way is an art. When you’re closing a thought, your inflection goes down. When you’re raising a question, your inflection goes up. Dan Levine recommends that you start reading about in the middle of your pitch, so that you have room to inflect. If you start too low, you can’t go lower on the scale, so you’re stuck.

You can also twist a word here and there to break out of a reading rhythm. You’d be amazed at how you can pick — almost at random — any word in a sentence and twist it to free yourself from a monotone reading rhythm.

As you focus on inflection, listen as you talk. Make note of how you change your voice, how you pause and move up and down the scale. Listen to the inflection in other people’s voices as they talk. As you start to focus on inflection, you’ll begin to hear what is believable. It’s something we unconsciously ignore.

One note. I know plenty of people who speak in a flat, monotone voice as their normal pitch and inflection. If that’s the case (and it’s partly the case with me), consider opening your mouth and getting into what you’re saying a little bit more. You might have to get creative and imagine yourself in a situation. For example, rather than imagining yourself talking to a user about the calendar feature of your app, which might bore you and leave your delivery flat, imagine yourself in a courtroom before a jury, or something similar.

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6. Avoiding Phlegm in Your Throat with Voiceovers

Tom Johnson — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:19:53 +0000

When you’re recording screencasts, a lot of people think about microphones, and focus on the technical setup behind your sound. But really, your audio starts with the vocal cords in your larynx, the upper part of your throat. Your voice is your main instrument, not the microphone. (Here’s a picture of some vocal cords.)

One of my biggest problems when narrating a screencast is that my throat gets all clogged up. I have to hit the pause and resume key every minute or so to clear my throat. Voiceover actors have learned to deal with this problem, since they often don’t have the benefits of a pause and resume key (F9 in Camtasia Studio, P in Audacity).

You can reduce the amount of phlegm that accumulates in your throat by chiefly doing these two things:

Hydrate. Drink lots of water, one or two hours before you start recording. Look at how wet and slimy the vocal cords look. If they’re properly hydrated, they’ll function better. Experts recommend that you drink warm water because it will loosen up your vocal cords. They also discourage caffeinated drinks.
Avoid dairy, such as milk and cheese. Dairy contributes to the phlegm that collects in the back of your throat.

I’ve read a smattering of other advice. In The Art of Voice Acting, James Alburger says to eat a green apple (not red). Apparently green apples cut down on the phlegm. He also says some voice actors eat greasy potato chips to reduce phlegm. Others squeeze lemons into the water they drink.

Since I’ve been recording screencasts lately, I’ve tried to avoid dairy and drink more water. But yesterday I had Alfredo-cheese pizza and tapioca pudding for lunch. I thought hey, it won’t make that much of a difference.

For the next few hours, my throat seemed like it had a slug stuck in it. I kept clearing my throat, hitting pause and resume after every 10 to 15 seconds, and then continuing.

It turns out clearing your throat is also bad. Peter Drew says,

If you feel mucous building up on your vocal cords, do not clear your throat. Throat clearing grates the edges of the folds of your larynx against each other causing irritation and it just moves the mucous to the side, ready to slide right back over your vocal cords. Drink some water, gently cough, or do the “panting puppy.” Simply stick out your tongue, pointing it downwards, and gently breathe in and out through your mouth, panting like a puppy. Be careful not to hyperventilate! The panting will dry out the mucous.

The panting puppy? Yeah, just make sure your colleagues aren’t looking when you start doing that. I’m not exactly sure how to clear my throat with the panting puppy maneuver, but apparently a lot of others caution against throat clearing as well. Clearing your throat doesn’t get rid of the phlegm/mucous, it just moves it to the side, which explains why I kept having to clear my throat so often.

LiveScience also warns against throat clearing:

Don’t clear your throat too often. When you clear your throat, it’s like slamming your vocal cords together. Doing it too much can injure them and make you hoarse. Try a sip of water or swallow to quench the urge to clear. If you feel like you have to clear your throat a lot, get checked by a doctor for such things as acid reflux disease, or allergy and sinus conditions.

The more you clear your throat, the more you stress your vocal cords, and before you know it, they’re inflamed and hoarse.

James Alburger recommends gently coughing or humming to clear your throat:

When you need to clear your throat, do it gently with a mild cough rather than a hard, raspy throat clearing, which can actually hurt your vocal cords. Try humming from your throat, gradually progressing into a cough. The vibration from humming often helps break up phlegm in your throat. Always be sure to vocalize and put air across your vocal cords whenever you cough. Building up saliva in your mouth and swallowing before a mild cough is also beneficial. (The Art of Voice Acting)

Let’s sum up the advice we’ve read. To maintain a strong, clear voice without phlegm or mucous building up in your throat, drink a lot of warm water, avoid dairy, eat a green apple followed by a bag of greasy potato chips. If you feel your throat clogging up with mucous, don’t clear your throat. Instead, do the panting puppy, sip some water, hum, and gently cough.

I’m starting to learn the weird rituals of voiceover acting.

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5. Smiling While You Narrate

Tom Johnson — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:25:22 +0000

Voiceover professionals often recommend that you smile while you narrate. Smiling injects a touch of warmth and charisma in your voice. Just a few touches here and there can make the entire tone of your voice noticeably warmer.

I recorded three samples for comparison. In the first, I just read a paragraph in my normal reading voice. In the second, I actually scrunched my eyebrows down in anger. In the third, I smiled. Listen to the differences.

Just reading normally

With eyebrows scrunched down in anger

Smiling while reading

As I listen to these three samples, I can hear something special in the last one. The first is all right, the second seems as if I’m tense and unforgiving, and the third has a touch of warmth and friendliness to it. It’s simply the smile that seems to change the tone.

For more professional examples, click the Sample Commercial Demo link on this page from Such a Voice. You can clearly hear the way the voiceover artist’s smile changes her tone.

Everyone says to smile

It may be hard to do at first, but smiling is at the heart of a voiceover person’s art and is a technique recommended over and over by professionals. Catherine Marshall says,

Maintaining a smile while doing a voice-over changes the whole energy of your voice, and therefore the voiceover. It’s one of the fundamental voice-over techniques to producing a believable voiceover that’s enjoyable to listen to.

Susan Berkley says,

Your tone of voice is closely linked to your facial expression. A frown on your face will make your voice sound harsh and cold. But a smile will warm up your voice, making it sound warm and inviting.

Dan Levine says,

You need to put a smile into what your reading. In almost every voiceover you’ll ever do, whether it be a commercial or a narration, you need to smile. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to be laughing. There are all kinds of smiles. There are smiles that represent happiness. There are smiles that represent reflection, and kindness, and thoughtful things. But you need to smile. …. The only way to make what you read sound as if you’re smiling, or to make it sound friendly, is for you to actually put a smile on your face.

By the way, that Dan Levine quote comes from a video that’s nine minutes long and covers a variety of tips on voiceover techniques. He also talks about being real, controlling pitch, adding variety, and so on. See the 4:15 mark for the section on smiling.

It isn’t easy to smile

Although everyone recommends smiling while you narrate, not many address exactly how you do it. It’s hard to smile. Try it — while you’re reading this post. Smile and keep smiling until you finish this entire post. It’s no easier to do this than it is to smile while reading a voiceover. If you find it hard, remember what Levine says: You don’t need a giant laughing grin. You can have a thoughtful or reflective smile.

Constantly smiling is hard for me because I’m used to being serious. I know people who smile all the time. They have cheery, bouncy personalities and exude happiness. But for some reason (unknown to me), I’ve just grown accustomed to acting serious. But maybe I can learn to change.

Brain is already occupied

Part of the difficulty of smiling while narrating is that you’re often not reading a script when recording screencast tutorials. In my recommendation for sounding natural, I recommend not reading a script verbatim, but rather to use the script as an outline, or to only read occasional sentences.

If you’re narrating somewhat freely as you record, your mind is more occupied. The advice to smile just kind of falls by the wayside as you focus on the application and the words you’re forming in your mind. (By the way, are you still smiling, or did you forget?)

Levine says the smile is a facial expression you get used to making the more you practice. Like almost anything in life, the more you do it, the easier and more natural it gets. At some point, you’ll be able to unconsciously smile while your mind is completely focused on the screencast you’re recording. For now, I have to remind myself at almost each pause and resume.

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2. Sounding Natural

Tom Johnson — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 18:00:37 +0000

One of my goals in creating engaging video tutorials is to develop a warm, personable, natural voice, like the voice of an encouraging friend or mentor.

In search of this more personable voice, last year I attended a voiceover workshop in my area. The voiceover coach explained that good voiceover artists start by imagining a situation—in their minds they imagine who they are, who they’re talking to, and what kind of situation and environment they’re in.

Voiceover artists have to stick carefully with the script they’ve been given, my coach explained. But they can inflect, add emphasis to control meaning, and play with the rhythm and intonation to bring it to life.

People told me that if I want to focus on the audio like this, I would be better off narrating the audio first and then recording the screen later—in two separate steps, rather than at the same time. I recorded at least 40 different video tutorials like this, narrating first (while trying to imagine myself in a situation); after recording the narration, I listened to the narration while following along to record the screen. Syncing it up took a little practice, but not much.

No matter how hard I tried, though, the narration always sounded stiff, slow, and a little dull. If I put too much inflection and rhythm into it, the narration sounded cheesy and fake. Maybe a background in acting would make it sound as if I weren’t reading a script, but I could never figure this acting thing out. It never sounded completely natural.

Not long ago, I decided to ramp up on PowerPoint through the video tutorials on Lynda.com. As I listened to the tutorials, the narrator’s voice epitomized the natural, personable voice I’d been trying to develop. He didn’t seem to be acting, nor was he a seasoned voiceover pro performing a pre-written script. He didn’t seem to have a script at all. He was just explaining, like a mentor, how various parts of the application worked. But it was perfect, and I quickly learned the more advanced parts of PowerPoint.

I was curious whether he even had a script, so I contacted him to find out. No, he said, he doesn’t record a pre-written narration script first. And neither do any of the Lynda.com trainers, he explained. He records the screen at the same time as he narrates. He did rehearse what he was going to do beforehand.

If all the Lynda.com trainers record this way, and I enjoy these tutorials, I realized that I should probably do the same. So I started to record the screen at the same time as I narrate. I still wrote out a general script beforehand, but I didn’t read it or follow it verbatim. I used my script more like an outline, glancing at it every so often to remember where I was going and what to include.

At times when I needed to explain a concept, I read a few sentences, because articulating complicated concepts in real-time can be tough to pull off with exactness (at least for me). But because the sentences that I read were mixed in with the unscripted narration, they blended well.

My opinion after recording and narrating at the same time? It works. And it has helped me achieve more of a natural voice—something I could never quite do reading scripts. The method isn’t perfect, but it’s better than before.

The downside with unscripted narration, unsurprisingly, is that I make mistakes. Listen to any real speech and you hear a smattering of slurs, missteps, poorly pronounced words, and other fumbles.

But I’ve found that I can re-record these problem patches and splice in my fixes somewhat seamlessly. A half a sentence here, a full sentence there. Sometimes it’s tricky to match the sound, but if I listen to 10 seconds before and repeat it a couple of times before rerecording the fixed sentence, it usually blends in indistinguishably.

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Trying to Find a Theater Stage/Voice for an Impossible Situation

Tom Johnson — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:54:01 +0000

In a recent design review meeting, I showed some of my screencasts to our team for feedback. We also reviewed some screencasts created by voiceover talents in our audiovisual department and screencasts created by trainers. In listening to my voice in the screencasts, it’s clear that I still have a lot to learn. I’m not even close to the personal, conversational-sounding audio voice that I want to achieve. It sounds like I’m reading a script. It’s slow and dull.

My teammates recommended that I read a little faster, that I add more inflection and maybe even switch to an outline rather than read a script.

I agree, but it’s hard to do that. It’s hard to develop that personal voice. It’s not a technical problem to simply figure out. It’s a theater art, and I have no background in theater. (Okay, in 8th grade I had a one-line role in Oliver Twist.)

As I’ve been reading voiceover books on Google, clearly the consensus is that you need to implement some acting. You have to imagine a situation, what character you are, who the audience is, and the situation you’re in. This theatrical situation is exactly what a local voiceover coach said the very first day of a workshop I attended.

Voiceover pro James R. Alburger also emphasizes the role of acting in voiceovers:

Remember, voice acting is theater of the mind, and you are the actor. When you become the character in the copy, you will be believable to the audience, and a suspension of disbelief will be created. When the audience suspends their disbelief in what they hear, they become more open to the message. This all starts when you discover the character in the copy. (The art of voice acting: the craft and business of performing for voice-over)

Voiceover professional Bob Bergen gives similar advice:

“Acting, acting, acting!!! No matter what kind of VO [voiceover] work you are trying to break into, it’s all about the acting. . . . The obvious trait that animation voice actors have is the ability to change their voice to match characters . . . you have to be believable. There is no such thing as a good voice! Everyone has a good voice! If you listen to radio and TV you hear very real, non-announcer-y, guy/gal next door reads. It’s oh so much harder to be real than it is to be announcer-y!” (quoted in Voiceovers: Techniques and Tactics for Success, by Janet Wilcox)

In other words, good voiceover involves acting. The problem is that in commercial voiceovers, the situations are more story-driven. Sure, they could take place on a stage in a situation with characters. But in instructional writing, you’re saying mundane sentences like click this, select that. Do this to create a new widget, and then save it, etc. I’m practically falling asleep writing this sentence.

Inflect your instructional script with some interesting pitch and emotion, add some drama and soul to it, twist a word here and there, and you end up converting the instructional script into a ridiculous soap opera. Click this. Now SELECT this button …. and when you’re ALL finished, go ahead and save the information.

On what kind of stage could an instructional script like that take place? I’ve said in past posts that you can imagine yourself sitting in a cafe explaining to a friend how to use a software application. But somehow that isn’t enough. You’re still yourself, the user is too ordinary, and the setting is mundane.

But perhaps it isn’t. The real problem in this situation is that a click-this, select-that script WOULD NEVER BE AN ACTUAL CONVERSATION THAT YOU HAVE IN A CAFE WITH A FRIEND. Can you really imagine yourself sitting across from Jim, a technical novice, saying Now Jim, in order to create a new group on your dashboard [sip your Coca Cola], you first click the Settings menu, then select New, choose the Group type, add the people you want to the group [take a bit of a Cuban sandwich]. Configure the attributes of the group you want by selecting the check boxes. [Chew food.] Then click Save. [ Wipe corners of mouth with napkin.] Refresh your page and you will see the new group …

No. In a cafe, you would give a conceptual overview of the application, briefly describing the basic idea of a group and how it functions on the dashboard and within the larger purposes of the application.

Doc Guy explained this same idea in our review. He said,

When I choose to watch a video about software, I expect it to be a general overview, not full of specific steps to take to walk through an entire procedure. If I want the specific steps, I’ll go to the written help material.

During our discussion, I showed a sample video from my favorite screencaster, Michael Pick of WordPress.tv. Here’s his screencast on Carmen, the latest WordPress version released.

Don’t focus on the pace (which is much faster than my screencasts). Don’t listen to the Jazz music, which always add to the voice’s appeal. Instead, listen to the script itself: it’s general. It’s an overview. It’s conceptual. Specific, granular steps are not narrated in painstaking detail. It really is something you might hear a friend explaining in a cafe.

So perhaps I doom my own screencasting efforts by creating impractical scenarios and then kicking myself for my inability to make it sound conversational. I can’t simply single source my screencasting scripts with my procedural help topics. The real first step in creating an engaging script, I believe, is to be honest about exactly the type of dialogue that might take place on the stage of your cafe.

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WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane”

Tom Johnson — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 14:14:39 +0000

The Right Way to Create Release Notes: WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” Video

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E-learning voice over demos and voice talent profiles|E-LearningVoices.com

Tom Johnson — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:42:57 +0000

E-learning voice over demos and voice talent profiles|E-LearningVoices.com. This site has great examples of professional voiceovers with e-learning and training content. Can you make your voice sound like this?