 So in this very short video, I'm going to share with you one thing that will change how you practice voiceovers. So you'll begin a voiceover artist who's already practicing, but you want to improve the quality that you deliver. Or this new year, one of your resolutions was that you would use your voice, learn voiceovers to earn some extra cash or become a full-time voiceover artist. Then you are the right place. You want to stick around to the end of this video to learn this one key thing that will change how you practice voiceovers and how it will change how you deliver and become a better voiceover artist. If you're completely new to this channel and to the voiceover practice, then you might want to check out some of the videos I have recorded already in the link in the description. And then you can learn more about even where to find clients, especially if you're practicing your voiceover from Ghana or Nigeria or Africa in general, how to read certain voiceover scripts, certain guiding principles and so on. But let's get into this particular one. So I chanced on this thing by accident. And by that, I mean both the crowds of voiceover and becoming a professional, as well as this key principle that I'm about to share with you. But I'll do the first one. Before I started voiceovers, I was mimicking a lot of cartoon characters, movie characters. When I would watch films, I would just literally replicate what I was hearing exactly or verbatim or lip syncing what I was hearing in movies and cartoons, my favorite parts of these particular media that I was consuming. So that's how I've been practicing voiceovers for the longest time, even before I grew or became aware of the fact that I could make money from the craft. So this is how I chanced on this thing by accident. But you don't have to do that. Let's make it easier for you to become a better voiceover artist. So one of the guiding principles, just like in movies, we have, you know, composition, we have lighting, we have sound, we have color and all these things that make movies the best they are, as well as music, the science of sound and keys and notes and everything that make music what it is also guides voiceovers. So the principle of voiceover basically is sound, sound of our voice and how we read it. So we've practiced over time to read voiceovers or scripts in such a way that it doesn't sound just as we speak or in a monotonous way in a way that engages people to want to listen to us. So we are telling stories or we are selling things or yeah, we are passing information. That is what voiceover artists do. And there are guiding principles to this. Some of the guiding principles to voiceover or becoming a learning voiceover is the principle of pauses. When to pause, how to pause, how to breathe when you're reading voiceovers, which is very essential because it also affects how people consume whatever you are reading. When you don't pause when you're talking, when you know, you don't know where exactly to pause to create maybe suspense or to give people the room to breathe, to consume more, then it becomes difficult to even understand you. There's another principle called inflections. So inflections is how, should I say, undulating is the word. How high and low the voice goes when reading a particular script. This makes it have a certain rhythm to it. And this is one thing that is also a guiding principle to reading voiceovers. No matter the type of voiceover that you're reading, whether you're reading commercials or you're reading a narration or you're reading an audiobook. There are inflections that make it not monotonous or flat so that somebody can listen for longer times or longer hours without getting bored and you still manage to engage them. There's a principle of knowing what words or which words to emphasize. All these things are guiding principles. Now, just like in music, we have notes, we have keys. And when they come together, they become the music that you hear. Your ability, the one thing that you need to know to become a better voiceover artist, your ability to replicate sound. When people ask me or when I encounter people during my coaching sessions and they ask me what they need to know to improve how they read. One of the things I tell them is that you must spend more time listening, spend more time listening to people who have already done it, spend more time listening to the kinds of voiceovers that you want to become good at. So if it's commercial voiceovers that you want to become good at, spend more time listening to a ton and ton of samples on websites again, that I've linked in the description below and in the other videos that I've done. Spend more time listening to radio to present us who you know sound a great deal of way that you like. They're able to engage you for a long, spend a lot of time watching movies. If that's not something you can do, then watch short videos or cartoons or just consume media and listen to people who already have been doing this for a long time. And if you're able to replicate exactly what you hear. Now, in replicating exactly what you hear, I don't necessarily mean that you should replicate the accent immediately. If that's not something you can do, concentrate on rather how they sound when they read whatever they read. If it's an ad and the person is saying that, do you really want to know? Then it has to sound exactly the same way, but in your voice. So the sound, the replication of that sound from the people you listen to or the professionals, is the one key thing that if you commit to over time, is going to improve your voice over drastically. This is something that I've been doing unconsciously for the longest time when I started the practice. And I only discovered that in principle, that's what I've been doing and it made my voice over is rather easier. So voice over is heavily or the craft or the art of voice over is heavily reliant on your ability to hear correctly. Hearing correctly will save you or save you more time in learning how to read voice over than having a great voice and having a great speaking voice. Everybody can speak, but not everybody can do voice over. So if you want to learn more, do check out some of the videos I've linked here. I do a detailed demonstration of how this works. But again, sound is the most important thing in your craft since you're reading and producing sound, your ability to replicate sound will improve your voice over drastically. If you have any questions or comments, please put them in the comment section below and catch you in the next one. Peace.