Using a professional voiceover recording – whether it’s being used in a commercial or video or a radio spot, or even on a telephone answering system – is a video production service that can drastically enhance your brand image in a positive way.

The human voice is a distinctly powerful asset when it comes to delivering information while simultaneously representing your brand. Voiceover professionals excel at their craft and offer a variety of options as well as skills that you can utilize to make your advertisement, video content or recording just right.

Here are some details to consider, and an overview of the process of working with a professional voiceover artist.

A Professional Voiceover Can Connect With Your Audience

Who is your target audience or key demographic that will be hearing this voiceover, and what type of voice would work best in speaking to them? In many cases, a female voice is found to be more trustworthy and believable, making a female voice ideal for persuasive commercials.

Male voices on the other hand, are often found to be neutral, authoritative and factual. There are positives to both male and female voices.  Age and ethnicity are also important factors. A good rule is to use whichever seems to make the most sense in speaking to your particular customer about your particular product or service.

Professional Voiceover Artists Offer Many Talents

Being a professional voiceover artist is more than simply reading words into a microphone. VO artists practice their enunciation and intonation in order to deliver lines in a variety of ways.

Think about a face wash commercial, compared to an informative training video. The commercial may sound more upbeat and fresh, and the wording may even use some fun slang or phrasing. Meanwhile most training videos need to be straightforward and clear, so that trainees can follow along and not lose information due to differences in interpretation.

A Professional Voiceover Can Improve Your Production

This means that an experienced and talented professional voiceover artist is beneficial to your video or audio production. It is worth it to invest in someone who can offer you diversity and variety, and also follow direction well.

Frequently a VO artist must record lines while being listened to and directed by a producer or other member of the production team. Just as having an interesting voice is a natural talent, so is the ability to follow direction well.

VO artists will be asked to adjust pacing, timing, pitch, feeling and more as they read through pre-scripted lines. Or, they may even be asked to ad-lib, depending on the project.

The Process of Working with a Professional Voiceover Artist

Here at Grey Sky Films, we work with professional VO artists all the time, in a variety of different ways:

Sample VO’s

When a simple voiceover reading of a script is required for a client’s video, our producers will first sort through a plethora of voiceover sample audio clips to find ones that seem like they’d be a good fit for the client project.

We always seek to provide our clients with a choice of at least two voices that we think could work for them: we do the leg work but give our clients the ability to listen to them, and provide input or ultimate guidance for the project.

Once an artist is selected, we submit the script to them and request a sample voiceover recording. This lets us hear that artists voice reading the exact copy that we would like to use in the project.

A VO Phone Session

Often it is more effective and efficient to hold a phone session with a voiceover artist. This means that our producer can listen in as the artist records their voice, and the producer can give feedback or direction.

This can be helpful in situations where the VO must be precise or if there is a tight turnaround time and we’d like to avoid the need to revise and correct a voiceover repeatedly.

Using a Spokesperson 

Often, we’ll hold a casting session to find a spokesperson that can be the face and voice of the brand across a variety of content: from video to audio to print!

During the casting session the talent is seen and heard in person, but also recorded so that they can be seen on-camera and so that the producers and client can look back through and evaluate their choices.

Once one is selected and used throughout production, an in-person voiceover recording session can also be facilitated, or a phone session if travel obstacles arise.

As you can see there is more to producing a professional voiceover than simply asking someone to read a script. The human voice is a very distinct element that can bring a lot of benefits to the content that is representing your brand.