E-Learning Voice Over Portfolios #104: Challenge | Recap
As course designers, you’re part of a fast-moving industry that requires a unique combination of skillsets, which includes writing, instructional design, multimedia, presentation design, project manager, and recording audio narration.
So while you may not think of yourself as a professional in each of those specific skillsets, collectively you are a working course designer because you’re able to work professionally across each of those disciplines.
This week, I’d like to focus on just one of those skills: audio narration.
Voice over work is subjective. If your course narration is good enough for your company, it just might be good enough for others. It doesn’t matter if you’re an aspiring voice actor or just trying to expand your services, this week’s challenge should help everyone find their e-learning voice!
Challenge of the Week
This week your challenge is to pull together a simple voice over portfolio for e-learning.
Never mind the fact you’re not interested in becoming a professional narrator. The goal for this week’s challenge is to practice recording different styles of narration for e-learning. If you pick up some additional work along the way, that’s a bonus.
If you’re feeling ambitious this week, please include the follow details with your portfolio:
How would you describe your voice? Describe your voice in 3-5 adjectives. Are you deep, warm, and authoritative? Or do you have an animated, wry, and quirky vocal style? These are keywords that can customers can use to find your services.
What’s your recording setup like? Tell us what you’re using to record your narration. What kind of microphone are you using? Are you recording directly into your authoring tool? How do you control ambient noise?
What types of audio editing do you offer? Describe your post-recording tasks. Do you remove breaths or ambient noise? Do you apply any filters like EQ or limiters to even out your recordings? If you keep things simple by recording and publishing that’s fine, too!
Sharing Your Work
You can share your voice over portfolio any way you like. Here are a few suggestions.
SoundCloud. A quick and easy option for sharing your audio portfolio is to upload your files to SoundCloud. I like how SoundCloud includes playlists so you can group your audio examples. Check out the Education Podcasts recap to see examples.
Voice123. If you think voice over work is something you’d like to do, then you should register with Voice123. They’re the largest online casting service for voice over professionals. One thing I like about them is how they guide you through completing your profile, adding demos, and describing your voice and services.
Interactive Audio Soundboard. If you want to build something this week, try building an interactive soundboard for your voice over portfolio. Please be sure to share your soundboard in this challenge and the original soundboard challenge. I’ll recap both posts to include your example.
Before you sound off in this week’s challenge, check out the interactive graphics your fellow community members shared over the past week:
Love and Hate E-Learning Infographic #103: Challenge | Recap
Wishing you a voice-tastic week, E-Learning Heroes!
New to E-Learning Challenges?
The weekly challenges are ongoing opportunities to learn, share, and build your e-learning portfolios. You can jump into any or all of the previous challenges anytime you want. I’ll update the recap posts to include your demos.
Sweet stuff! I agree with Jane that the Hairy Toe entry is particularly effective. One thing I'd suggest is trying to match sound levels between all the clips; I know that can be tricky, but it would be a nice enhancement to an already nifty sampler. A super self-introduction. Welcome to the Challenges!
That's really a really good point, Andrew. Thanks for letting me know. I'll see what I can do to modify it: recorded the audio in different climes and places.
Thanks David for sharing resources. I always shirk when it comes to Narration as I don't think my voice and accent will help my course. Therefore, I spoke with a couple of teachers who can narrate the script of my course.
Good sample, Spanish is my native language, so I understand your concerns Mohammad. However, I found that many learners appreciated my accent because it made them focus more on what was being narrated. Funny, isn't it?
Totally understand where you're coming from, Mohammad. Just because we can record narration doesn't mean we should. We may not be the best people to narrate our projects. But that's not what this week's challenge is about:-)
I tend to agree with Alexander regarding accents. Authenticity trumps homogeneity these days. Remember 20 years ago when every nightly news broadcaster sounded exactly the same? They worked hard to remove their regional accents to appeal to a national audience. That's not the case today.
But I've heard your voice because we chatted for a couple hours on Skype and last month at DevLearn. Your voice would be great for the right projects.
I agree with David and the others--while you may feel your voice is not suited to all projects, it may be an asset for some of them. And your voice, like your fingerprint, is unique. That can be gold when giving a course a voice. I would much rather hear a course where the voice has something of a "real" personality. It can help make a learner sit up and take notice. A real person has entered the room.... ;-)
To edit audio, I use Audacity: http://audacityteam.org/ to remove background noise and cut out all of the breaths. (I also take the pitch down 5-6% but that's a secret.)
Nice and clear! The only suggestion I'd make off the top of my head: don't take out every single breath. There are times when it's helpful to leave a bit of a breath in there, both to help a clip retain the sound of a human being (rather than a series of sound bytes) and also to allow the learner's ear a chance to rest for a beat and absorb what you've said. Allowing that "breathing space" here and there, at logical/organic places, can greatly enhance both enjoyment and retention, in my experience.
Hi, all! Sorry that other projects have kept me away from the Challenges for a while; lots of catching up to do. As Fate would have it, when David posted the challenge about Soundboards, I decided to do one as a voiceover portfolio, since voiceovers is one of the services I offer. I haven't changed the portfolio since then (I am just starting to work on updating my demos, and will add new versions down the road), but I did update my blog post to include answers to the questions David posed this week about our voices and our setup. As to the demos, I especially had fun creating the Animation one; I had a good day, and did it all in one take, which was a hoot. If anyone knows any animators looking for writer/collaborators, let me know; I have a second clip I'd love to see animated, too.
I look forward to listening to this week's submissions!
Thanks, Nancy! Yes, I did Ruby as well as Victor. It was great fun. If you enjoyed that, check out my Mad Scientist clip, and also my World Dialects clip, on my acting web site. Pretty silly stuff: http://www.andrewsellon.com/voiceovers/
Very nice Andrew, I like your choices of background music for the different samples. Also, I enjoy hearing some character voices on the animation sample. Your voice works well in a variety of settings!
Hi, it's me again. All the real projects I'm working on right now seem to be moving at a snails pace so while I'm waiting for various and many people to get back to me I thought I'd do this audio challenge.
Gosh, Nancy--you're selling yourself short! I love what you did with these voices and characters. Charming, specific, and funny. What tool did you use for the animations? I loved these. But I'd remove the disclaimer on the menu page and just accept that you do this really well! ;-)
Good to know--I've seen it advertised a lot, but hadn't run across anyone I knew who was using it. So you like working with the tool? I certainly enjoyed the animations! I may need to add that to my toolkit....
This is wonderful! I only "understood" the French and English versions, but both were very well delivered, indeed--and I think it's great to showcase the same poem in three languages like this.
It is indeed sometimes a challenge in trilingual countries like Belgium to record good narration. We allways have to make our learnings in the different languages and it's almost impossible to find a good voice which fits all. Hope my English is acceptable :-)
