The next time you hear a voice over on a commercial be it radio or television here’s something to think about- it was not spoken into a mic as the ad was shot. More importantly it isn’t the actor’s voice you are hearing either. I found this out just recently, when I was given the opportunity to assist Broadcast Producer from the VOX Collective Mr. Jose Gallegos for a large department store’s Christmas theme advertisement.The casting for the voice over began, even as the sound engineers and Mr. Gallegos went about readying the studio for the soon to arrive kids. I was left to coordinate them in order, gather their information and portfolios and have them ready to walk into the studio as soon as the recording team was ready. And then it began! Batches of four stepped into the studio and behind closed doors and finely tuned sound systems began recording- voices, laughter, screams of joy and the script came to life.
The fun part for me during this entire process was watching these kids and the way they conducted themselves. Some of them first timers were nervous, practicing their lines over and over with equally anxious parents while others, veteran voice over experts so it seemed walked up to me with a smile, jotted down their information for me, took a seat, recorded in a jiffy and skipped out of the studio. At about the five hour mark, we had gone through 28 kids’ ages four to thirteen, recorded umpteen takes and were ready to make revisions.
Ah yes! Revisions! That simple word doesn’t do justice to the manner in which these voices were handled. The two sound engineers assisting Mr. Gallegos were adept at what they did. Cutting and pasting sound bites into seven samples even as Jose instructed, “Not that sample…” or “Okay let’s cut that one voice from the first sample and paste it over here…” I have to mention though, Mr. Gallegos’ work with kids was amazing to watch, he was quick and efficient yet took the time to warm the kids up to the script and give their best the minute they stepped in front of the mic. The entire process of revising and creating edits from the voiceovers took an hour. During which time I was able to see how detail oriented a sound engineer had to be in placing gaps between voices. I feel this can best be described as “a conversation”, in that an out of place laughter, uncalled for comment or low voices take away from the beauty and meaning of that snippet of conversation. Similarly, the accentuations and pitches you and I hear on radio or television ads add effect to the branding and imagery advertisers attempt to showcase. I found this process very intriguing and the attention to detail mind blowing.
Finally, we were done. Seven samples were compiled in a span of one hour, the kids names matched up to the samples for future reference based on the list I had compiled. The samples were then forwarded to the creative team at the VOX for review, surgical and methodical to pick out the best voices that would emote and capture the audience’s (you dear reader’s) attention and do justice to the brand it would stand for. On the whole, this experience while short; gave me a glimpse of the amount of work that goes into harnessing talented voices and putting them to the best use- reaching customers with a brand message in a memorable voice!