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.
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!
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....
• We have included all the voice talent we like to use on our projects. They have a variety of styles and sounds.
• When doing the recordings with internal staff (Shalene), we use a simple microphone and we control ambient noise by recording in a small non-echoing room. The external talent uses more sophisticated equipment and recording rooms.
• We edit using Audacity, but often we negotiate with talent to send us edited voice over.
Here is my submission for voice-over portfolio. It's a little different from the others but hopefully still in the category: It is voice-over software called Speech-Over (www.speechover.com) that uses text to speech voices (TTS) to add voice-over narration to PowerPoint.
The narration added by Speech-Over to PowerPoint is easily published by Articulate Presenter - as shown in this video that I posted on our site. The video was created with Speech-Over and Articulate and is narrated by TTS voices.
