Build and Promote Your E-Learning Voice Over Portfolios #104

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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?
  3. 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.

Resources

Previous challenges

Articles

Last Week’s Challenge:

Before you sound off in this week’s challenge, check out the interactive graphics your fellow community members shared over the past week:

E-Learning Infographic

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.

 

102 Comments
Andrew Sellon
Jane Maduke
Jackie Van Nice
Lindsay Abbott - Voice Over
David Anderson
Lindsay Abbott - Voice Over

Hi David - Yes, with voice over it is about using the right narrator for the right project. One type of voice doesn't necessarily work for every project - even when it's otherwise a good one. It depends on the subject, style and audience of the learning package. Very often, the subject experts themselves, like many of you, can be the best people to narrate E-Learning projects, where conviction of the subject knowledge of the subject shines through and is engaging - providing the voice sounds right, is confident, projects well but doesn't detract from the learning. Those that can do it well and effectively would definitely enhance the course. When needed, professional narrators can be used of course. I'm not submitting my own showreel in this thread as that's not the purpose of this e... Expand

Andrew Sellon
Stephen Brodeur
Andrew Sellon
Stephen Brodeur
Andrew Sellon
Andrew Sellon

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.... Expand

Jackie Van Nice
EJ LeBlanc
Program Development Department

This is so timely. This has been a work in progress, but now is a better time than ever to share it. Here is our eLearning Voice Talent: The purpose of creating this was because we often get asked for samples and pulling all of the samples together was a task we were doing over and over and over. http://www.zenithperformancesolutions.com/Clients/ZPS/ZPSVoiceTalent/story.html Our blog: http://zpsbytes.com/ • 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 Audaci... Expand

Daniel Sweigert
Joel Harband