Voiceover

A voiceover is recorded in a treated room with a microphone on a stand. A meeting room has an echo nobody can remove afterwards, so it is a studio or at least a room with carpet and curtains. The voice artist reads in blocks, each block two or three times, and the director picks. A minute of narration takes about an hour including setup. The rest is timing it into the edit and cleaning the sound.

On a factory video we had lovely footage of the line and nobody willing to speak on camera. A voiceover turned it into a story in one afternoon. A Slovak voice artist for a corporate video typically costs in the low hundreds of euros, a fraction of a single shooting day.

Order matters: rough cut first, then the script, then the recording. Record narration earlier and you end up cutting picture to words instead of words to picture. From you we need approved copy without abbreviations, the pronunciation of technical terms and names, and three voice samples to choose from. Write numbers and abbreviations the way they are spoken and you save two takes.

A voiceover is not a cure for having nothing to say. If the video has no point, narration only says the nothing out loud. Watch the density too: copy written for the page usually runs a third longer than it can comfortably be read on screen. Then you either cut words or stretch the video.

We read narration scripts out loud with a stopwatch before recording. If it does not fit, we cut copy rather than speed up the delivery. And we pick the voice to match how the brand writes, its tone of voice. Read your latest script aloud and you will know within a minute.