Intro to Voice Overs 101 - A complete newbie's guide to voice narration using Librivox and Audacity

1. 01 Meet Your Teacher: Hi, I'm Erin Lillis, and I'm a voice actress, and I am currently the lead in a podcast called Conjure Area. Season one, also contributing voice actress on the No sleep podcast, And I also have my own podcast called The Summer City Transmit. In addition, I am a spokesperson voice for a number of Internet brands. I could be heard on radio announcements, Spotify commercials. I do some audio books. It can also be heard in the number of video games, including stifled Father Dot Io Heroes Call, which is a game for the blind and a few upcoming titles. I also do some volunteer work for a site called Liber box dot org's. Many people have asked me how they, too, can get started in voice acting. So I thought I'd teach a little intro class for the very, very, very beginning, knew about how to dip your toe and find out if it's even something you're interested in. So first off, I'll confess that I didn't just jump into this completely coldly. I've been doing voices to impersonate characters and entertain friends for pretty much all my life. And in film school, I got a taste for working and sound. Following that, I entered with an Oscar award winning sound designer and took further classes and audio design and radio production. So I made an educated jump into the whole process. But in this class, we're just going to start with the basics. 2. 02 Introduction to the Project: my intent is to give you a taste of what is commonly involved in voice acting so that you can determine if this is actually something you want to pursue further. We'll be doing that by completing a small narration project for Liber Box. This is a site for free audiobooks of work that is in the public domain, and we'll be recording and editing this project using audacity, which is a free open source audio editor or A D a W a digital audio workstation. So what you're gonna need for this project is gonna be a microphone. And since this is one of your first attempts were not gonna bother with a fancy microphone , we're going to work with what you probably already have available a microphone on your phone tablet or one that came with your computer. It's often not the microphone that makes a difference, but where you record, you're gonna need a quiet room. So most likely this might be a closet, a computer, PC or Mac Doesn't matter, cause audacity works on both, and some way to read your script, You getting their print it out or read it on a tablet or phone device. So let's get started 3. 03 What are Voice Overs?: I'd like to give you just a brief introduction to the different types of voice acting in narration that you might see in casting listings and what they mean. So this video is about voiceovers. There's many different kinds, and let me tell you about a few that I've experienced. The first is voiceovers for broadcast or commercials, so this is typically the voice that goes over a moving picture and is adapted into 15 to 32nd spots for radio ads. So think of a commercial advertising, the latest pharmaceutical and the high speed legal disclaimers. At the end of that, for example, the side effects may include constipation, runny noses and an inability to read music or the infamous Sunday sudden days Sunday Monster Truck voices the in a world trailer voice that gets you hyped up for a movie. Thes voices air basically disembodied information givers. They're not really attached to a specific character there, just a clear voice providing information. So things that fall into this category are explainer videos, movie trailers, training material presentations, awards, announcers and more. The next type is a spokesperson, so like a voice over a spokesperson might be another voice over a picture, but I'm getting in a separate bullet because this type of voice usually is associated with the character or character type. So think of Jack from the jack in the box commercials or Flo from Progressive Insurance. You'll hear those same voices in radio commercials, and those voice characters become associated with specific brands. So even if you don't see the visual commercial for progressive insurance, you'll still recognize flows, voice and associate her with those visual characteristics. Same with jack podcasts. Podcast voices Air. Typically a real person knowledgeable about a certain subject. You don't have to be a vocal acting expert but learning to speak into a microphone correctly and with more clarity. For example, with less comes and verbal tics is a bonus. Radio DJs Radio broadcasters tend to speak very clearly with enthusiasm and in perfectly allotted periods of time, they're usually well practiced with the microphone. They avoid moments of dead air religiously because think about it. If you're turning the DIA looking for a station and you hear nothing, you're going to keep turning the dial, thinking there's no signal. They're so dead. Air on a radio broadcast is basically a huge mistake. D. J. Drops. This is a special type of short, enthusiastic or sexy style of voice that is used to announce a live deejay or hyper crowd, and it's usually mixed with a lot of audio effects. Voice mail were auto attendant or an I V R. This ranges from your basic answering machine message such as High We're not home. Leave a message to a business voicemail such as acne tire irons. Your call is important to us. Leave a detailed message after the beep. The next step after this is the auto attendant or the ivy are the interactive voice attendant voice. Usually the ones such as Welcome to Acme Corporate Press one for accounts payable to for production. Three to reach Jenin accounts, etcetera. The style here is pleasant, with a smile in your voice and a slow pace for clarity. After I began my own path of liber box, I began doing voicemails. I found it the most forgiving for a beginner within Okay, microphone, because the audio quality of a telephone call is poor by design and therefore a little more forgiving SMR. This is a relatively new style of narration, which generally involves whispering very close to it is sort of seductive. The intent with these is to set off the tingle sensations you might get when someone blows into your ear. These air, usually off the cuff, improvised or done in a role playing style again, you're looking for a slow paced talking and a controlled, quiet speaking style. 4. 04 What is Voice Acting?: Now we get into voice acting, and in this genre, the first thing we have is narrators. A narrator is usually the disembodied voice that is associated with a story. This is someone reading the stage directions in a play where the Amish in God voice in a fiction novel. A great example of this is the Emma Thompson character in the movie Stranger Than Fiction. That is telling the audience what Will Ferrell's character is doing throughout his day, and their reader usually has an authoritative inside knowledge of the tail that's going on and congenitally have a wise character style. They're usually a voice you feel you can trust, and the pace is usually slower than normal. Speaking such that the writer's words can be clearly understood. You'll encounter narrators in audiobooks, podcast stories, play narrators and movie narration for the blind, amongst other things. Next we gettinto audio drama and radio plays. Getting into this space is acting for the voice. If you're already an actor and you make the jump to voice, then this is really the same thing. You already know the added element of using your voice to really express your emotions since you don't have your body to rely on. It involves subtle vocal noises, size, huh? Laughter and basically a really great imagination. Since you'll probably be doing this alone in the dark and just having to imagine the whole seeing around you, I wouldn't recommend this is a first step unless you already have acting experience. I would work up to this because it is a bit harder than you think it might be. But basically, if you're not in the narrator rule here, your job is to be a character in an invisible play. Fiction Audiobooks will also fall into this category if you're doing an entire book or story as the sole narrator and you'll be required to do the voices for all the characters in the book. This really requires a wide range of different styles so that each character in the story could be distinguishable and recognizable without the reader being able to see the part that says Harry said or her mind. He looked at Ron and said, Personally, my favorite audiobook narrator is Jim Dale and specifically his work on the Harry Potter series. I really recommend those if you're gonna listen to study his range is amazing. Animation animation Voice acting is just that animated voice acting. It's definitely associated with a fictional character and is usually in a speech pattern that is quicker and more faster pace than a normal human voice. Think of it like a vocal caricature. The features of a voice are exaggerated. You might have more vocal fry, which is that little growl in your voice might have lists. I'm just a silly woodpecker, and I can't see what I'm doing lower or higher into nations. Hi, I'm speaking really high vibe speaking really low. No, and other verbal eccentricities like overblown accents. Tilly D I. C. A. Found me part of Gore. Bernie's a rainbow. Typically in an animation voiceover, you are a little involved in the creation of the character before the animation is created . So your creativity in the voice is considered when the drawing starts. A great example here is Robin Williams, as the genie in a Latin Robyn's ad Lives made it into the drawn character of the genie. It would have been a totally different genie of someone like, say, Jerry Seinfeld had voiced him. Animations have a lot of different places in the world. You'll see them in animated movies, cartoons for TV animated greeting cards, Web videos, animated comic strips, theme park rides and more. Another thing you'll see in these casting calls is calls for machinima or fan dubbing and professional dubbing. This is basically an animation voiceover, but it's for a character that exists prior to your involvement in the development of the character for machinima. Someone has taken existing footage and re edited it into a story of their choosing your coming into voice after the fact. So you might have to talk faster than normal to get the script to fit into the time allotted. The same goes for language dubs of something in a different language. For example, in an enemy that's being readapt, the scenes exist and are cut for the Japanese language and the original actors character choices. And you're coming in after the fact to try and match a character and squeeze that English translation into tighter spaces. Fan made and pro dubbing is used for live action video as well. The visual novel. This genre is like a hybrid between cartoon animation, story narration and video game voice acting. The narration style might be a mix between narrators and character acting, but it is readable in a video game style. It's like a video game of just the cut scenes video game voice acting. Video game voices are similar to animation and that you'll usually be involved with the production in tandem with the animation and creation of the characters. But in video game acting, your characters will generally not talk as fast because they are providing information the gamer needs. It tend to be a lot more dramatic, with strong stories of love and violent loss, and they'll take themselves very seriously. Video game acting also involves sessions where you're just grunting, screaming, doing battle cries and making other general human noises like heavy breathing yawns, stretches and reacting to pain. Directions, like do a death rattle and react to an arrow hit in the shoulder, are normal in this space. These tend to be a little more grueling and a harder on people because they are physical and they do a lot of vocal stress. So if someone is being booked for a vocal session for a video game, they might not then be able to act for another week or so while their voice rests. So this covers most of what you're going to see in casting sections for voice overs, and you now have an idea of the different niches you could go into. If you're so inclined for this class and this project, we're gonna be working on the narration style will be picking a problem from the public domain to record and will be picking a character style that fits that piece. Okay, Now, before we pick our project and get set up, I think we should pick a space to record. 5. 05 Finding A Quiet Place To Record: So take a pause and really listen to the sound around you. I first started recording in my kitchen because that's where my computer was. But it was a terrible recording area because the refrigerator hummed the fan on my laptop constantly word and my voice echoed off the far walls of the room. I would record a segment realize I missed something and record again on Lee to realize that it sounded different because this time the refrigerator motor was resting so we'd have to start over and we record the whole project. I must have done all of my initial story in variations three or four times because of trying to have one unified sounding recording. Don't make my mistakes. I made them for you because I was rushing actually find a quiet space. This is a sample recording next to the fan of a laptop and in a room where my voice bounces off different walls and different items in the room. This is a recording in my bathroom in my shower. Now I've heard of some people recording in the shower, but this is a pretty bad place to record because you might be able to hear now by voices echoing off the tiles in the shower. I moved into my bedroom, but my upstairs neighbor had an A C running that caused a nice cyclical home. This is a recording in my bedroom. I'm now in a softer environment. There are pillows and beds around. There's lots of clothes, but if you listen carefully, you might be able to still hear the air conditioner from the upstairs neighbor. And you can also kind of hear how I'm echoing off of the items in the room in here. Then I started recording with a blanket over my head, which was a lot better. Pillows and blankets are great for sound dampening, but in some cases it sounded too dampened, like I was recording under a blanket again. My takes were inconsistent if my pillows moved around and I had to re record mistaken lines , so this wasn't working out either. This is a recording of me under a blanket in that same bedroom. The recording here is drastically improved in quality because you're not getting all that background noise, but because the blanket is literally draped over my head, there's no real place for the sound to go, so it might sound too close. You might not be able to tell when you're listening to it. I just sound really good. But if you can just increase the space between the blanket and the recorder, I'm doing that. Now. You might be able to hear a little bit of that distance. The problem is, of course, recording under a blanket gets really hot, and it's also hard to read a script under here if you're doing something for consistent audio. So let's say you're doing a long story and you need to take a break between paragraphs. If you move this blanket around a different parts of the room, you might get a different sound quality. So this is fine. Recording under a blanket is perfect for our first project, but if you go and continuing to voice overs, you're gonna want to set up something that's a little more consistent that you can keep going back. Teoh and the sound will remain consistent. Finally, I did what most home recording artists do. I moved into a closet. Now in this sample, I am still using the iPhone to record my voice, but I am using my makeshift pop filter, and I'm recording in the closet that I have pre set up for sound dampening. I've got my egg crates on the wall. I've got the close behind me. I have a chair to sit on so that my voice is consistently pointing in the same direction, so that if I need to re record something later, it's coming from the same spot. My voice will bounce in the same way, and that way it makes it really easy to edit things together. If I fudge align and need to come back and do it again, here is a low key tour of my quiet space. I have my laptop sitting on a TV tree outside of the closet that I use. That is basically a broom closet cloak closet by my front door, and I draped a blanket over the door, and I have the wire coming to my USB microphone, going out underneath it. This is because when I'm recording on my laptop, it tends to be noisy, the fans running and I want to keep it outside the door. This is my sound booth, where I have basically draped blankets and I use sweaters to just muffle noise, and you can get soundproofing foam relatively inexpensively. At the time I purchased this, I've basically just bought an egg, create for eight bed and cut it into pieces and laid it out where it could. You can see my microphone is a blue yeti, and it is actually just sitting upon my Christmas decorations. And I sit upon a kitchen stool when I record, and I used to just record standing. But when I started doing longer pieces such as audiobooks, I needed to be able to sit coming into my sound booth. I have my microphone. Have a 2nd 1 there. That's just recording me right now. OK, so now we close the door and it's dark in here. But I have a light so we can see this is my microphone. This is where I have my iPhone set up so I can read from it. And this piece of fabric insulation actually just came out of one of those like blue apron type of boxes. I just repurposed it firm or sound insulation. Very, very important warning here. If you are going to record audio in your closet, please do not close the closet door all the way. You need to have it open at least a little crack because you need air circulation. Otherwise, the more you talk, the more you're gonna breathe out. Some CEO, too. More likely you are to start getting symptoms of carbon dioxide poisoning. You're gonna start to feel fate possibly dizzy. Maybe a little confused. Now again, I made this mistake for you, so you don't have to. I did this to myself, and I nearly fainted. So please, please, please make sure you have some air circulation coming into your closet. If you're going to record in an enclosed space like that, if you want to really dive deep into sound booth making and soundproofing, I really recommend Mike Delgado's videos on YouTube. He goes by the channel name Booth Junkie, and he does a really thorough job of talking about microphones and sound booths for this beginner project. This is what you need to dio find a quiet space. Really Listen to make sure you hear that it's quiet. Try a closet, try your car. Prevent echoes by making a pillow fort or put a blanket over your head. And very importantly, you need to hydrate 6. 06 Eliminating Mouth Noise: The next important thing is a pop filter. I bought a really one that went with my microphone. But to be honest, this one I made out of nylons and a small embroidery hoop works way better. This is used to eliminate those extra sounds from the PLO sieve noises your mouth makes when you say things like pop out at Parties and Bob the Builder, P's and B's Air basically little explosions in your mouth when your lips hit, which is why it's called a PLO sieve. You were listening those interviews, sometimes on NPR, and you can hear those little poppy and squishy noises in their mouths. Gonna be honest. It's a little gross and distracting, and it's totally gonna happen to you and your recordings if you don't drink water. But it doesn't work if you drink water while you're recording. Sure, that helps, but it really only works if you drink water 1 to 2 hours before you record in a pinch, A green apple helps. Personally, I've got sensitive teeth, and I hate biting into apples, so I originally kept apple juice boxes on hand for recordings. Now I just try to plan a bit ahead and actually drink the damn water 1 to 2 hours ahead of time. I'll tell you, you can edit some of those sounds out, but it is long and arduous journey. So just drink the water in the first place, and then you won't have to sit there editing out all these gross sounds. 7. 07 Microphones: Let's talk about microphones. There are a lot of different types of microphones, such as condenser and USB and etcetera, but that's a whole different, detailed subject that we don't really need to touch on in this class. For now, we just need to know a little bit about pick up patterns. So to explain that subject, let's say that this dot right here is your microphone. The first pick up pattern we're going to talk about is Omni directional. What that means is that if this is the microphone in the center, it's going to pick up everything around it. Think of it like a 360 degree circle or sphere, and it's going to pick up every sound that happens. Within this space. It will pick up your voice, but also everything behind the microphone under it over it, etcetera. It's good for things like picking up ambience and room tone, but that great for narration because it picks up everything around it. The next pattern is cardio. OId sounds like cardiac because it's a heart shape, but in inverted heart. So with this being the microphone here, it's picking up everything in front of it. and to the sides of it, but not things behind it. This is good for directionality and also getting a little bit of what's going on to either side of the target speaker or narrator. In your case, this will also get a bit of the room ambiance and surroundings, so the best way to use this type of microphone is in a noise controlled environment. The next pattern of note is thehyperfix, Carney oId or super cardio. This is basically the same thing as a carny oId, but the heart shape is even tighter or skinnier. It's better for catching a tight area of sound and will pick up a little of the surrounding ambience, but nothing from the back unless from the side areas. Lovelier microphones, which are the types you see clipped on collars during interviews, and shotgun or boom mikes on production sets usually have this type of pick up pattern because you can point them directly at the speaker you're trying to pick up. The next type of pattern is the bi directional pattern. It's got a figure eight shape and picks up sound in front of it, and behind it, this is best used when you have two subjects across from each other, one in front and one in back that are doing something like an interview. A mike with this pattern won't get much sound from the sides. It's only going to get what's right in front of it and what's right behind it. The best type of pick up pattern for our uses in voice overs is the cardio. I'd pattern because we will be standing in one position in front of the mike, and we want a limit our surrounding noise. But if you get a microphone like the Blue Yeti, for instance, it has different types of pick up patterns so that you could actually switch between the different types. So this might be a good mic to get if you're thinking about going into podcasting, because you can switch between cardio aid for narration and voice overs and bi directional for interviews, if you're doing something like an interview at a table for now, we're going to assume that the microphone you're using in this class, whether it be your laptop microphone or your mobile phone, is omni directional. So because it's picking up sound in all directions, we a getting to focus on limiting the outside noise as much as possible. This is again why we need to find a very quiet place to record. 8. 08 Prepping Your Script For Reading: Now I'm going to show you my trick for preparing my scripts so that I can read them off of my device instead of having to print out paper you could use to do it on paper if you like . But keep in mind that the sound of your paper maybe caught on audio, and you will also need a source of light in order to read it by reading your script from a device. It is both quiet and self illuminated. I have found that the easiest method for me to use is to prepare my script in Google docks , because it is something I can open on multiple devices using the Google docks or Google Drive app. If you don't already have a Google account, it's pretty simple to make one. You can also choose to use something equivalent that works for you and your devices, like Apple notes or Evernote, the key being that you can access it both from your computer and the device on which you'll read it from To follow along with me. Start by going to doc's dot google dot com, and once you're logged in, you should see the big plus sign which allows you to create a new blank document in my screen recording. You may have seen my document entitled Vo to Record today. I always use the same document for my projects just to keep things a little less cluttered . But in the sample were starting from scratch by clicking on the title text, I can rename the document. I am going to change the name here to Fortnight Poem because that is what will be working on in the second part of the Siri's. So next, all head to the source text that I need to read and copy it. Don't worry about where to find the source right now. This video is just to show you how I prepare my script to go on record it. Returning to my browser window where the Google doc is open, I then paste in the text. In my document, I can either use keyboard shortcuts such as control, see or control V to copy and paste, or it can use the edit menu to copy and paste. Now, when I'm in my sound booth, I have used a group device attached to an extension arm that keeps my device positioned above the microphone. You definitely don't need to be this fancy for your project, but you do need to keep your mouth pointed towards your microphone When you read, you can hear how the voice and the sound shifts if I'm looking down at my paper and I'm looking back at the microphone. So if you're just in the short project, holding your hand in the air while you read from that device will be suffice. And here's how I open the script on my device. For my set up, I open the Google Drive or Google Docks APP, find my document and then, while reading, I can quietly scroll through the text, avoiding the sound of rustling papers while I read. 9. 09 Your Project: Okay, You've got your quiet place. You know how to avoid mouth noises. You've chosen the microphone you're going to use, and you have a way to read your script for your project. For this class, I'd like you to make a test recording in a few possible quiet areas that you will consider using and then listen back to those recordings to see if you can identify potential problems. If you can post those audio snippets to the project area by up, loading those audio files to a site like soundcloud dot com or clip that C L Y P and then including those links in your post. If you can please also post pictures of your chosen quiet place in the project area so you can give other students ideas as well. If you have any alternatives or tips and tricks that you prefer for reading scripts, please post those in the community area. And when you've completed Project one, you can move on to the next videos in this Siri's where we will be learning about how to use audacity and labour box. Thank you for watching hope to see you in the next class