Voice Over Blog

The sheer number of scripts Hollywood executives see each year makes the competition pretty stiff. Of the tens of thousands of scripts registered with the Writers Guild of America (WGA), only a few hundred get picked up by Hollywood. Thankfully, there are many ways to get started in scriptwriting and to hone the craft to a refined edge. Writing a script for a movie can be a worthwhile goal, but the task is often daunting. A good script only comes together after a painstaking process that can take a very long time. Often, the final product is the result of innumerable drafts and revisions, but that is only the beginning.

No one writes a script for fun, and the aim is to sell it to a studio or producer. Unless you want to produce and finance the project, you need to get people on board with your idea. You may have agents, studios, and producers in the mix when you consider selling it.

Get Educated, Get Inspired

Before you start spilling ideas onto an empty page, know that many people have already done what you are trying to do and have written entire books about it. There are several books about how to get started in scriptwriting, coming up with ideas, how to get inspired, how to structure a script, etc. Consider reading up on the craft before just diving in. Here are some books to help you start:

• The Nutshell Technique by Jill Chamberlain
• Story by Robert McKee
• Making a Good Script Great by Linda Seger
• From Script to Screen by Linda Seger
• The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler
• The TV Writer’s Workbook by Ellen Sandler
• The Coffee Break Screenwriter by Pilar Alessandra
• Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting by Syd Field
• Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds by Michael Hauge
• Your Screenplay Sucks! By Willaim M. Akers

Studying scriptwriting does not have to be entirely academic, either. Go through a list of your favorite movies, TV shows, and novels to see how they are structured. You can get a feel for how a script came to life by simply watching something you enjoy and analyzing it a little deeper.

Generating Ideas and Loglines to Get Started in Scriptwriting

The next step is to start coming up with ideas. Not all of these ideas will evolve into a script or may only be expanded on slightly, but it is essential to have a running list of ideas to which you can always add. Current events, history, your own life, the life of a celebrity, lines from a song, or the public domain are all excellent places to start. Try to write down ideas as they come to you before you worry about expanding any particular one.

Once you have some ideas down, it is time to create loglines. A logline is a story broken down into a single sentence or phrase and is one of the essential aspects of scriptwriting. It should describe the protagonist, the goal, the antagonist, the conflict, and any potential obstacles in the story. Iconic examples, such as the first lines from the opening crawl of Star Wars, are easy examples of what a logline can look like.

Ideally, you never want to have just one logline. Come up with five to ten ideas to turn into loglines and test them out. Ask your agent, friends, or even strangers what they think of a logline and whether or not they would see a movie based on it. Seek out voices from inside and outside the industry to get holistic feedback about your lines.

Making a Story Treatment, Fleshing out Characters, and Creating a Plot

The treatment is another critical part of developing and selling a script. It includes a logline, the title, a 2-5 page synopsis, and the central characters. Treatments should give the highlights of the story and the characters. It should also give a sense of style, lay out the genre, and give the readers an idea of how the story pans out.

Often, the treatment is used for marketing and feedback. Many producers and studios will also read a treatment to see if it is worth investing in. From a structural point of view, the treatment also helps you as the scriptwriter. You can see the whole story and how the characters move through each part. The overview can give you an idea of what to change or where to add more details as the whole script starts coming together.

The characters of the story need to be exciting and empathetic. The audience needs to relate to the protagonist and understand their goals. The antagonist should have their reasons, which must be understandable to the audience. Some characters need to be likable but not alienate the audience.

The script’s plot should be laid out at this point, but structuring it still takes work. Making a beat sheet is a great way to keep all the moving parts in order when crafting a plot. This describes the smaller events that link to bigger ones to create the plot. You can use note cards, a flowchart, or a spreadsheet to organize these events and ensure they flow well into each other.

Get Started in Scriptwriting With Your First Draft

After completing all the other steps, it is time to write the first draft. The draft should be anywhere from 90-120 pages written in 12-point Courier font. There are no set rules for this part other than formatting guidelines based on the type of script you are writing. Producers get dozens of scripts daily and only read the first ten pages unless the script hooks them. Make sure the first ten pages are strong; then, it is all about keeping yourself honest and writing a set number of pages daily or weekly.

Once your first draft is done, take a break. Let the script rest for a few weeks to clear your head. When you come back to it, you will have a fresh set of eyes to look over it and can then start revising and rewriting it. During this stage, you must share your script with others so that you can get a variety of perspectives. Others might catch what you have missed. Once you have rewritten the script a few times, made the necessary edits, and formatted it correctly, you have reached the finish line. Your script is ready to be sent out into the world.

If you’re an employer who wants to cast voice talent for your upcoming job, you want to be familiar with their style of work before booking them. In today’s highly saturated and competitive market, knowing how to evaluate your voiceover talent can put your project’s quality over the top.

If you are a voice over talent, you may undergo an evaluation process for some employers before you can begin working for them. This is where voice talent tests come into play. If you are a business owner or producer, you can look for several attributes before hiring the right fit.

What Are the Main Categories to Look For?

While many aspects can go into choosing the perfect voice talent for a job, a few key factors should be considered, including:

• Project type
• Quality of the voice
• Target audience
• Available voiceover samples and demos

Another factor cannot be overstated: the client’s priority is the top priority. Factors such as experience, a versatile portfolio, amount of voiceover samples, or any other tangible attributes can be favorable. However, the client has the final say over which voice fits best with their project.

Project Type

The type of project you are working on will play a vital role in selecting voice talent. Their familiarity with a given type of work will helps when seek to cast a talent. The types of jobs can include:

• Announcers: Announcing jobs involve introductory segments for events. These can be awards shows, sporting events, or promotional events.
• Narrators: Narration jobs focus on explanatory content in which the voiceover explains a concept or a process. These can include audiobooks, documentaries, educational videos, and audio tours.
• Voice actors for entertainment programs: Character voice jobs have a voiceover talent voicing a character in an animated movie, animated TV show, radio dramas, Automated Dialogue Replacement (ADR), and dubbing foreign shows/programs.
• Miscellaneous voiceover: Miscellaneous jobs can include public relations gigs, advertisements, over-the-phone recordings, website voiceovers, etc.

Quality of Voice

Testing for voice quality can involve many different attributes, but four big ones are pitch, enunciation, articulation, and clarity. All come together to create good quality in a voice.

Evaluate Your Voiceover Talent to Reach the Target Audience

Another part of evaluating voice talent is how well they can connect with the chosen target audience. Depending on how far you are willing to go, you may already have extensive demographic data about your audience. Knowing an audience will help you tailor a voice over for greater effectiveness and can include:

• Tone: The tone of a voice is a vital part of helping to influence your audience. Different tones are needed depending on the type of project that is being made.
• Voice actor age: Sometimes, the age of a voice actor can also be a consideration. Specific demographics may find an older, more mature voice more trustworthy. Others may find younger, more energetic voices more relatable.
• Male or female voice: Choosing a male, female, or gender-neutral voice may have to be considered based on what your audience expects. 
• Accents: Depending on what region or country a project takes place in, a specific accent for a voiceover might be required. You may ask what accents a voice talent is familiar with before casting.
• Language: Much like accents, there may be some projects that require a voice actor to speak another language. This could be a sticking point when evaluating talent for those roles.

Evaluating Voiceover Samples and Demos

You can also evaluate talent based on the voiceover samples that voice actors make available on their websites. If you like the samples a talent has available or has provided, then you may reach out for a job. 

Just relying on prerecorded samples doesn’t always give a feel for a voice actor’s abilities, however. Sometimes, an employer may want a more recent, tailor-made sample to help them decide whether or not a voice over talent is right for the job. In these cases, employers may request a custom audition or ask for a custom sample. 

Final Considerations on How to Evaluate Your Voiceover Talent

Some final measures that might not be obvious but are still very important include recording quality and scheduling. A pre-recorded demo may sound perfect, but a custom demo with a deadline attached ensures that a voice over talent has good equipment on hand. 

This also helps to let you know that a voice over talent can work on a tight or flexible schedule. Depending on the type of project, voice talent who can fit a tight schedule can be the decisive factor when you hire someone.

For employers seeking voice talent, knowing who to look for and knowing how to evaluate them is a necessary step in finding the perfect voice for a project. Using the proper metrics can greatly reduce the time spent trying to hire the right person for the job. That means you can get to work on your project faster.

What’s so great about artificial intelligence or AI? A lot, apparently, and it’s making its way into voice over with no apologies. Are you ready? Technology will never rest, and it won’t be idle around the advancement and improvement of voice over and AI—or anything else tech-related.

Some artists worry because a computer-generated voice can sound similar to a human voice. Some software can sound almost exactly like specific human voices. But experts in both AI and voice over say AI isn’t poised to overtake voice over in the not-too-distant future. As Voice 123 notes, “AI voices can help businesses fill the gaps in their operations and further solidify their market presence.”

You Get What You Pay For with Voice Over and AI

In 2020, the CEO of Voice123, Rolf Veldman, said AI impacted 2 percent of our voice over industry. Odds are that hasn’t changed much now. Producers agree that digitization has positively impacted and improved the quality of AI voices.

Advancements in technology have spurred AI to sound like even the most subtle nuances of our human speech. These voices can even take a breath and pause exactly where they’re supposed to. And yes, they are inexpensive, some say even “cheap.” As Voice Archive shares, the advantages of AI VO are speed, lower starting cost, and more control when creating and editing.

On the negative side, as we all know, an AI voice is devoid of emotion, compassion, and empathy. It’s tough to ensure accuracy with flow, pronunciation, and accent, and in fact, an AI voice can sound monotonous and lack spontaneity. It can miss those subtle contextual clues and struggle with acronyms and abbreviations. Some people call AI voices “soulless.” Ouch.

Research has shown that people respond more acutely to a real person voice over than an AI voice.

Synthetic Voices Take the Stage

AI voices such as Siri and Alexa are termed “synthetic voices,” evolving via machine learning technology when text is converted into audible speech. And yes, some of the AI voices you hear may sound like real voice talent, and in fact, those AI voices are created to sound like real humans.

Deep learning has taken the production of AI voice from clunky and robotic, says MIT Technology Review, to something much more palatable and effective. Voice developers can feed audio into an algorithm that learns the pacing, pronunciation, or intonation patterns of human speech.

It cites WellSaid Labs and its two key deep-learning models. The first one can predict from text how a speaker will sound, with “accent, pitch and timber,” the publication explains. The second one gets really real and fills in with “breaths and the way the voice resonates in its environment.”

Then there’s making a human voice sound human with qualities such as inconsistency, expressiveness, and the ability to deliver the same lines in entirely different styles, depending on the context. (VO actors relate to this direction: “Now give me three different reads of the last line of that spot, please”…)

They Still Need Real Voices

Looks like AI voices are even being used to, er, “fix” actors’ speech in film and television, as with the company Resemble.ai, which can tidy up garbled speech or mispronounced words.

And yes, there’s work for voice over artists with AI, says the review. “And for every synthetic voice made by these companies, a voice actor must also supply the original training data.” Whew.

The article notes that some companies want to be fair about working with us VO talent and have asked SAG-AFTRA how to do that. “SAG-AFTRA is also pushing for legislation to protect actors from illegitimate replicas of their voice.”

Richness and Complexity of Human Voices

Liz Barber of London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art specializes in communication skills training. She talks about how AI voice development can learn from the world of acting—many people feel that we as voice over performers, are acting every time we read a script.

“Voice is a result of a dynamic relationship between mind and body. It is a physical process,” Barber says. “Actors understand this. Their profession is grounded in the relationship between physical presence and voice.”

She says voice reveals emotions but doesn’t describe them. “AI voice can trigger some extreme emotions in us. What is in question is how the human voice will evolve with our increasing engagement with AI voice.”

Barber adds that “The one thing that will never change is the richness, complexity, and capability of the human voice.”

You Can Outperform AI

If you’re worried about losing a job to an AI voice, take precautions now to ensure that doesn’t happen. You can do so many things that an AI voice cannot. Being there when clients need you, whether by email or text and always being on time with your deadlines—being ahead of them is even better.

Triple-check your audio quality and then your files so what you think is on there is actually “on there.” Showing empathy and support for your client goes a long way, as does anticipate their next need. Be that person they can rely on, not just for great sound and production values, but the one who asks, “What else can I do to help you?” An AI voice cannot and will not do those things, and it can’t convince the client of a strong work ethic and professional business acumen.

You’re already doing voiceover, and you love it. Like me, you may do narration—medical, corporate, in-show—or maybe even telephony voiceover, but you have your eye on the prize: commercial voiceover. In just 30 or 60 seconds, there’s a big story there, and the right voice can make all the difference in a commercial ad campaign. Oh, and if you’re good at booking commercial voiceover jobs, there’s usually a big paycheck for you if you book a national spot for a major corporation.

It’s good to have lofty goals in voiceover. When you see or hear that McDonald’s ad, or spots from Ford, Microsoft, GEICO, Verizon, or Subway, you think: “That should be me!” And you’re not alone because almost all voiceover artists think that should be them, too. So how do you stand apart from the rest?

Be strategic before you read that copy.

Your Demo Lays the Groundwork

You have to be ready. First, you must have a killer commercial demo, even though at the end of the day, you’ll usually book from auditions. Maybe you need more coaching, but the good news is that there’s no shortage of great commercial voiceover coaches or demo producers.

You’ll work with your coach to get your commercial style “just right,” and then you and that expert will decide on a list of spots to record on demo day. Ultimately, your coach will pick the takes from those spots that best illustrate what makes you a special commercial voiceover talent. As I’ve learned, it takes thoughtful planning and preparation, so you want to ensure you’re ready to shine on demo day.

Your commercial voiceover demo represents what you do well. It’s your audio “business card” when prospective clients want to hear how you sound—so they can imagine your sound with their script.

Some successful commercial voiceover artists learn to imagine someone else delivering the lines of the spot: a friend, a family member, or a celebrity, and they incorporate the probable reason that motivates the words to help them interpret the copy and deliver the read that’s right on target.

Celebrity Commercial Voiceover

It’s true that celebrities sometimes book commercial voice over, but don’t let that dampen your enthusiasm. You may have heard Jon Hamm on Mercedes-Benz, Matt Damon on TD Ameritrade, John Goodman on Dunkin’ Donuts, or Tina Fey on Walgreens. Ask producers why celebs got those jobs, and you’ll likely be told that they sound “relatable,” “conversational,” “friendly,” or “trusted.”

Your voice is the only voice that sounds like you, and you, too, can find your niche and capitalize on “your” commercial sound. You sound within a certain age range, and that’s noted since producers are always cognizant of the target market for a product’s success.

Those Directions on the Voiceover Script

Big companies pay big agencies very well to develop the next great commercial. Agencies include copywriters, creative directors, and their teams, who have a certain sound or tone in mind when writing the words that can sell products. They also have personality characteristics in mind, often tied to the target demographic—those people an ad needs to reach.

When you first get a commercial script, the directions are specific, and you’ll be told what the client wants in terms of a “feel.” Here are some recent examples from a few commercial voice over scripts:

• Calm, straightforward, and with hope
• With pride, hope, authoritative leadership
• Confident and conversational
• Slow and measured, nothing dramatic or over the top: a natural speaking voice
• Authoritative with a touch of humanity
• Majestic, grand, with depth, passionate, magical like casting an enchanting spell, inviting, aged with wisdom in vocals, powerful, inspiring, inviting…modern
• Not announcer: human

As you can see, some clients want you to pack a whole lot into your commercial voice over read! So, you’d better “bring it.”

Know the Types of Ads

There’s a lot to think about before delivering that all-important first take in the booth. It’s generally agreed that two major types of ads dominate commercials, and your goal is to make sure your read resonates with the target audience for each. Whatever the read, you must be versatile and able to punt while performing under direction during recording.

Brand ads: These have a consistent theme, causing the listener to respond with an emotion that connects to what’s being promoted or sold. You may not read an overt call to action, but you will read copy that reinforces what’s great about the product or service—a feeling. And that can translate to sales.

Event ads: The second most common category is event advertising, which is often directly tied to retail sales. This one comes with a marked sense of “hurry up,” as in “You’d better buy this now at this great, low price before it’s gone!” Are you familiar with the venerable four Ps of strategic marketing strategy? They’re the product, price, place, and promotion, and they figure heavily in event advertising.

Sure, the brand still places a role in the message delivery, but a strong message overrides any subtlety here.

Listening is Vital for Booking Commercial Voiceover Jobs

Finally, no voice talent is an island. Pay attention to spots on TV, radio, and social media. Do you hear that casual and cool sound or something more formal and measured? Can you hear certain trendy cadences, breathiness, or texture? Those voices you hear on the “big boys” commercials? What’s special or unique about the read or the voice—surprisingly, that voice may not be so memorable, but the read may have grabbed your attention and didn’t let go. Success with commercial voiceover? You’ve got this. Just take time and care along the way.