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.
And, I loved the way you made the video slightly transparent on the white background, and had the text rise up through the horizon and into the sky. At least I think that's how you did that. Really good stuff.
• 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.
As Queen pointed out on the credits to "A Night at the Opera" the album that brought us "Bohemian Rhapsody" I would like to say that "no synthesizers were used in the creation of this voice-over portfolio (except for the tympani roll)." Yes, all the background music was done with my voice. This portfolio emphasizes the various character voices I've done over the last few years. Enjoy! http://cropcirclecollective.com/Dan_Sweigert_Voiceover_Artist/story.html
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.
