How often have you sat through someone else’s video that was well shot, well edited, good story, but ruined by a dull, flat voice-over.
If we are honest that thought might also apply to our own.
The truth is that we are not likely to have been gifted with the "Voice of God" and aspire to a career in voicing movie trailers, or even commercials for book warehouses.
However, there are a few things we can do to make ourselves easier to listen to, and our videos more watchable.
Firstly, let's start when we are shooting our footage on location. Rule No 1 is don’t shoot short. Give yourself plenty of time in each shot to play with later.
Rule No 2 is shoot plenty of ambient footage and sound. By ambient footage I mean shots of things around you which in themselves are not spectacular, but provide additional background and cutaways to match your narrations.
If you are tempted to narrate footage while you shoot, by all means do so, but take the same shot again without the narration. Good Ad lib narrations from behind a camera are invariably hard to achieve. Don't forget that you are also likely to pick up many unwanted sounds, wind noise, and even your own breathing. Your on-camera narration may however help you later in writing your script.
Once you have viewed your footage and completed your additional research, you can envisage your final video, and start to write the script.
In writing your script, it is important that you visualize an individual who is to be your audience. This could be a friend, or maybe a grandchild. You are going to tell them the story of your video. It might be about your last trip away, or it might be your family’s history. In any case, make your script a conversation with that one person.
I write my scripts in paragraphs, but print them as single and alone sentences. I’ll explain why later.
Whether you stand or sit to read your script is up to you. To gain realism in presenting a conversation you might like to consider standing and using hand gestures to emphasis points. Invisible though these will be, they will help you to add emphasis to your voice.
It is important to keep your voice lubricated, so have a glass of water at hand. Do not think about you breathing. Let it happen naturally.
Unless you are delivering a particularly somber sentence, smile; even for the most mundane of lines. Your smile will give your voice animation. Similarly, be excited. What you are doing is important, and you need some excitement and emotion in your voice to convey the message.
Watch your diction. Concentrate on delivering your words clearly, and emphasis the d’s and t’s that come at the end of words. These are the easiest to let slide away.
Listen to the pace of your speech. Look for a rhythm that suits the words, and maintain it.
Use pitch to give highs and lows to your reading, but always start a sentence at a high pitch. It grabs attentions and you can move down and up from there. It is almost impossible to credibly move from a low pitch start to higher pitch later.
For the read itself, I record one long read, including the setting up noises and so on. I read each sentence three times, even if I think I nailed it the first time. Sometimes you think you have, when you really haven’t. By making three reads, I know to expect to see the sentence three times in editing. If I feel I need more than three reads, I’ll make a mark on the script to tell me how many reads there are for that sentence.
In editing, I use Audacity to listen to my three (or more) readings of a sentence, and to cut out the unwanted sentences and noises. Where sentences are to follow on in a paragraph, I allow for a small gap. For paragraphs, I leave the gaps larger. Theses gaps might be shortened or lengthened when go to the video timeline.
Before saving my soundtrack file, I normalize the whole track so that volume levels are more or less consistent. I then save this as a new file. I may want to go back and extract something else from the original.
If we are honest that thought might also apply to our own.
The truth is that we are not likely to have been gifted with the "Voice of God" and aspire to a career in voicing movie trailers, or even commercials for book warehouses.
However, there are a few things we can do to make ourselves easier to listen to, and our videos more watchable.
Firstly, let's start when we are shooting our footage on location. Rule No 1 is don’t shoot short. Give yourself plenty of time in each shot to play with later.
Rule No 2 is shoot plenty of ambient footage and sound. By ambient footage I mean shots of things around you which in themselves are not spectacular, but provide additional background and cutaways to match your narrations.
If you are tempted to narrate footage while you shoot, by all means do so, but take the same shot again without the narration. Good Ad lib narrations from behind a camera are invariably hard to achieve. Don't forget that you are also likely to pick up many unwanted sounds, wind noise, and even your own breathing. Your on-camera narration may however help you later in writing your script.
Once you have viewed your footage and completed your additional research, you can envisage your final video, and start to write the script.
In writing your script, it is important that you visualize an individual who is to be your audience. This could be a friend, or maybe a grandchild. You are going to tell them the story of your video. It might be about your last trip away, or it might be your family’s history. In any case, make your script a conversation with that one person.
I write my scripts in paragraphs, but print them as single and alone sentences. I’ll explain why later.
Whether you stand or sit to read your script is up to you. To gain realism in presenting a conversation you might like to consider standing and using hand gestures to emphasis points. Invisible though these will be, they will help you to add emphasis to your voice.
It is important to keep your voice lubricated, so have a glass of water at hand. Do not think about you breathing. Let it happen naturally.
Unless you are delivering a particularly somber sentence, smile; even for the most mundane of lines. Your smile will give your voice animation. Similarly, be excited. What you are doing is important, and you need some excitement and emotion in your voice to convey the message.
Watch your diction. Concentrate on delivering your words clearly, and emphasis the d’s and t’s that come at the end of words. These are the easiest to let slide away.
Listen to the pace of your speech. Look for a rhythm that suits the words, and maintain it.
Use pitch to give highs and lows to your reading, but always start a sentence at a high pitch. It grabs attentions and you can move down and up from there. It is almost impossible to credibly move from a low pitch start to higher pitch later.
For the read itself, I record one long read, including the setting up noises and so on. I read each sentence three times, even if I think I nailed it the first time. Sometimes you think you have, when you really haven’t. By making three reads, I know to expect to see the sentence three times in editing. If I feel I need more than three reads, I’ll make a mark on the script to tell me how many reads there are for that sentence.
In editing, I use Audacity to listen to my three (or more) readings of a sentence, and to cut out the unwanted sentences and noises. Where sentences are to follow on in a paragraph, I allow for a small gap. For paragraphs, I leave the gaps larger. Theses gaps might be shortened or lengthened when go to the video timeline.
Before saving my soundtrack file, I normalize the whole track so that volume levels are more or less consistent. I then save this as a new file. I may want to go back and extract something else from the original.
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