12.3: Voice-overs

You cannot control everything that happens when interviewing someone else, but you can have complete control of a voice-over or the narration that you will record for a video story or an audio slideshow that goes with a photo gallery. Here’s how to make the best of it.

Write a script: Having a detailed script that you can practice a few times before turning on the microphone will greatly enhance the quality of the finished product. Crafting an effective script is quite different from news writing. The fewer words the better as the purpose of voice-over narration is to amplify or clarify what may be obvious on screen. Short, simple declarative sentences work best.

Choose words that are easy to say and have a good flow when put together. Build in natural breaks for taking a breath. Add some verbal “white space” so the narration doesn’t overpower the visual elements of the story.

Script for Hurricane Family Feature (courtesy KPLU radio):

(Kitchen nats — opening drawer) :03

Patricia Quinn searches through the kitchen cupboards of her new home in Seattle.

(Kitchen nats — raw sound) :02

Behind freshly-painted cabinet doors, are small reminders of her family’s old life in New Orleans.

(Kitchen nats — bag rustling)

She pulls out a prized possession — authentic Louisiana-style beans.

(Kitchen nats — beans and season salt mixed) :19

NOTE: See Appendix, for the full version of this script.

Warm up: While it may feel weird, stretching the muscles in your face and mouth and humming or singing will help prepare you to be recorded. Open your mouth as wide as possible and move your jaw back and forth. Then hum some deep notes and some high notes and sing a few bars of a familiar song, like “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Your facial muscles and vocal chords need to be ready to perform, just as if you were about to go running or play basketball.

Operative words: Marilyn Pittman (http://marilynpittman.com), who serves as a guest lecturer at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, teaches print journalists about audio and video performance. She recommends finding the “operative” words in your script — the words that are essential to telling the story — before you begin recording.

Which are the operative words? The words that would give the listener or viewer the gist of the story rather than the complete sentences in the script, Pittman says. Usually they are the classic who-what-where-when-why-how words — nouns, adjectives, adverbs, titles, names.

Now read through the script and add emphasis to the operative words. According to Pittman, you can do that in four ways:

• Volume — Increase or decrease the volume of your voice when saying an operative word. Emphasizing a word by making your voice louder is also called "punching" it.
• Pitch — Change the pitch of your voice when you say an operative word, going up or down the scale, high and low, falsetto to baritone.
• Rhythm — Change the rhythm of your voice — the space between the words — when saying an operative word. Pause before the word, after the word, or both to emphasize it. A pause is especially effective before a word that's complex or highly technical in nature. A pause is also effective when you're introducing a new idea in a script.
• Tempo — Change the tempo or speed of your delivery to emphasize an operative word. You might pick up the tempo where the copy is less important, and then slow down when you hit a section with more operative words to emphasize them. Or you might stretch out a vowel in an operative word.

Be conversational: While focusing on operative words will help, don’t allow yourself to be too distracted by them. It’s more important to be natural and conversational as you speak. If it sounds like you’re reading a script and intentionally emphasizing some words but not others, the entire project will suffer. So aim for a flowing, conversational reading of your script first, and then add the more complicated techniques of operative words.