Tips: Writing For Voiceover
I'm Ron Burgandy? It Happens.
From E-learning, Radio and Television advertising, phone messaging... in fact any voiceover! these tips are things we've learnt over our 25 plus years recording the spoken Voice. We hope you can put these into practice and make our next project together a seamless and enjoyable process. Our best tip? Read the script aloud and write it to be spoken.
Pronunciations
A mispronunciation has the potential to not only make your brand lose credibility, but can also create delay in the recording process. Things you may take for granted such as the names of towns, streets, and people (for example) may not be so common to us! Or things that are spelled a certain way but are said differently can be problematic and are worth clarifying prior to the recording session.
We do our best to identify these up in the process but you can help buy: Providing a voice recording of how to say unusual or local words, adding a youtube link where the pronunciation can be found or by suppling a phonetic guide within the script.
B.T.W Other common bogies are anacronyms, do they need to be spelled out or said as a word? If they have stops between the letters we take that as spell it out. (Just an F.Y.I)
Numbers, is there a specific way you'd like your price or number said? Write it in words, this will make certain it's read how you'd like. For example our number 0432 777 800 (Oh four three two, triple seven, Eight hundred)
Timing
If in doubt Get the stopwatch out! There's one on your phone.
The only sure way to know how long your script will run, is to get a stopwatch and time yourself reading it... aloud (whispering to yourself will be faster) so don't be shy!
There are however a few guidelines to help get you in the ballpark. 80-90 will get you in the vicinity of 30sec, Which means 40 will be approximately 15 seconds. If you work on 145 words per minute you should be able to get an estimated script duration for your longer-form Voice over recording.
There are no hard and fast rules here, read styles and different voice talent can all contribute to longer or shorter outcomes.
DIRECTING A VoiceOver
Coming Soon - a guide on how to provide direction to voice talent, so you get the intimate slow intense hard sell you know you need. :-)
