Reading voice over scripts takes a lot more than sounding professional. Actually, if you’ve read any of the previous blogs here you would already be in the camp that believes sounding professional is NOT at all the direction to head in. But that’s another blog for another day. We’re here today to talk about lists. You see them all the time in commercial scripts for a reason. Advertisers have very little (and very costly) media time to tell their potential customers why they should buy their product. Because of this, even the best copywriters can get caught up in the voiceover list. Here are a few examples:
NY Tourism
Looking up’s for the dreamers, for children who haven’t yet outgrown their surroundings, for anyone wide-eyed enough to believe New York still lives up to its namesake as someplace new.
Natural Remedy
These natural remedies can lower your cholesterol, relieve depression, overcome anxiety, fight sleep problems and treat the flu as well as other diseases.
Chevron
Energyville from Chevron is an online game that lets you choose from a wide range of energy sources to meet the demands of your own city. Alternatives. Renewables. Oil. Gas.
Crunch and Munch
Mmm…..popcorn, peanuts, and real buttery toffee. Crunch and Munch would sure taste good right now.
That’s the general idea. You know lists are inevitable in voiceover. Now let’s review how you manage them in your delivery. The key to making lists listenable is a sweet spot between your inflection choices and variation, balanced with your general pacing. We discuss pacing in more detail in this previous Voiceover Gurus blog, but the gist is that many beginners make the mistake of doing lists way too slow, because they are honestly just trying to honor all the commas the writer put in. The problem with that is that the listener’s patience will be tested greatly, but also that this slow pacing doesn’t reflect how we as readers would naturally flow through that material if we were reading it on our own. We’d go faster. We’re all pretty smart, right? We don’t need it spelled out. We need it to move and flow. The sweet spot lives within honoring the importance of each word in the list through changing your inflection a tiny bit from one word to the next, and by not lingering more than a tiny bit of time between each of them. It’s a splitting hairs thing (hence the use of “tiny-bit). I’ve pointed out to students that they’re going to slow and then the next read becomes a run-on sentence, which essentially “throws-away” the importance of each thing in the list. Split those hairs, practice the above scripts, and avoid these pitfalls. Your sweet spot awaits.