 Hello there and welcome to my channel, my name is Kwame, I'm a voiceover artist as well as a YouTuber and a documentary filmmaker based in Accra, Ghana. And in this video, I'm going to share with you what goes on behind the scenes of a voiceover recording and I do get asked questions about voiceovers a lot so I thought it might be nice to record this particular video just to answer some of the questions for you out there who might be curious about this craft in general or if you're considering starting a voiceover career to end some full-time income or part-time income depending on what you do. And for you also who actually want to hire a voiceover artist but do not know where to begin. So there are lessons or there are tips in here that everybody who's interested in voiceover can have and I need to issue a disclaimer, I'm talking about this off the cuff so I might be going on and on about some points which I'm passionate about or when I remember some things I might backtrack and come and correct them just so you know. But I'm going to break this video into three parts. I'm going to try and let you know about the setup or what goes into recording a professional voiceover and then I'm going to talk about the scripts and then I'm finally going to demonstrate how all that ties together. So it's just a simple introductory video to voiceovers and how they are recorded. So let's talk about the setup. I'm going to begin with the setup which is basically going to be the space to record it, the equipment to record it and the alternatives that are available to you out there. So spaces to record voiceovers. First of all voiceovers are recorded or the two major characteristics of voiceovers are that they are devoid of echoing or echo and they are also devoid of noise or background noise or ambient noise. So those are the two main characteristics of professional voiceovers. That's two things you need to know. How do you achieve this? The setup and equipment will let you achieve this output. So the setup is the studio or where you're going to record it. You don't necessarily have to have a full studio to record a voiceover. That's why there are alternatives. You don't necessarily need to have all the fancy equipment to record a good voiceover. That is why there are alternatives depending on the quality that you can afford and the output. You just need to know how to use them. So studios are usually lined with acoustic materials which help absorb sound and avoid echo. Acoustic materials can be custom made to the particular space or you can buy generic acoustic materials and line the studio walls or if you don't have money to afford all of that you can also buy an isolation chamber and use that one. Alternatively if you can't afford an isolation chamber either you can also record from your closet or your wardrobe. So there are many many many options going down the line. Microphones and interfaces are the things that produce the sound and you need a microphone and you need something to power the microphone and you need media storage to save the sound after recording. These are some of the things that you need to record. Microphones can vary or can vary in price from a few tens to a few thousands of dollars. Depending on what you can afford if you can't afford any of that your phone even your phone can record good audio if you're recording it in the space that has been treated. That's the term they use for when the place is designed to design for yes designed for voice overs. So if the space has been treated even your phone can record decent decent audio. So just so you know even your closet you can record decent audio you just need to know that for example if you take it too close to your mouth when you record you're going to have plosives and it's going to sound muffled. If you take it far away enough about six to eight inches you can get better sound so it's technique rather than the equipment although the equipment improves drastically the quality that you're going to be outputting. But if you can't afford it there are ways around it which you can research. Like I'm saying this is not a technical video so I can't tell you which one is best or not. I'm just telling you what happens and what you need to know. Now that we're done with the setup and the equipment let's go into scripts. So scripts are the words the ideas on paper that you'll be presented with to read for the client and there are different types of scripts including books. Books are scripts for audiobooks. You can have narrations for documentaries which are longer and you can have commercial scripts which are usually shorter. I'm not going to go too much into audiobooks or documentary narrations however for example if you're given a script for a radio ad chances are it's going to be between zero to sixty seconds which is the sweet spot for what radio ads need to be able to communicate whatever they're communicating. Now what you need to know is you need to ask your client for example what emotion or what the tone they envisage for the script. What are they selling? What do they want you to do? What emotions do they want you to evoke with the script after you finish reading it? These are questions you need to ask. Now after you've asked that question if your client is somebody who has a lot of experience in hiring voice over artists chances are they'll know how many words make a zero to sixty second script. If they don't know and you're the professional or the freelancer you can let them know that for example zero to sixty second script usually usually go anywhere between eighty to a hundred and fifty words eighty to a hundred and fifty words will give you a fair balance of you know thirty second to sixty second script. If they go beyond it to two hundred then they are going into the over a minute area and you need to let them know that this is what it might mean for them if their script is too long. Now it also depends on how fast or slow you're reading the script so a script can be very fast whereby even a hundred and eighty words can still make it into a sixty second time frame depending on how fast and the energy that the script requires. So these are some of the things that you need to note and ask and you would be challenged or you would be tasked to present it as such. So that is about it for the script. What are the emotions you need to communicate? How do you pace yourself or what's the pace you're looking for? What are they selling? Who are they selling it to and how do they want it to come out? Another thing I'm trying to remember about scripts. Yes, it's that you need to always remember that the brand names there are trigger areas or trigger words and brand names which need to be stressed on. You can't rush through a brand name in a script for a commercial. You need to have some kind of respect for it and there are words that evoke certain emotions that those are your trigger words and you need to also have a way you say or pronounce or voice out those trigger words. So these are some of the things you need to know about scripts and some of the questions you need to ask about them. As for pricing, I'm not going to talk about it in this video because it's also another technical thing that can be discussed in a whole separate realm. Now that we know what scripts are about, now that we know how they are set up and how they are recorded or what you need. Now we can have a little demonstration of what I mean by having the kind of emotion that they evoke and the pace and how it all affects the particular scripts that you're going to record. Let's get into the demonstration part of this video. So for the sake of this demonstration, I'm going to go to one of the places online where I get my sample scripts which is edge studio dot com. I'm going to link it in the description below. I'm going to pick one documentary narration script and I do copy it and I put it on word or my word document or pages on Mac. And then what I do is because I prefer to record while sitting. There's also a lot of, you know, whether or not to record while standing or sitting, but I prefer to record while sitting. I put it on my big screen. That's my editing monitor. And then I increase the size so it's right in front of me and then I can record. So I've taken one script, which I'm going to go through. It's supposed to be a documentary narration script. However, I'm going to read it in the way it's supposed to be read. And I'm going to attempt to read it in a way it's not supposed to be read so you can understand where I'm coming from with the emotion that needs to be communicated and what usually should be the use of a script and how you should read it. This particular script is 92 words and depending on how I read it, it should be anywhere between 45 seconds to about 50. Depending on how I read it, it might be shorter and might be longer. So let's get to it. So this one is about the planet Earth. So I'm going to go through it right now in the actual form it's supposed to be, which is documentary narration. And I think this one is sounding more like an intro to a documentary about Earth. That's the direction I get from going through it. So when you get to the script, you have to read through it and then put yourself in character for bringing out the emotions that need to be communicated. So when I look at this particular script, I see that it looks more like an intro to a documentary. So it starts something like, welcome to planet Earth, a place of blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests, soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. From the cosmic perspective, it is, for the moment, unique. The only world on which we know with certainty that the matter of us... see mistakes? So this is a code read. I'm not doing the full thing. The only world on which we know with certainty that the matter of the cosmos has become alive and aware. There must be us. There must be many. There must be many such worlds scattered through space, but our search for them begins here with the accumulated wisdom of the men and women of our species acquired at great cost over a million years. So that's the code read, what you call your first read. You're going to go through it, you're going to practice, and then you're going to try and take it again and again and again till you get the right tone for every sentence and all the key or trigger words that need to be stressed on to bring a certain emotion out. So yeah, if I try it, for example, to read this particular script like an ad or a promotion, like a very high energy promotion, it might not work to communicate the emotion. Welcome to Planet Earth, a piece of blue nitrogen skies, oceans full of liquid water, cool forest, soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. No, that for me doesn't work in my mind. As opposed to welcome to Planet Earth, a place full of blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forest, soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. From the cosmic perspective, it is, for the moment, unique. The only world on which we know with certainty that a matter of the cosmos has become alive and aware. There must be, there must be many such worlds scattered through space, but our search for them begins here with the accumulated wisdom of the man and women of our species, acquired at great cost over a million years. So yes, that is how I would read it, and that is what usually happens in behind the scenes of voice over recording. So if you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them in the description box below. No, not description box, in the comment section. Put them in the comment section and I might do a follow up video where we go through the nuances and some of the tips and tricks for reading different types of voice overs. My name is Kwame and I'm going to end the video here. I'll catch you in the next one. Enjoy the rest of your day. Peace.