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Hiring a professional voice-over talent can bring a myriad of different benefits to your project or business. Here are some reasons why you may want to consider hiring a professional voice over artist:

• Quality and expertise: Professional VO artist have the necessary skills and experience to deliver the best read for your script with the quality you desire.

• Versatility: Voiceover talent can adapt their voice to match the tone and style of your project or brand, ensuring that your message is conveyed effectively to your target audience.

• Consistency: Professional VO talent have the ability to maintain consistent tone, pacing, and energy throughout the recording, ensuring that your message is conveyed clearly and effectively.

• Time and cost-effectiveness: Hiring a professional voiceover artist can save you time and money, as they can deliver high-quality reads quickly and efficiently, eliminating the need for added noise reduction and multiple pick up sessions.

• Branding: A professional Voice Talent can help establish and reinforce your brand identity by delivering a consistent and recognizable voice across all of your audio content.

Overall, hiring a professional voiceover talent can help you deliver high-quality audio content that engages and resonates with your target audience.

Sidenote: AI wrote most of this post and I’m using it for SEO, curious if anyone actually reads studio’s blog posts. Let me know at brandon@soundnectarstudios.com

Of course we can help you Cast, Record, Direct, and Edit outstanding voiceovers with the industries best VO Talent, when you’re ready!

I was asked by a voiceover artist to give advice to people just starting out as a VO director. Here is my attempt at keeping it short…which it is not.

The hot seat. You’re in a chair and someone has placed their trust in you to deliver a project worth putting out in the world. It’s your very first time directing a voiceover session…what do you do?
Panic?! Stay Quiet?! Fake it?!
Well, I assure you I panicked on my first recording session. And I have also messed up a lot of times sicne. I have been quiet when I shouldn’t have and over directed when I should’ve let the voice talent figure it out.

So here is what I wish someone would’ve told me before my first VO session;
Stay Calm,
Be Honest,
Discuss.

My Philosophy of Common Sense Voiceover Directing…
Our VO talent are our collaborative partners NOT our sled dogs.
Maybe this one isn’t just for new directors… we should all look for a creative collaboration with our voice talent. We can have the most wonderful script, cast the most talented voice actor you’ve ever heard and add a visionary creative director and it will still crash and burn if we cannot speak to each other properly.

But what about YOU, can YOU direct? Well, yeah you can! I believe everyone can give direction. Every person has their own taste and is able to make judgement calls on how the voiceover sounds to them. These are just skills that need to be practiced. Over time you will get better and better at conveying what your preferred reads are. What inflections are pleasing; what pacing sounds best to your ears. It boils down to finding out this: why certain performances are better suited for certain stories.

Do not worry about if you can/will be a good voice-over director. The talent you are working with, in all honesty, has already experienced bad to useless directors. Don’t be so afraid of being a bad director that you don’t share your thoughts at all. Your goal is to get a good performance from an artist who wants to give a good performance. It’s that simple! This also means you shouldn’t have to get in the way too often. Keep the overview of your entire project in mind. Trust that your voice actor can create the performance where everyone will be happy. You will help guide them along the way, but you shouldn’t drag them through the finish line.

Tips on how to be prepared: read more…

Paying attention to emerging trends in Voiceover is something us sound engineers make time to do. I find it much easier when it also intercepts with my leisure interests, like comics! When something remarkable happens, our ears take notice. If you aren’t skirmish around animated gore, watch Invincible, if only for the vocal direction. It’s not your typical creative direction for epic animation!

Don’t want to waste time on a synopsis of the show since there are many people out there who do that for a living, so quickly our super family members are Mark Grayson (think Spiderman mixed with Superboy) his Mother Debbie Grayson (Not powered BUT voiced by Sandr Oh) and Father Omni-Man (think Superman or maybe Homelander). If you liked the comic, you’ll enjoy the series. If you don’t like Robert Kirkman’s style of gory over-the-top violence in a long dramatic series filled with unrelenting trauma and tragedy for his protagonists, well maybe the series was never going to work for you. However, it’s the unique-for-the-genre voice over direction is what we’re talking about here.

Remarkable actors portray every character in this show but don’t expect larger than life superhero performances. These actors are doing very little which I believe accomplishes more.

The series opens on a conversation where Steve the security guard (Jon Hamm) is explaining the struggles of his adopted teenage son. Such a quiet and thoughtful note this series decided to start on. Hamm’s vocal projection is minuscule. His vocal performance is intimate and brings a ton of emotion and humanity to this conversation. Immediately I’m wondering if this sets the stage for the show, is this to contrast this project from all other epic superhero animations? Is it just a set up for an epic fight that breaks this emotional set up? Well yeah, maybe yes to both.

A couple scenes later we see Omni Man (J.K. Simmons) hushed and gentle vocal delivery. First Jon Hamm now J.K. Simmons, both completely pulled back in their performance. These two are fantastic actors and they’re not putting a lot into these reads? Neither of these actors are just phoning it in… they were directed this way. WHY?

We have all gotten used to the non-announcer spec on voiceover projects keeping our VO performances toned down and feeling natural. We do this to create authenticity and avoid an obviously selly/announcery voice. I believe by now we are all tired of being sold to, so instead we are more interested in conversations rather than sales pitches.

Back to our show. Our protagonists seem to be taking this a step further with something I want to call the Ultra Conversational or maybe Anti-Announcer read. It doesn’t seem to matter what’s happening on the screen, voiceover performances by J.K. Simmons(Omni-Man) and Steven Yuen(Mark Grayson) are so turned down they’re just above a whisper.

Even when their characters are flying around the world or at great distances from each other, neither uses any projection. Never raising their voice; never too ‘animated’, never over acting. Which if you really wanted to argue, having super sensitive hearing could mean keeping conversations at a hushed level would be more comfortable. But even the unpowered keep it quietly ultra-conversational. read more…