OPINION: With voiceovers, technicalities matter

Studio recording, as every director knows, is time in the hot seat. A session with a voice talent, even the very best, requires intense concentration, creative collaboration and quick decision-making. It is at this point in your production that the insufferable guide-track that has dogged you throughout post will be replaced with the final voiceover; the one that will give your campaign wings, and help distinguish it from its peers in the ad breaks.

In my previous column I listed the pitfalls of, shall we say, ‘compromised direction’, but in truth the list does not end there. And while the broader brushstrokes of good direction are critical to follow, it is often in the finer points of direction—in the subtle use of voice and the nuances of language—that a good voiceover becomes excellent.

As a voice director for many years, I have grown used to beating down the places where pronunciation and annunciation fall foul. I’m not there to cozy up to clients and voice talent. I’m there to get a perfect read, and I’ll crack the whip if I so much as catch a whiff of dodgy syntax.

You see, even good talent can sometimes miss the little details that matter. Words that run together too quickly can sound sloppy, or worse inaudible. I heard an ad recently where the, er, really important end tag about ‘Less energy’ ran together so fast that the resulting ‘lessenergy’ sounded like some weird sales pitch for Italian pasta. In fact, reading too fast is perhaps the single biggest problem with the voiceovers I listen to on TV. Only yesterday I saw an ad for a leading camera manufacturer voiced by a UK talent. It clearly had money thrown at it—art direction, camera, lighting, sound, actors and you name it, all vibrant and appealing. But then, the voiceover. Total pants. I could barely make out what the guy was saying. The words ran together so fast—trying to squeeze too much dialogue into a tiny window of pictures—I simply had no idea what this amazing new camera was about. Fluffing such a crucial component is simply unforgivable.

Another pet peeve of mine is incorrect pronunciation: I’d be a millionaire if I got a dollar every time I heard syllable skippers and adders, such as itinerary, (it-in-ery) and secretary (sec-re-ta-ry), or noun/verb bloopers such as survey, protest and discount. Maybe I get perverse satisfaction from seeking out blunders, but when a product needs linguistic perfection and the campaign has cost ger-zillions, then to overlook this crucial element is just criminal.

Stressing the wrong word in the sentence (if overlooked during recording) can radically alter the message, and create much hilarity when on air. In a famous confectionery ad the voice artist turns ‘Are you a chocolate lover?’—a benign but pertinent question to most of us with a sweet tooth—into, ‘Are you a chocolate LOVER?’, conjuring up images of a Bacchanalian orgy of melting cream eggs, ambassador’s friends and fingers of fudge. Honestly, is it too much to ask that a voice director directs?

One easy way to make a better impression, in my opinion, is to make sure your script is read by someone who understands the language well enough not to butcher it. A Le Sportsac ad that's been on air forever uses a decidedly un-French voice artist to do the voiceover. She reads ‘Les Sportsac’ instead of ‘Le Sportsac’, a howler that not only shifts the article from the singular to the plural but changes the name of the product itself—a cardinal sin. Off with her head, I say! 

The same goes for UK and US English. Why get an Englishman to voice in a US accent? Or use US pronunciation in a British ad? It’s plain odd, but happens frequently. All those UK versus US variants that oh so often are not flagged in time, and make it to the final mix. June 21 or June the 21st, weekend, schedule, kilometre, magazine, advertisement, Hong Kong, Singapore. The list is endless, but if your director ain’t got an ear for it, then it’ll slip through your fingers like Mitt Romney’s quest for the presidency.

It takes training and experience to listen well and really hear what the voice artists are saying. I regularly take novice voice talent through our voiceover training course, and I enjoy introducing them to the nuances of voice use and the impact their voice can have on a script. I love the subtle ways intonation and stress can shift the energy of the sentence, and the way pacing affects the emotional response of the listener. Voice recording is an art, an alchemy of fantastic script, versatile voice talent and a creative, decisive, attentive voice director—preferably one with big ears to boot, all the better for listening.