If you are an employer looking to cast voice talent for your upcoming job, it makes sense that you would 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 voiceover talent, you may also have to 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 who you believe to be the right fit.
What Are the Main Areas to Look For?
While many aspects can go into choosing the perfect voice talent for a job, there are a few key factors to consider, including:
- Project Type
- Quality of the voice
- Target Audience
- Available Voiceover Samples and Demos
On top of these, another thing cannot be overstated: the client’s priority is the top priority. While factors such as experience, a versatile portfolio, amount of voiceover samples, or any other tangible attributes can be favorable, the client has the final say over what voice fits best with the project in question.
Project Type
The type of project you are working on will play a vital role in selecting voice talent. Familiarity with a given type of work will always be beneficial when you are looking to cast someone. The types of jobs can include:
- Announcers: Announcing jobs involves introductory segments for events. These can be award shows, sporting events, or promotional events.
- Narrators: Narration jobs focus on explanatory content where 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 a lot of different attributes, but four big ones are:
- Announcers: Announcing jobs involves introductory segments for events. These can be award shows, sporting events, or promotional events.
- Narrators: Narration jobs focus on explanatory content where 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.
Other important components of voice quality are pitch, enunciation, articulation, and clarity. All of these parts come together to create good quality in a voice.
Evaluate Your Voiceover Talent to Reach theTarget Audience
Another part of evaluating what voice talent to choose 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 voiceover 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, having 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 such 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. Many voice actors have samples available on their websites, and looking through them is well worth your time.
Just relying on pre-recorded samples is not always sufficient to get 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 voiceover talent is right for the job. In these cases, it is not uncommon for employers to 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 are recording quality and scheduling. All of the above considerations serve a dual purpose in that they can also be used to judge the quality of a voice actor’s recording setup. A pre-recorded demo may sound perfect, but a custom demo with a deadline attached ensures that a voiceover talent has good equipment on hand.
This also helps to let you know that a voiceover talent can work on a tight or flexible schedule. Being able to send in custom samples or make time for a custom audition can assure you that a voice actor can work within your schedule. Depending on the type of project, voice talent being able to fit a tight schedule can be the decisive factor when it is time to hire someone.
For employers that are 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, which means you can get to work on your project faster.