Voice Overs (Narration) - Things to Consider

Voice-Overs/Narration

What are they?
A EXPLANATORY NARRATION

What areas within media use voice-over?
ADVERTS, TRAILERS, NATURE SHOWS, NEWSREELS
Why use voice-over?
VOICE OF GOD

What type of documentary do you mainly uses voice-over?
EXPOSITORY MODE



Style?

Should your natural voice stay unaffected or affected with your delivery?
It should match the style and theme of your film
Avoid colloquialisms and slang
Don't be over-dramatic or theatrical
Emotion, character, pace, tone are all areas you need to be aware of and take into consideration when recording your voice-over. Are you trying to persuade your audience? Mentally or emotional?

http://vimeo.com/16206759


Points to Remember

• Avoid describing anything that is already evident on screen (name of people that might have already been displayed via a 'title')
• Voice-over content must only act as a driving mechanism for your narrative 
• Choose a style appropriate to your film (fast, slow, authoritative..)
• Timing - Try not to go over 140 words per minute

Voice-Over Task

In groups of 3, we were all given a script, audio track and video clip. The task was to record a voice over to the given video clip. 

First of all, we set up in the voice-over recording booths in Silverstone and created a shared media folder for our group so we all had access to the task. We gathered all the files we needed from the teaching drive into our group folder and set up a new audio track recording in Adobe Audition. Myself and Ben set up the microphone and we as well as Roshana played rock, paper, scissors to decide who voice was going to be used for the voice-over, which turned out to be Ben.

Once we had everything ready to record Ben's voice, me and Roshana left him in the booth alone to reduce noise within the voice-over booth. We all individually listened back to Ben's reading of the script and commented on his tone, pace and delivery. I thought he had a strong voice for the chosen clip but his delivery had a few pauses and mistakes. However, Ben rectified this situation by clicking his fingers after making a mistake, so when we looked back at the audio file to edit it whilst in waveform, it was much easier to notice where he had made his mistakes, thus making the edit an less complex task.

After we had finished recording we went back to the edit labs to edits our voice-over and footage using Audition to edit the footage, voice over and audio track (Subliminal - The path of the least existence) where we cut out all of Ben's pauses and mistakes.  We also added fades and pauses for effect in the voice-over delivery.

This task provided us insight into how to cut down an edit our own voice-over and interview pieces within our documentary and I found it a great way to introduce voice-over within documentary.